jamespr's WebLog : Music

Should I go MP3?

jamespr — Sat, 16 Jul 2005 04:06:00 GMT

After going through hoops to get my music from iTunes into my Media Center UI it got me thinking about music formats. When I started with my iPod, I chose M4A because it enabled me to save space on my iPod. iTunes now has a facility to transcode songs down to a smaller size when it syncs to save space. Media Player can also do that which is important for my Samsung YH-999 Portable Media Center (http://product.samsung.com/cgi-bin/nabc/product/b2c_product_detail.jsp?eUser=&prod_id=YH-999GS%2fXAA). That set me wondering whether I might just be better creating high quality MP3s for my server and then just letting them be transcoded down when I sync. Of course, I have to figure out exactly how I'm going to create those high quality MP3 files as well as what "high quality" really means. Maybe I could even go lossless?

Issues

Space. I'm going to need a bigger hard drive. With a 40Gig library at 128kbps I'm going to increase that to MINIMUM 60Gig if I go MP3, more if lossless. I only have 80 Gig allocated at the moment.
Time. Do I really have both the time and inclination to re-encode 800+ CDs?

I'll keep you posted.

Syncing Windows Media Player and iTunes

jamespr — Sat, 16 Jul 2005 03:59:00 GMT

Syncing Windows Media Player and iTunes

We've talked about me being an iPod owner and we talked about me building a Media Center PC - we did talk about that right? Maybe not! Well that's the topic for another post but for now let's take a step forward. Initially having an iPod locked me into the M4A format. When I bought my iPod nearly 2 years ago I had a choice :

a) Keep my format "open" and encode everything in MP3. Because I care about quality, 128 MP3 doesn't do it for me so I'd have to go 192kbps

b) Use the proprietary M4A format from Apple which I'm happy with at 128kbps and free up 50% more space on my iPod

THe whole reason I own an iPod is so I can carry an obscene amount of music with me so that extra space was attractive. So I selected option b) and went about encoding my existing CDs and all CDs since then to 128kbps M4A.

And then I got my Media Center PC ...

One thing I LOVE is having all my media in one place and one interface. Media Center uses Windows Media Player which doesn't support M4A so I had a problem. How do I get all 10000 or so M4As to show up in my Media Center PC? And I found a solution.

The first part of the solution concerns enabling Media Player/Center to play M4A files. M4A files are AAc encoded and while a number of freeware AAC codecs exist none of them really did too good of a job. In the end I bought a codec pack from www.3ivx.com who enable general MPEG4 support including both audio and video. The great thing about their product is that it installs the decoder and registers the file type with Media Player making it very easy to setup.

THen I hit upon another problem. Using this method, Media Player cannot read the tags from the M4A files meaining that my Media Player library was a mess. Songs were listed by filename and all infomration about album, artist and full track name were lost. Bummer! With 10000 songs it becomes pretty hard to work with just a list of filenames.

After a considerable amount of searching I stumbled upon Music Bridge (http://www.thegreenbutton.com/community/shwmessage.aspx?ForumID=26&MessageID=94304). Music Bridge does a pretty good job of solving my problem. Rather than making Media Player able to read the tags in the file so it can build the library, it uses the programming interface in both iTunes and Media Player to synchronize library information from one to the other. Net result is that now Media Player and hence Media Center have album, artist and song name information for my files and I can navigate more easily. Music Bridge is able to sync bidirecitonally and can sync album art and playlists in addition to tag information.

MusicBridge is currently free.

I still have acouple of outstanding gripes and issues :

* MusicBridge isn't flawless, it sometimes gets choked but the developer is responsive and committed to fixing issues
* When I rip new CDs I need to remember to run MusicBridge again, it's not automated
* Media Player won't pick up ALL my files ... it knows about 9200 of 10000 so for some reason it's choking on a few, I haven't investigated that yet.

Fun with 3rd Party iPod Sync Cables

jamespr — Sun, 19 Jun 2005 01:59:00 GMT

I foolishly didn't bring the firewire adapter with me that allows me to connect the BIG firewire (6 pin?) to the LITTLE firewire (4 pin?) on my laptop. Since I'd bought a bunch of CDs in London, I decided at Heathrow that I wanted to transfer them to my iPod. Heathrow supports many stores but no Apple store I could find. It does =, however, have a Dixons which is a local electronics store.

My first thought was to buy the necessary connector. YOu can never have enough foo to bar connectors right? While Dixons in Terminal 4 offers a variety of cables and connectors but not the one I was after. However, due to the popularity of the iPod they did have a lot of iPod accessories including an iPod sync and charge cable. Unfortunately the cable was marked for "click wheel, 20Gb/40Gb and mini only". Now I stopped and thought to myself "Has the iPod dock connector changed going from 3G to 4G and why 20Gb/40Gb when iPods are 30Gb/60Gb by default these days. To me it looked like a case of 3rd party peripheral providers struggling to keep up with an ever changing/expanding range of products so I bought it anyway.

