Atomic Playboy» audio

Creative Re-Invents Podcasts

Johan Svensson — Thu, 05 Jan 2006 22:17:25 +0000

“Podcasts, short for Personal On Demand broadCast, are audio files you can download into any MP3 player or computer. These audio files are broadcasted over the Internet automatically to subscribers of specific podcast channels.”

Via digg.

Things I Don’t Like About iTunes

Johan Svensson — Sat, 12 Nov 2005 02:50:03 +0000

I want a “remove duplicate entries” option for playlists. I quite often drag good tunes to various playlists, but I’m never sure if I already have the song there.
I want the option to have iTunes play the currently selected track after the current one is finished, like Foobar does.
Retarded tag writing. It writes its gain info as a comment, for crying out loud! Why can’t iTunes make its own ID3 field called iTunesGain or something and store the data there?
And on the topic of audio gain, use a commonly accepted standard instead to be compatible with lots of other players.
Reshuffling the party list (with 25 songs) takes forever when the music is on an SMB mount. Why?
Stop using 100MB of memory!

Harvey Danger

Johan Svensson — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 17:08:23 +0000

I have no idea who Harvey Danger are, but they’re releasing their third album as a free MP3/OGG download. I don’t know if I’ll like it, but I’m going to download it.

iTunes playlists

Johan Svensson — Thu, 04 Dec 2003 08:18:27 +0000

Following up to an entry on NSLog, here’s a list of my smart playlists in iTunes.

“Getting moldy” — My rating is in the range of 3 to 5 stars; last played is not in the last month; limit to 10 songs selected by random.
“Recently played” — Last played is in the last month; limit to 100 songs selected by most recently played.
“Top 25″ — Limit to 25 songs selected by most played; match only checked songs.
“Top rated” — My rating is greater than 4 stars; play count is greater than zero.
“Unrated” — My rating is zero stars; limited to 10 songs selected by random; match only checked songs.

Smart playlists in iTunes rocks my world. Before them (known as “the dark ages”), I tended to either listen to a random playlist with all my songs (though I still do that 70% of the time in iTunes) or listen to a subset of my favorite songs.

The ability to make a playlist of songs I haven’t played in a long while alone makes smart playlists worthwhile.

I currently have 2222 songs in iTunes (how’s that for symmetry?), and rating them all takes time. So I listen quite a lot to the Unrated list now and make a quick rating of the song. The ratings are always in a state of flux and may change on subsequent plays. Of course, smart playlists update themselves dynamically, so as soon as I rate a song on the Unrated list, it disappears and another unrated song is added.

Tools of the trade

Johan Svensson — Fri, 29 Aug 2003 05:14:50 +0000

The tools I use for my digital music enjoyment.

First of all, I use CDex to rip CDs to MP3 format, at 192kbit/s using the LAME encoder. This is pretty straight-forward and automated, requiring an entire two buttons to be pressed.

After that, MP3gain comes to the rescue. With it I poke around a bit at the gain levels of the tracks, making sure that there’s no clipping and the average sound level is consistant with the rest of my music collection, namely an average album volume of 90dB. Again, this requires a total of two buttons to be pressed. This modification is also completely lossless, since it doesn’t touch the actual encoded data, only volume metadata for individual frames.

Now the album is complete and ready to be integrated into my music collection. I could just move it there manually, but I let it pass through MusicBrainz first. MusicBrainz is a nifty application that checks music files against a large database that not only gets its data from FreeDB, but is also moderated by live human beings. This makes sure that the song data is (usually) correct, since a lot of retards submit incorrect data to FreeDB.

MusicBrainz checks the songs against the database, and is usually correct. I may occasionally have to correct the spelling of a few tracks in the database, but that means the next person with this album won’t have to. Then I save the tracks, meaning that MusicBrainz writes new ID3 tags and moves the files into my music collection, with my preferred format for the file names.

All done. Now I just have to have Winamp (2.91, I don’t like version 3) rescan the music collection and add new stuff to the media library.