Bank holidays musings
A little info blurt on our weekend. It was OK if lacking in doing very much, only managed to go to pub once and only went out the house three times in four days really. main thing was our three shopping splurges: a New(ish, 1ghz) PC, a 30gb MP3 player and our next Holiday - five weeks and counting to Les Deux ALpes, summer park riding and chilling by the pool in the evenings :-D. Oh, I feel such a slave to shopping; however all three were markedly less than they should've been so that's OK.
Finally after months without music on the commute to work, I can now isolate myself entirely from human life by carrying round as much of my CD collection as I want at once; first bit of technology in a while I've bought that didn't give me any setup trouble either. 'Randomise' can be a surreal experience when you are skipping from Sigur Ros to Bouncig Souls to Listz to Slipknot to....Ah well, you gotta love ebay...
posted by AKI @ 9:10 AM
9 comments
9 Comments:
how can you snowboard in the summer?
My PC at home has died, so I need to splash on a new motherboard and/or chip. I'll go with the motherboard first, then if its the processor, sell the motherboard and buy a new chipset as well.
What MPFree player have you got as well?
Is it an Ipod, creative or iriver? I think they're the main three aren't they?
I'm off to Les Deux Alpes matey - glacial height of 3400m running an extensive boardpark and some pistes from June to August. Top of mountian around 5 degrees and sunny, resort base about 30c!
I bought a Creative Labs Zen 30gb, for £140 on ebay - new imported from the states. Looks like a house brick, but still smaller than my old CD walkman; potential best feature - removable battery pack (you know what I mean Dan!) Only put 150 songs on it so far and barely scratched the storage space, looks like my new hobby is trying to fill it!
The Zen rocks. Can also be used as and external HardDrive (I believe it's got a firewire connection). True, it IS brick like compared to the iPod, but features are alot better.
Sounds like you got an excellent deal there Dean. Nice one.
yes, and you're locked in with a specific vendor... ;P
Only joking. The iPod plays Mp3's so we're OK, although I don't think it plays OGG.
We've got to look at a replacement MP3 player for tones, and we either go with Apple and the new iTunes plug in for Winamp (Itunes is a biggy and it does take up a lot of memory on Windows), or we go with creative/iRiver. I don't know, and it may after all this come down to the audiophiles and the sound quality.
So far I can't complain about the sound quality. Absolutely no hiss for starters. I've recorded at 128kps in MP3 and WMA format so far, WMA may very well have the edge, certainly it sounds better than played at the equivalent bitrate on a PC - the perks of being dedicated I guess. I'm gonna try recording a track at several bitrates to see at what point it becomes audiably unacceptable. First attempt to feed the monster today resulted in three new albums; not nearly enough...
I usually record at 192 (cd quality), using Lame encoding, and now I've got the new open source CDex (sourceforge) and the sound is pretty much toppus notchus.
The preloaded classical tracks are encoded at 320kps! I reckon each track takes up the equivalent of 6 normal tracks of space, and theres 4 hours of em! I'm not deleting them til I've listened to em all though, in case I like any and want to keep em....
Think we mentioned this before but the Lame encode is the win.
If you've got the time (or a spare server laying about!), leaving Lame running in highest quality mode helps alot. I've not got the best ears around, but even I can tell the difference. Taking the time to leave it running, (and it's really worth trying to encode a track with lots of different options) teaches you alot. All ends up being getting the best sound for the minimum size. I usually go for a Variable Bit Rate of 192 down to 96. Plenty when needed, able to downgrade when not alot happening. Seems to be the best ration for me. I rarely go above 192 as my phone starts to have trouble playing higher bitrates, and this sounds fine to me.
The thing about quality of mp3 to wma, it's the encoder that's the main thing, not the format. When they did blind(?) sound tests, most people picked the wma files, but only because the volume level is higher than normal and its been found that people tend to rank higher noise levels with quality. When they used Lame high quality with a slight signal boost, it won most of the tests.
plus wma is evil Microsoft.
Given how loud I like my music, that'd be why WMA wins out, though kps for kps they encode in less memory too; which is a winner. added another 250 tracks on Saturday, filling a mighty 400mb. Oh well only 27gb left ;-)
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