The Mothership

I upgraded my Linux server box to Ubuntu 8.10 tonight, and it went smoothly enough. Well, mostly… The big, complicated things like Apache, MySQL, and MythTV actually worked perfectly after the upgrade, and instead the glitches showed up in relatively small things, like the MP3 player. The files themselves were fine, but the collection database didn’t survive the change in version of Amarok, and I lost all of the non-ID3 metadata like ratings, play counts, etc.

I was able to recover some of it, from syncing back from the iPod and the playlist I still had loaded at the time, but it looks like I’ve lost about 2/3rds of the ratings. And I have backups of the MP3 files themselves, but not of the directory where it looks like Amarok stores the metadata, though it’s not clear if that would even help if it’s a version problem. Oh well, at least it’s easier to re-rate them on the fly through the iPod…

I’ve put in a couple days of use of my new iPod Nano, and it’s working out well so far.

My main worry was about its ‘pocketfeel’ (hey, if food critics can have ‘mouthfeel’…) so that I can fiddle with it without having to take it out and look at it, and it does have a few quirks there: the shake-to-shuffle feature requires a *really* vigorous shake, which would be kind of embarrassing to perform in public and can’t be done within the confines of a pocket, but using the dial to advance to the next song isn’t a big deal. The ‘hold’ switch is a bit tricky — I can run a finger along the top to turn it off, but have to get the edge of a fingernail and find the switch to turn it back on. And I have to watch out when adjusting the volume. If it’s lying too horizontally, it switches into Cover Flow mode and you can’t adjust the volume there, so I have to make sure it’s tilted a bit upwards before changing the volume. They’re only minor problems, though.

I also managed to get it working with Amarok by installing iTunes on my XP machine and reformatting it with a Windows filesystem. And, as I hoped, it does indeed sync back updated ratings, play counts and times, and updates last.fm. The only quirk is that unmounting it still leaves the iPod saying “you must eject first…” on its screen, but it seems like unplugging it at that point doesn’t cause any harm.

Update: And it turns out I can sync it to both Amarok for music and iTunes for automatic podcast management, if I disable automatic syncing in iTunes and I make sure to sync to Amarok first or the rating and play count updates will be lost.

Update update: Ugh, okay, podcasts have some problems when I do it that way, with multiple copies of them showing up each time I switch between clients. I’ll have to try doing the podcasts from within Amarok as well.

My iPod Nano arrived today, so here’s the obligatory vanity shot, showing off just how tiny even the retail packaging is:

There are apparently still some kinks to be worked out with its support under Linux, since it’s still brand new, so for now I’ve only fooled around with it in iTunes. I’d prefer to get Amarok working with it though, since the collection database is more easily synced there and I’d rather not have to reenter all of the ratings and such into iTunes.

Oh well, I’ve just filled it up with random songs for now.

Alright, uncle, I give up. I’ve fretted about choosing an MP3 player for far too long, so there’s a shiny new 16GB iPod Nano on its way to me now.

There’s decent support for the iPod under amarok now, so it might be fairly painless to sync it up with my existing library on the Linux server. Or I might experiment with the ‘proper’ iTunes way for a bit too, especially if any of those games catch my eye, though it’ll be a bit more of a pain to keep the library synced then.

I got my email and downloaded the new Radiohead album this morning, and I’m liking it a fair bit so far. Though I’m probably a bad Radiohead fan for liking the more traditional rock pieces (Bodysnatchers, Jigsaw Falling Into Place) best so far.

Between all the demos I downloaded now that my 360 is back, and the OCReMix song collection torrents, I’ve probably torn through half my monthly bandwidth quota just in the last 24 hours…

Some of the more recent music I’ve run across:

The Shins, Wincing The Night Away - I’d only briefly heard a couple of their songs before, so I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I was pleasantly surprised. The melodies are catchy enough, but the rather dense lyrics tickled my curiosity, and I had to check them out, even though I don’t usually pay too much attention to them. There’s an odd, surreal poetry to them that I don’t see a lot of in the rest of my collection, but I like it.