Now the cable works but it has a couple of flaws :

It doesn't charge ... I guess that isn't supported on 3G iPods and maybe why it was marked as it was
Syncing with USB 2.0 drains the battery in about 550 songs

A Fun New Game

jamespr — Sun, 19 Jun 2005 00:25:00 GMT

Next time your in a hotel try this. Install iTunes. Switch on the option to search for music libraries which I believe is on by default. Listen to other peoples music. You can do this without paying a penny since you're usually given an IP address to connect to the local network before you pay, you just aren't granted external privileges.

I found this out in my London hotel. I connected to the wireless LAN, fired up iTunes and there they were! Three other people's iTunes music libraries. Of course, iTunes is designed to prevent you from stealing other people's music but I did wonder if the people concerned realized they were sharing their music for others to browse. In one case, I was able to figure out the computers IP address and connect to their share list BAD BAD BAD security. Interesting feature though.

Try it next time you're in a hotel or widely used public hotspot and see what you can find! My limited experience so far is that most iTunes users have reasonable taste in music ... your mileage may vary.

Outted By MrsMEDC! and some thoughts about media formats

jamespr — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 11:35:00 GMT

If you're following the comments in your blog you'll notice that my wife (posting under the guise of MrsMEDC) drew attention to my deliberately vague use of the term MP3 Player. As ever she keeps me honest ;-)

Well, there's no hiding the fact that I'm an iPod user, in fact we both are. We both use iTunes - necessarily because otherwise we wouldn't be able to get any music to our iPods. We share a library of music which lives on a shared server rather than waste space with duplicate files. It turns out that sharing our huge - legitimately licensed - music library is something that doesn't appear to be too well supported in iTunes. I'd love for iTunes to automatically scan the iTunes folder and add new songs but it doesn't do that. Does it do that on Mac? Is this a PC implementation limitation? Anyone who knows any different please let me know!
Keeping our libraries in sync - as accessed through iTunes - is complex. We have to keep Copy Files to iTunes Library checked off and then rescan the WHOLE iTunes music folder which can take a while over a wireless LAN to add new tunes. I'd love to just add the new album/album folders but the file structure of iTunes is somewhat illogical in that it spreads the tunes for a compilation over several folders, one for each artist represented.

Question : If we own one copy of a CD and we rip that CD to a single file and sync with two iPods for us to listen to ... is that within the concept of fair use? Could a music company legitimately expect a married couple to buy two copies of a CD? I'm thinking surely not. Discuss?

Difficulty of sharing our music aside, we're both pretty happy with our iPods. I bought my iPod after trying a number of other in market devices a couple of years back - most of them being flash based solutions. For me and at that time, the iPod meant I could take a lot of music with me wherever I went without having to decide what I wanted to listen to before I left. For someone like me who has very diverse music tastes, still likes listening to albums and who's musical mood changes every three seconds that's very important. I'm thinking that when the battery in my iPod finally dies - and it's on its way out - I'm going to have to think about buying another player. I guess I could always get the battery replaced. Recommendations?

So my next point. Locking into musical formats. In many ways, I'm an old fashioned music consumer. I still prefer to purchase CDs over digital music because I still have the high quality source (let's not get into a debate about whether CDs are a high quailty source - my hearing isn't THAT good). If I have a high quality source I can then rip that down to the format I want which is mostly based on the player I've got. Currently, that means I have most of our music in 128kbps AAC format. So some of you are asking the obvious question. Why not use MP3 which is more portable? Well, I CAN tell the difference between a 128kbps MP3 and AAC file so to get acceptable MP3 quality I have to go to 192kbps which means I lose 1/3 of the space on my device. I have more music that I want to carry than I can fit on the device so I don't want to lose another third of it.

And that's why I keep buying CDs ... apart from the fun of going to record shops. Because I'm insulated from the digital music standards war. And when I eventually move to a WMA based player I'll just have to feed 600 CDs into my media PC to get the audio files in a new format. People, transcoding between lossy formats doesn't cut it ...

I guess at SOME point tiny hard drives will be SOOOO cheap that someone will create a media player I can store all my music losslessly and portably.

My Alternate Solution : I don't mind purchasing CDs for $10 to $20, I really don't. But once I've bought the music, as far as I'm concerned I've bought the right to use that CD on pretty much whatever player I want. Media Center PC, PMC, iPod, my various laptops etc. I realize music license holders and most music stores wouldn't necessarily agree with me but that's the way I feel. So here's what I'd like. A single, federated digital music source. What do I mean? When I purchase a CD, I've purchased the CD. I'd like that purchase to be recognized by some music licensing system. I'd then like to be able to request digital files from the system in formats of my choice for the various players I'd own over time without having to go ahead and feed CDs. It can't be THAT hard ... ;-)