foobar2000
Posted by Pavan Chander | Filed under Media, Software
Of late I’ve been keeping busy experimenting with foobar2000, an extremely functional music player for Windows. In the process of converting over to foobar from Windows Media Player I also ended up doing a little of re-structuring my music collection.
In the past I had all my music sorted via:
- Music \ [Artist] \ [Album] \ [## Track Name.mp3]
But since I decided to finally incorporate all the Hindi music I have with the English music I realized I had to change things a little. Doing so meant I could also include all the music that I’ve collected as single songs, and not part of an album. In addition to what I already had I also developed an ear for classical music around the time I started using foobar, so I ended up with a structure inside my Music folder like so:
- [Folder] \ [Artist] \ [Year] [Album] \ [## Track Name.mp3]
- Where “Folder” is one of the following six folders, and “##” is the track number.
- \Artists
- All my english music that I have in complete albums falls into this category except for soundtrack releases.
- \Classical
- The Beethoven’s, and Tchaikovsky’s of this world rest within.
- \Hindi
- All my Hindi music, even though the majority of it is all movie soundtracks.
- \Playlists
- Foobar has built in dynamic playlist support, but occasionally it is useful to save a hard (soft?) copy of a playlist.
- \Single Tracks
- All the singles of my youth, I’ve had some of these files for 5 or so years.
- \Soundtracks
- Black Hawk Down, Mary Poppins, Metal Gear Solid, Pirates of the Caribbean, Phantom of the Opera…the list goes on and on.
One of the many things that make me “as happy as a pig in shit”, is the ability to browse my library via “facets”, a dynamic list that sorts using AND and/or OR logic in a hierarchal manner. It’s one of those times when a picture does indeed say a thousand words.
Thanks to Frank Bicking for his work developing the Facets component.
I’m sure I’ll write more on foobar in the future.
re: Downloading Music
Posted by Pavan Chander | Filed under Friends, Media
Ian just wrote a post about his brother coming to grips with the legality of downloading music, and I felt an opinion of mine should see the light of an LCD screen. Your eyes will thank me later.
Or at least I hope so - if you’re still using a CRT please, purchase invest in an LCD screen.
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But here’s a potential problem when switching from a download mentality, to a purchase mentality.
Purchasing every song either detracts from genre experimentation, by forcing the consumer to choose tracks wisely and with more thought, or it puts a huge hole into ones pocket every month because of excessive track downloading/purchasing. When you have spent the last [however many years] with the attitude that if you like that song, you can just go grab it and listen away, it will be hard to have to stop and think about whether its good enough that its worthy of spending a dollar on. Or $10 if you’re like me and want to get the whole album to keep things organised and complete.
In an ideal situation, one could maybe learn from the movie industry and the success of Blockbuster and the like. While it may sound silly, the ability to “rent” an album for a period of a month or maybe even longer could prove to be a huge success.
Because, personally speaking, a lot of the time I find that I like a certain track or artist, but after a few weeks of repetitive listening I’ve lost their taste. After which I might not care about the album anymore, but at least I would have been able to make an informed decsion as to whether to officially own it or not.
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It’s definitely a thought.
Ieva’s Polka
Posted by Pavan Chander | Filed under Media
Song of the week…it has a very pleasant catchy tune.
“Ieva’s Polka” is by the Finnish Quartet “Loituma“.
And if you like the song, heres a remix version that I like. Check out youtube for the other 9,999 different versions.
(Don’t mind the video, I couldn’t find another version of this particular remix)
Tags: Media
My Movies - Online Listing Service
Posted by Pavan Chander | Filed under Media, Software
To anyone who took a look at the site I linked to in my last post, I wanted to give you a small example of the online database.
And yes, to reassure everyone I do have a much bigger collection than what’s currently listed, but I made a slight boo boo, and managed to delete my whole Movies folder.