Front Line Assembly, Artificial Soldier - They got a lot of flak over the last couple albums for letting their side-project Delerium’s style slip into FLA too much, but this album returns them to an earlier, harder sound. I like Delerium too, but this is closer to what attracted me to FLA in the first place, so I still approve. The lyrics are still the same old apocalyptic doom-n-gloom, but it just wouldn’t be the same without them. :)

Sonic Youth, Rather Ripped - A good followup to Sonic Nurse, in much the same vein, even if they seem to have mostly dropped the extended multi-minute noise solos. And you can listen to it for free! (Flip4Mac support might be needed for Mac users.)

Gnarls Barkley, St. Elsewhere - I saw this one on a lot of people’s best-of-the-year lists so I took a chance on it, but I’m fairly lukewarm on it overall. I like a couple of the tracks, like ‘Crazy’, but I guess this style (rap-hop?), still just isn’t for me.

(and no, I don’t live in the vacuum of space, the flash reflection just overpowered the rest of the room.)
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The new iPods are out and…I don’t particularly care. I don’t really feel the need to carry a ton of photos around, and although the black look of the U2 edition *sounded* intriguing, the red click wheel is just too horribly ugly to me.

This now makes me even more tempted to pick up one of the regular 4G iPods though, now that I know it’s not likely to be imminently obsoleted by something vastly better. It’s down to either that or the iRiver hard drive player, and although the iRiver has a couple more features, it’s still slightly more expensive and the iPod/iTunes integration is a big plus and iTMS will be coming to Canada soon…

Out of all of my systems, one of the components that I’ve upgraded the *least* over the last 11 years is the sound card. I first got an SB16 way back in the mid-’90s and continued to use it alone until a couple years ago, when the lack of ISA slots in a new motherboard forced an upgrade to an SBLive. Even then, the SB16 continued to live on in my server box. The sound card is just one of those parts that I never really felt an urgent need to upgrade. It produces sound…what more do I need? Whereas the clarity of a new video card’s higher resolutions or the speed of a new processor are easy to appreciate, the subtleties of a different sound are harder to quantify to a tone-deaf musical ignoramus like me.

Nonetheless, upgrade time has come again and a shiny new Audigy 2 ZS has kicked the SBLive out and down the hand-me-down chain into the server box. The reasons are somewhat more practical than audible, though: the old SB16 in the server box was simply annoying the hell out of me.
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I’ve been trying to rip just the audio stream from each chapter of a DVD I have, but none of the tools I’ve tried so far (transcode, mplayer) seem to work, and just produce noise instead. The disc uses 48khz 24-bit PCM audio, but it keeps getting detected as 16-bit, and the programs don’t even seem to support 24-bit audio at all.

Maybe if I can at least get the raw PCM stream I can manually massage it into a usable form, but it looks like other useful conversion tools like ’sox’ don’t support 24-bit audio either. Maybe I should just write a trivial app to just knock every third byte off…

Update: Worked around it by playing it in the DVD Player on the iBook and capturing the audio with WireTap (found via Matt). I’m still lacking an automated batch method, but this is good enough for the one chapter I really wanted for now.

While I was walking to the office this morning, headphones on and the PocketPC playing, a slightly-dishevelled gentleman standing by a bike motioned to me as I passed by. I paused a moment and took the headphones off, mentally preparing a polite apology that I could not help, but instead I was surprised to see him reach into a pack and bring out a CD wallet, which he opened to reveal a number of CD-R discs. He then asked if I had a CD player, to which I mumbled something like “Er, no, not really, sorry…” and then went on my way. I’ve heard of the old cliche of someone selling copied video tapes out of their trunk, of course, but this is the first time I’ve personally run into anything like it, and a bit higher-tech even.

Looking back, it doesn’t even make much sense. If I’m so desperate for cheap, pirated music, I can get nearly anything I’d want easily enough for free. Oh well, it helped make the day a little more surreal, at least…

Another interesting read: The Daily Adventures of Mixerman

It’s not only highly amusing in that laugh-at-someone-else’s-frustrations way, but it also helps paint a clearer picture of just what goes on in the recording process, who’s involved, what they do, and so on.

