Posts Tagged ‘audio’
Tuesday, September 30th, 2008
So I bought the Kross Bluetooth Hands Free Cell Phone Car Kit with FM Transmitter. It has its good points, but it has some quirks and serious shortcomings.
Here’s what’s good:
- It’s cheap (< $40)
- It provides in-car Bluetooth speakerphone
- It plays MP3s from SD card, USB stick, or an line level source.
Here’s what’s not so good:
- Playback quality is limited to finding an open FM frequency, which is hard in the GTA
- The transmitter is not very powerful, so nearby vehicles can swamp your signal (or, if you want to call it a feature, it’s a “random positional mashup”)
- The phone mic is a tiny port on the unit, so sometimes the caller can’t hear you too well
- You need to have your radio on to answer your phone
- The USB port doesn’t provide enough charging current for a phone or GPS
- The remote isn’t very good
- Voice dialling doesn’t seem to work with my Blackberry
- The MP3 playback function usually remembers where you were when you start the car, but sometimes forgets, and needs the card ejected and reinserted
- It doesn’t know about ID3 tags
- Weirdest of all, it plays back files in the strict order they were written to the directory - not ordered by file name. It seems that, under Microsoft operating systems, files are copied in name order, but under Unix, they are (winging it here) copied by inode. Using
tar on a Mac or Linux is the way to go, as it writes in name order.
The Kross S-150 Manual (scanned PDF) is pretty terse, and has been of limited use to me. For all its faults, it’s kind of useful, but if I had a USB-capable stereo, I wouldn’t need this.
Tags: audio, bluetooth, car, mp3
Posted in cars suck | No Comments »
Wednesday, September 17th, 2008
Tags: audio, bluetooth, car, usb
Posted in cars suck | 1 Comment »
Sunday, August 17th, 2008
1626 Artists / 1124 Albums / 17082 Tracks / 39.4 Days / 70.15 GB.
That was a lot of ripping.
Tags: audio, cd, daap, mp3, rip
Posted in choons, computers suck | No Comments »
Saturday, August 16th, 2008
1492 Artists / 999 Albums / 15245 Tracks / 34.9 Days / 62.12 GB
(and here’s me thinking I had about 2000 CDs, too)
CDs that wouldn’t read: 0 (so far). That’s not to say that there weren’t some difficulties (copy-controlled CDs can go die, glitching and gronking in my drives) and my oldest CD (XTC’s Skylarking, my copy of which I think has just turned 20) had a ton of retries.
Lost CDs: Thomas Dolby’s Aliens Ate My Buick is somewhere in the house, but nowhere I’ve looked.
Found CDs: My long-lost promo copy of the (Portland) Decemberists’ Picaresque, which I thought had vanished in a road trip to Missouri. It was lurking in a long-forgotten portable CD player in the bottom of a storage bin.
Pleasant surprises: that freedb is generally better than it used to be.
Peeves: copy-controlled CDs (see above); flappy cardboardy cases that only have the title on one spine; oversized CD cases (Japanese imports, I’m looking straight at you), dark blue text on a black background, idjit freedb submitters who insist on Band, The syntax or worse, submit whole albums called sdfsdf;aefhsdf; bonus DVD “premium” releases (who watches these?).
Tags: audio, cd, daap, mp3, rip
Posted in choons, computers suck | 1 Comment »
Sunday, August 3rd, 2008
With more than a little help from How to Rip DVD audio to mp3 or ogg — Ubuntu Geek, here’s how I’d rip audio from a DVD:
for f in $(seq 1 12)
do
transcode -i /dev/sr1 -x null,dvd -T 1,$f,1 -N 0x1 -y null,wav -m $(printf "%02d" $f).wav
done
Your track count and device name will vary. You’ll note that I caved, and used the annoying $(…) syntax instead of good old-fashioned backticks (which some youngsters will claim are deprecated, but I claim as job security). Wordpress munges those badly, so we’re stuck with the ugly.
You could use livemp3 to convert to mp3s (if I remembered to upload the version that handles wav files) under controlled circumstances.
Tags: audio, deprecated, dvd, linux, ubuntu
Posted in choons, computers suck | No Comments »
Sunday, July 27th, 2008
Now I’ve got the Soundbridge set up to share from my server, I’ve been ripping CDs like crazy. I’ve got two drives on my Ubuntu box, and hooked an external CD drive to my laptop, so I’m rocking four drives at once. After years of using Grip, I converted to Abcde this weekend. What I really like about it is that I can run multiple copies at once, and it very nearly things right (aka “my way”) out of the box.
By the end of tonight, I should have about 6700 tracks on my share, and a bunch of CDs in storage.
Tags: abcde, audio, cd, daap, mp3, rip
Posted in computers suck | No Comments »
Tuesday, January 29th, 2008
I have a bunch of Catherine’s old family recordings to digitise (do people still do that - sit around a tape recorder and make recordings?) and I had recorded one of Ken’s shows on minidisc, so I needed a relatively clean way to get analogue audio onto the computer.
I ended up getting a Griffin iMic, a small USB audio input device. The sound quality is remarkably clean; here’s a sine wave recorded from CD to minidisc, then recorded on the iMic:
The iMic seems to work with all Mac audio software as an input device. The free Final Vinyl recording sofware is pretty, but a bit buggy and annoyingly, only works when the iMic is connected. I just use Audacity, and have done with it.
Tags: analogue, audacity, audio, imic, minidisc, tape, usb
Posted in choons, computers suck | No Comments »
Saturday, December 3rd, 2005
Tags: audio, rockbox, ttc
Posted in audblog | No Comments »
