I just had a fun tech experience while visiting family up in northern Minnesota over the weekend - My brother started taking about Civil War. I hadn't seen this comic yet, and it sounded cool. I figured Tim probably has it. Now, not too long ago, this is where the conversation would end and I would try to remember to ask Tim about Civil War the next time I see him. But in the connected world I just pulled out the ol' UMPC and logged onto the hamachi network my friends and I use for sharing files. My grandparents may not really understand the computer they own, but at least their wi-fi works.

So using hamachi, I just browsed Tim's well organized comics file share and saw that he does indeed have the first five issues of Civil War. So I promptly copy and pasted them over. The UMPC is awesome for reading comics because the 800x600 screen is actually detailed enough to resolve an entire scanned page at a time and keep it readable, and the fact that it's about the size of a paperback book makes it natural for reading.

So then, as I was reading that, my brother goes on to mention a band he thinks I'd like called Shpongle. So I checked them out on myspace and based on that decided to seed a new pandora station from them. Amazingly (though not too surprising considering how awesome the service is) Pandora had Shpongle in the system (I believe "wet recordings" is one of the genomes that distinguish it).

So then, based on that, I remoted into the server at home and found a couple torrents full of Shpongle and other similiar stuff from Simon Posford. Some of it is lossless to boot! Now when I get home I'll have new music waiting for the ipod and the music system. I suppose I could download it here, but I'll be home tomorrow and Pandora will suffice until then. Assuming I can find them, I'll buy the stuff that I like.

That's a 2006 Christmas I guess. :)

technorati tags:christmas, umpc, pandora, hamachi

I'm not the only audio/gadget guy living in this house. My housemate/landlord and I sort of built up the living room home theater through a combination of our hardware. My tv, his speakers, my consoles, his Tivo, etc.

Well since the speakers are studio monitors with their own amps, we didn't need a central amplifier, and we just stuck in an old Technics pre/pro I had from a while back. It did alright, but it's pretty low quality and didn't have fancy stuff like dolby pro-logic II, not to mention any analog inputs whatsoever (well besides the 5.1 direct input that didn't allow volume control).

At some point I mentioned Outlaw Audio to my housemate and he realized he should really own their 990 pre/pro. Why? Well, mostly becuase it's just so friggin' cool! But there are other reasons like additional digital inputs and all balanced connections (which our speakers can take advantage of).

So here's the new equipment equipment rack. (Tivo and HTPC not shown)

The 990 gives us way more flexibility in configuring the system. Setup was a breeze with the included mic. Although the test tones were so loud they bottomed out the sub (it has a protection circuit though) and I think the dog is now deaf. :) We were able to set the front L/R to a 60hz crossover and the center and surrounds to 80hz. That kind of fine-tuning is really nice to have, and Outlaw has always been ahead of the game when it comes to bass management.

All setup, including renaming the inputs and assigning digital connectors for each one is done through the onscreen display. Which is pretty standard, but it's definitely not something we had before. Another plus, the 990 includes a phono stage! That's definitely NOT standard these days, but probably should be considering the resurgence in vinyl lately. So we now have a turntable in the living room. I feel so hip.

I then went through and reprogrammed the Logitech 880 remote. It had the 990 in its database and I went through and totally revamped the activity list. This took all of 20 minutes maybe. It works like a charm. The IR sensor on the 990 is much better than the Technics, thank god. Oh, and it sounds great so far.

technorati tags:hometheater, outlawaudio

I've not been able to rip cds via my normal process since I upgraded to Vista RTM because WMA Lossless encoding didn't work. The script would just fail immediately with no explanation. It didn't seem to have anything to do with permissions. I finally got my answer from someone on the wmp user groups; turns out it's DEP.

So I disabled DEP entirely on Vista like this:

bcdedit.exe /set {current} nx AlwaysOff

Now the script runs fine and EAC can go about its business. I'm also transcoding everything to aac these days for the ol' ipod, and I have yet to automate that. I should probably have a job scheduled on the server to find new wma files. There's always something... :)

technorati tags:vista, wma, lossless, DEP

That's right. I just bought an 80GB iPod. Go ahead, accuse me of being behind the times and a slave to the Apple brand. But I gaurantee you that I gave this a lot of thought and just saw no reasonable alternative. My current 20GB 4th gen's battery is dying (down to about 4 hours of life per charge) and not to mention 20GB just isn't enough for me these days. So what else was I going to do? The Zune just did NOT deliver the goods imo. The innovation I would like is not there yet, and 30GB is not enough of an upgrade for me.

Now I get to stop worrying about running out of space on my ipod and I should be able to finally sync all my music again. This is also finally forcing me to overhaul my itunes library which has been in disrepair for a while. As I've said here before, I rip all my music to my server in wma lossless. I use wma just because it is most compatible with MCE and the xbox, and slimserver (which drives my primary music system through the squeezebox) reads wma just fine. Then I need a separate encoding of all the music I want with me on my portable player because I don't want to fill the thing up with lossless music when I can't tell the difference for those usage scnarios anyway.

I've said before that I would love to have a player that supports auto-transcoding from lossless to lossy during sync, and keeps all the metadata sync'd between the two formats, but that doesn't exist. I've tried some of the hacked together versions of jukebox and winamp plugins that try to do this but they are not very successful.

There are some solutions for keeping your itunes library metadata in sync with your wmp and slimserver libraries. I'm going to give these a try and I'll report back if I'm successful. At the moment, I've removed all the mp3s for which I have a corresponding lossless copy from itunes and I'm transcoding all my wma files to vbr aac. They aac copies will sit in the same folder with the same filenames as the wma versions, just with a different extension. Then I set slimserver to ignore the aac files (actually the extension is m4a). MCE should automatically ignore those files because it doesn't support them, same with the xbox 360.

This conversion is a big one. The server is on 766 of 3462 songs (not including the complete works of mozart) after 13 hours. It's not a particularily fast server. :)

So anyway, I really hope this gets me closer to my ideal "portable media experience". But I fully believe there is plenty of room for improvement.

technorati tags:ipod, mobile, music, lossless