I’ve been on a bit of a CD-buying binge lately.

Velvet Revolver, “Contraband”: Yeah, it’s a gimmick band, but I’m actually enjoying it a fair bit. Nothing groundbreaking, but it’s mostly solid earache rock. There’s a couple of slower ‘ballads’ that seem a bit out-of-place, but that’s pretty much obligatory for this type of music.

Sonic Youth, “Sonic Nurse”: This one was on a recommendation; I hadn’t actually heard any Sonic Youth since sometime in the early ’90s. Definitely not for everyone, with their oft-noise-ish feel, and I don’t care for a couple of the tracks, but there’s a lot to like too. In particular I’d recommend “Unmade Bed”, “Dripping Dream”, “Stones”, and “Paper Cup Exit”.

The Killers, “Hot Fuss”: I’d never heard of these guys before, but I heard a couple songs while doing other shopping in HMV and liked them but didn’t know who it was, so I googled the lyrics later on and picked up the album itself a few days later. Average overall, but a few tracks are new favourites (”Jenny Was A Friend Of Mine”, “Smile Like You Mean It”, “Somebody Told Me”) and I wouldn’t really call any of them bad.

And Depeche Mode, “Music For The Masses.” Hey, it was five bucks.

There was also a cheap movie binge, but it’ll take longer to work through those…

To hell with it, maybe I should just get an iPod after all. The fourth-generation ones are out now, with the clicky-wheel from the mini-iPod, better battery life, and a lower price (I can live without the dock and case). It still doesn’t have the other features I’d like, but it’s better to have something at all than to chase a ‘perfect’ goal forever…

The problem then becomes one of management. I’d obviously need iTunes in order to load songs, manage playlists, and so on, but of the three systems I have, all of the songs are stored on the Linux file server, the one where iTunes isn’t available. There isn’t enough room to mirror the entire library on the iBook, and I don’t have FireWire or even USB2 on the Windows system (which I’d prefer to avoid and is also low on space).

Fortunately you can add songs to an iTunes library from a network share, so I can do all of the management from the iBook, but then that creates a couple more problems. First, it doesn’t seem to let me edit ID3 tags on songs in the library that are from a network share. Whether this is a limitation of iTunes or a permissions problem or what isn’t clear yet, so I still need to do some investigation there.

The second problem is that now I have a redundant data problem. Although I can’t fit my whole music library on the iBook, I *do* have a subset of my favourite tracks loaded on it so I can listen to them while roaming. Adding the songs from the network share makes the local ones show up twice in the library, and it’s not immediately obvious which one is the local one and which is the remote one (idea to Apple: smart playlists based on filename/path). What I really need is two separate libraries, one just for the networked songs and one for the local copies, but iTunes just has one big library per user.

There is a way around it though, if you cheat a bit. Since everything is stored in ~/Music/iTunes, all I had to do was take the existing directory, rename it to iTunes.local, restart iTunes and add the network songs to the now-empty library, quit iTunes, and rename the newly-recreated iTunes directory to iTunes.remote. Now all I have to do is make ~/Music/iTunes a symbolic link to whichever library I want to work on at the time before starting iTunes. (If I were really lazy I’d make wrapper scripts to do it automatically from the Dock or Finder.)

It’s a bit of a kludge, but should work well enough. Now where are all those pennies…

Maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to abandon the MP3 player change. I’m not sure how I overlooked this one the last time around, but statwise it looks extremely nice: the iRiver iGP-100

It supports Ogg Vorbis, the 1.5G capacity is almost exactly what all of my favourite tracks total to in Ogg format, it acts as a USB Mass Storage device, has an FM tuner, and is even cheaper than most of the other players iRiver has. About the only major downsides are that it can’t record (not too important), and may have potential battery replacement problems down the road.

The reviews don’t seem too bad either. It’s tempting, at least…

Screw this, I’m sticking with the PocketPC for my music needs for now. As much trouble as it is, it’s just too much of a hassle to switch at the moment.

