Category: Music

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…

I’m sure everybody’s heard a song but not known where it came from. After some more digging through my hard drive I have one song that, even though I have a clip from it, I simply cannot track down.

So far the only lyrics I can more or less make out from it are “the voice that makes me sleep at night” and “you know the voice that makes me feel alright”, and searches on those turn up absolutely nothing. Unfortunately there isn’t an easy way to search on sound samples otherwise…

You can listen to it here if you’re curious and think you might know it. It’s rather crummy quality unfortunately; the original file was only 8-bit mono.

You thought the RIAA was bad? It appears that ASCAP is also joining the Evil club.

The whole process of detemining who has the right to collect money for anything music-related is fairly complex, but the way they’re going about it here is outright extortion. “No, we haven’t proven you’ve violated any licenses, but pay us anyway or we’ll sue you into oblivion.” Even if they could win, the legal fees alone would bankrupt most clubs and bars.

It’s reminiscent of how Microsoft would force computer vendors to pay for DOS licenses for every machine sold, even if it didn’t ship with DOS on it…

Oh, duh. After a bit of research, it turns out that my PocketPC situation isn’t as dire as I thought. I can remap one of the buttons that’s recessed a bit along the side of the unit to deactivate and reactivate the touch screen, and it’s out-of-the-way enough that it won’t get pressed accidentally.

There are still a few problems though: it’s clunky, the screen is going to get scratched up if I don’t get a case which leaves the earphone jack available, and one thing I forgot to mention before: the WMA format.

More music is better than less music, of course, so I want to cram as much as I can into the 256 meg card I have (the biggest I can get for this unit, I believe). The important factor here then is bitrate, since it directly determines how much time’s worth of music I can put in that space. I usually rip tracks at 192kbps, which sounds good enough to my ears (I’m not much of an audiophile). Unfortunately that would only give me around three hours total.

High quality isn’t really necessary for travelling music though, since there’ll be a lot of environmental noise interfering anyway, so I did a bit of testing with various MP3 bitrates. I found that in my own opinion, the cutoff point was at 96kbps; below that too many higher frequencies got cut off and it sounded way too muddy. But, I also did a few tests with different formats, and I found that I could go down to 64kbps with WMAs and still keep roughly the same quality. Yes, unfortunately, Microsoft wins on this one. 64kbps WMAs sound better than 64kbps MP3s, at least as encoded by LAME. It makes a big difference in capacity too — nine hours at 64kbps versus only six hours at 96kbps.

This presents a few problems. I already have a large number of MP3s but it’s not easy to convert them to WMAs; Media Player will only let me rip CDs to WMA, not convert existing MP3s, and I don’t want to have to rerip damn near everything (not to mention the files I wouldn’t be able to rip again….). One possibility is to convert to the Ogg Vorbis format since it does fairly well at 64kbps too, but then I can’t use the built-in player and would have to shell out money for some third-party player.

Still, it’s better than having to buy a whole new gadget. I’ve got too many of them lying around already…

After my walk tonight, I’ve learned two things:

1. PocketPCs make awful portable MP3 players.

There’s nothing wrong with the quality of the sound from my V37, it’s the little quirks of it being a PDA first, music player second. The built-in media player has a stupid little ‘feature’ where any touch of the screen while a song is playing will cause it to pause, and while I’m walking along with the V37 jostling around in my pocket, the screen is getting touched a lot. Even if I minimize the media player, something else is going to get triggered by all those screen touches. I had to put the ebook reader up just because it has relatively few ‘hot spots’ on the screen to trigger.

Every touch of the screen causes beeps and clicks to pop up in the middle of the song, too, and although they can be disabled it’s a pain to have to do so temporarily just for these walks. There’s a similar problem with the buttons on the front of the unit — until I disabled them, it would constantly be switching between the built-in apps, scribbling garbage into each of them. A better case might help, but all of the cases I can find for this unit block the earphone jack, so I have to leave it exposed.

The shuffle feature of the player also seems pretty weak. The resulting playlist still has a lot of songs by the same group clustered together. There are better player programs out there, but they cost money of course, and won’t fix all of these problems. And 256 megs of memory doesn’t really cut it anymore. It’s more than enough for a walk, but I don’t want the hassle of syncing it up and loading a new playlist every day.

2. Earbuds just don’t cut it for walking about.

The wind and the traffic are heavy enough in this area that I had to crank the volume up a fair bit just to be able to hear the songs, but the earbuds are deep in enough that it was on the verge of causing an earache. Also, the slightest tugs on the wires would loosen them enough that I was constantly readjusting them through the whole trip.

If I really want to have music on my walks, I’m clearly going to need a better player and a proper set of headphones, so it’s time to do some research. The iPod is the traditional choice, but there are some interesting new models coming out like the iHP-120 and the Rio Karma. Now when was I scheduled to win that lottery…