I have so far successfuly recovered about 95% of the deleted files, so all is not lost, and I will update my listing when I can muster the will to go through my Movies without fear again.
Battlestar Gallactica Season 4 Premiere
Posted by Pavan Chander | Filed under Media
I was on TV.com today, looking up the titles of some episodes of The Big Bang Theory when I noticed a huge “BATTLESTAR GALACTICA: PREMIERES TONIGHT AT 10/9C” sign.
It’s about “fracking” time, I’m definitely very excited to learn what happens to the plot in this final season.
[Source]
For those of us that have been away from BSG for so long and need a refresher, I found this gem of a video on YouTube.
Now all I need is for House to start back up.
A review of Mojo, an iTunes library sharing software
Posted by Pavan Chander | Filed under Media, Review, Software
A little over a year ago, I bought a Linksys NSLU2 NAS, or the “Slug” as it was called, in order to hook up an external hard drive and share my MP3 collection off of it using Apple’s DAAP. It went well, but as I rarely needed my MP3 collection when I was out of the house it ended up being one of those “because I can” things and I returned the Slug.
In a nutshell the procedure went like this:
- Local machine:
- Install DAAP server
- Install SSH server
- Setup SSH key files (as opposed to passwords)
- Setup port tunneling using SSH
- Remote Machine:
- Install iTunes (unfortunately the best DAAP client at the time)
- Install SSH client
- Setup port tunneling through the the SSH client
- Attach the SSH key file to make it auto login (or not, depending on security)
- SSH into the server, and Voila!
So, if you’re still with me you can tell that is requires a bit of work, and is definitely not easy and intuitive to setup.
Fast forward to the year 2008 and “Mojo is here“.
Mojo accomplishes everything outlined above with one small intuitive little client, it actually goes above and beyond as its list of features include; zero configuration, instant download capability, and playlist synchronization.
It still relies on iTunes though unfortunately.
As of release 2.5.1, Mojo is offered as free software, with its only limitation on the number of peers in your friends list. Alternatively, for the small price of $10.95, you can upgrade to Mojo Pro, which currently gives you three licenses, and lifetime upgrade membership.
The only thing really souring the deal for me is its mac only status and iTunes dependency, but I believe there is a windows version in the works. And as for the iTunes/DAAP dependency, well I’ll have to wait till Mojo starts supporting WMP/UPNP.
Tags: Apple, daap, iTunes, Media, Mojo, Network, p2p, Review, Software, SSH
Call of Duty 4
Posted by Pavan Chander | Filed under Media
Singleplayer was incredibly short..
I know its got a massive amount of multiplayer play, but comon!
As I’m not a huge gamer, singleplayer is usually enough to satisfy me as I go painfully slow through it and if I ever manage to finish it I am sick of the game anyway. Not in this case, I finished the campaign in just under 10 hours and am now for the first time playing various parts of the game again on hard.
So I guess its still entertaining, but still there’s a limited number of times you can do the same missions over and over.
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On a lighter note, I got my Sony XL1BR Changer yesterday!
Its definitely as big as I thought it would be (read: massive), and has a nice polished apple-esqe look. Although that unfortunately means the front is a huge fingerprint magnet.
It has a nice solid feel to it and has a slightly noisy “whir” sound to it as the carousel turns, but as you don’t need to change discs around while watching a movie, thats not really an issue.
So far the only hangups I’ve had is that the “vista” install disc didnt actually support vista, I don’t know what sony was thinking when they shipped it out. But, thanks to the wonders of the internet I managed to download the latest installer from sony.
The second issue is the disc management software, it’s bundled into Windows Media Centre. Which is totaly fine for all the dvd movies I insert, but if I insert data discs like games or an avi collection, I have to open up the MCE interface and navigate to that disc in order for it to be inserted into the optical drive.
A long process to get the disc to show up in My Computer.
But as the net time to get the proper disc displayed in My Computer is still less than having to manually go find the disc and insert it into the computer, It’s a small price to pay.