The iHP-120 looks really nice, but is expensive and even bulkier than the PocketPC. The iPod has the capacity, but not much else. The other iRiver players are nice and small, but damn hard to get hold of and also rather pricey for the larger-memory models. And miscellaneous other faults in the other products.

Of course every product has its downsides, but considering that I already have a more-or-less working solution at the moment, whatever replaces it had better be damn-near perfect if I’m going to be shelling out hundreds of dollars…

Today’s lesson:

ID3 tags are annoying. All the different versions of them, that is.

I’ve been using my own script for ripping CD tracks and converting them to MP3, with all of the appropriate ID3 tags and such. That required manually entering all the album and track data though, which was a pain. I considered extending the script to get the appropriate information from the CDDB databases automatically, but that’s a lot of work and I never got around to it.

Now that I have the iBook though, it turns out that iTunes is a pretty good CD ripper. I can slap a CD in, select all the tracks, wander away and come back ten minutes later to a complete set of properly-sorted 192kbps MP3s. However, not all was well. If I took the tracks and then tried to play them in xmms or on the PocketPC, the ID3 information would not show up. It looks like Apple is using their own extended version of the ID3 tags to embed extra information like the album jacket cover pictures, and other programs haven’t caught up yet.

Fortunately, the fix is simple. If I use the “Convert ID3 tags” option and set it back to version 1.1, the tags are now properly recognized by everything else. I don’t think I’m using any of the extended tags that would get lost in the conversion anyway.

The arguments over digital music rights and file sharing still rage on, and everyone seems to be talking past each other due to different assumptions about just what rights we actually *do* have when it comes to music copying, rather than what they should be. That of course raises the question, just what *are* those current rights?

Well, in Canada anyway, the relevant legislation is part of the Copyright Act:

Copying for Private Use

80. (1) Subject to subsection (2), the act of reproducing all or any substantial part of

        (a) a musical work embodied in a sound recording,

        (b) a performer’s performance of a musical work embodied in a sound recording, or

        (c) a sound recording in which a musical work, or a performer’s performance of a musical work, is embodied onto an audio recording medium for the private use of the person who makes the copy does not constitute an infringement of the copyright in the musical work, the performer’s performance or the sound recording.

(2) Subsection (1) does not apply if the act described in that subsection is done for the purpose of doing any of the following in relation to any of the things referred to in paragraphs (1)(a) to (c):

        (a) selling or renting out, or by way of trade exposing or offering for sale or rental;

        (b) distributing, whether or not for the purpose of trade;

        (c) communicating to the public by telecommunication; or

        (d) performing, or causing to be performed, in public.

(found via Slashdot)

So what does this mean? Basically, if you can listen to a piece of music, you also have the right to make a copy for your own private use. For example, if you’re listening to it off the radio, recording your own copy of it is perfectly fine, as long as you keep it private. It’s this portion of it that has suddenly become relevant and caused people to start proclaiming “File sharing is legal in Canada!!!” Well, they’re *half*-right…

The downloading portion is apparently perfectly legal, as it is covered by the above legislation. What’s not so clear is whether it’s legal to have shared it in the first place. The case cited in the story above found that placing files in a shared folder did not constitute ‘distribution,’ but that sounds like a loophole and a particularly weak point of the case. This, if anything, is what will likely be challenged and potentially revised.

Assuming it does get changed, this creates the rather odd situation where downloading shared music will be perfectly legal, it’ll just be a violation to share it, versus the situation in the States where both ends of the transaction are considered a violation. Odd solutions are, however, in keeping with Canadian tradition… :-)

The other effect the above legislation has is that it clarifies just what you can do with songs that you own. Some people would argue that no, you don’t have the right to even make MP3s or to copy songs to iPods or other computers and such; copyright’s ‘fair use’ only allows single backup copies and in the States the DMCA prevents even that if it would mean circumventing copyright protection. Fortunately, since if we own the music we can always ‘broadcast’ it to ourselves, and the law lets us make additional copies with no specific restrictions on purpose or format or copy protection, again as long as it’s for our own personal use.

Sounds fair to me. Certainly better than what they’re having to put up with in the U.S. right now…