It has been years since I paid any attention to Audible.  However, my driving has increased as of late and I thought now would be a good opportunity to look back into the whole “books on tape” thing.  I must say that I’m pretty impressed.  For $14.95/month, I’m getting one audio book each month and a monthly subscription to an audio version of the Wall Street Journal.  Having never been a WSJ reader, I must say that I’m impressed with their content – especially the editorial.  Furthermore, the iPod knows full well about Audible’s format and conveniently files all of the content under Audio Books and a genre of Spoken Word.

However, I have to question why Audible makes available content in MP3 yet still has some goofy wrapper they put around it.  The file still comes down as a .aa file, not a .mp3 file, and requires some extra stuff in the likes of Windows Media Player in order for the content to play back.  Simply renaming the .aa to .mp3 is not sufficient.  If anyone has insight into this, I’d love hearing from you.

Just for the record, ANUSOL and Anbesol are two different medications that sound very similar and you do not want to use Anbesol where you’d use ANUSOL. 

We started the reconstruction of our basement today and, as a result, casadehambone.com was offline for most of the day.  However, I have two pieces of good news:

a)      Casa de Hambone is back online and operational

b)      We made tremendous progress in tearing out the walls and ceiling in the basement.  In fact, we got 90% of the room done today.  Next week we’ll be ready to do electrical!

In the process, I also cleaned out three machines that the house doesn’t need any more.   Kind of amazing what one keeps:

·         A 386 with a 486 upgrade chip and 64MB of RAM

·         A Pentium Pro 200 with 256MB of RAM, including a non-working floppy drive and a non-bootable CD-ROM; this machine is being dedicated to a good cause at the Chicago Windows Users Group on the 19^th

·         A Pentium Pro 200 with 256MB of RAM that was working; this is a work machine and after I take my upgraded IDE drive out of it, I’ll be bringing it back to the office to be salvagaed

This leaves the house with the machine that is serving casadehambone.com – a Compaq M700 notebook with 1GB of RAM running Windows Server 2003, and the machine which is my day-to-day notebook.  My wife also has a Toshiba Tecra that we use upstairs and it’s about to either be reloaded or replaced real soon now.

Seems track 11, Top of the World, is getting read errors on my disc.  I’m going to need to borrow one from a friend to rip that track.  Anyway, the ripping continues this morning.

Currently ripping: The Essentials - Ratt

I thought I was going to bed, but did some blog reading and ripped some more CDs in the process:

·         For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge by Van Halen

·         Best Of Volume I by Van Halen

·         The Long Road by Nickleback

Tonight’s ripping session brings the following CDs over into VBR MP3s using EAC/LAME:

·         Cracked Rear View by Hootie & The Blowfish

·         More Than You Think You Are by Matchbox Twenty

·         Seal by Seal

·         Seal IV by Seal

·         Marching to Mars by Sammy Hagar

·         Red Voodoo by Sammy Hagar and The Waboritas

·         Flying In a Blue Dream by Joe Satriani

·         Just Push Play by Aerosmith

·         Balance by Van Halen

·         Silver Side Up by Nickleback

·         Vault by Def Leppard

·         The Way I Am by Jennifer Knapp

·         Dirt by Alice In Chains

·         Weathered by Creed

·         Voyage to India by India.Arie

·         Promised Land by Queensryche

·         Greatest Hits by Queensryche

[Remember the good ole’ days, back before the record companies came crashing down on folks with good ideas?  I loved being able to buy a CD from mp3.com and immediately getting the ripped content.  It was instant gratification and I got to own the hardcopy.  Oh well.  Back to ripping with EAC and LAME.]

Well, there’s some trouble in paradise … I ripped some Queensryche the other day with the Cybermedia MP3 encoder and Windows Media Player 9.  When listening to the tracks later that day on my iPod, a good number of them were truncated by 10-20 seconds!  When I got home, I fired up the original MP3s stored on my PC and they played fine.  Windows Media Player also played the MP3s directly off the iPod fine, too.  A little digging in Google and I discover that there are some encoders that create variable bitrate MP3s that the iPod just doesn’t like.

Apparently there is a thing called a null frame at the front of a VBR MP3 that contains information about the timing of the track.  If this frame isn’t there, then players have to estimate the duration of the song based upon the size of the file itself – a suboptimum decision when you’re dealing with variable encoding, and the iPod seems to suffer from this problem.

Some more digging turned me on to a solution, VbrFix, that “corrects” your MP3s.  The program works as advertised even if it’s a tad clunky. However, even more digging turned me on to Exact Audio Copy (EAC) and the LAME MP3 encoder through The Quintessential Guide to Creating High Quality MP3s by Chris Myden, which I highly suggest you go read.  I did a quick test to encode my Queensryche disc with EAC and LAME and the audio quality was noticeably better!  As a result, I’m ripping a bunch of CDs tonight in that combination to listen to them in comparison to the existing MP3s.  I bet as a result that I’m going to go back and revisit my entire ripped collection and do it again (as painful as that may sound) with EAC and LAME.  Why?  Because my buddy Scott mentioned that his MP3s don’t sound as “bright” as the original CD and I had to agree.  My MP3s sounded somewhat muddied.  However, the EAC/LAME combination sounded amazing and I want the high quality audio.

Why does EAC/LAME appear to do a better job than Windows Media Player and Cybermedia?  My understanding from reading the guide above is that the reader and encoder are both very important in the process of ripping CDs.  EAC/LAME just appears to do a better job than Windows Media Player, which means its time for an e-mail to the Windows Media Player team and ask them what’s going on.

Yet another beautiful Sunday!  This summer has simply been amazing in terms of weather … not too hot, though often times cool.  I don’t think I’d have it any other way!

Today was a major cleaning for the Nano Cube.  I had neglected it for far too long, and algae had built up all over the glass and the sand was due for a good vacuuming.  I can gladly report the scum is gone from the top of the water and the tank once again sparkles.  I put in a new phosphate sponge and introduce some new blue-legged hermit crabs and some more turbo snails.   Hopefully this new crew will get to cleaning and help out overall, as the last crew succumbed to some unknown force of nature.

The MP3 ripping?  It continues.  I think I’ve completed another 25 or so today.  Just throwin’ ‘em in and lettin’ ‘em copy.  The only down side is when I come across a disk that isn’t in AMG’s database and have to hand-enter the obscure stuff.

I’m taking advantage of the fact that that the iPod is really a 40GB hard drive connected via USB 2.0 to play back music using Windows Media Player 9.  In doing this, I get full fidelity in WMP including things like album art, ratings, frequently played tracks, automatic playlist generation, etc.

To make it work, I deleted all of the entries from my existing media library and then imported all of the music that is sitting on the iPod.  However, note that it’s necessary to remove the Hidden bits from \iPod_Control\Music\F00-F49 folders, as Windows Media Player refuses to search hidden directories.

I now have a notebook hard drive that is free from music – thereby returning over 15GB of space to me! – yet still have the exact same experience as I had before in Windows Media Player.  Nice.  The only thing I would like now is for synchronization between ratings and play counts on the iPod with Windows Media Player.  That would be cool.

Let me just say it’s hard to stay motivated to rip CDs when you’re down to the “junk.”  By junk, I don’t mean that I don’t appreciate the music, but its stuff that I just normally wouldn’t listen to.  I’ve done all the stuff that I would listen to and now I’m looking at the remaining discs with apathy. Yet to complete the project of packing away all our CDs, it must be done.  I did a size check last night and am estimating that once everything is ripped, it will take up less than 20GB.  Nice.

With this post, I hit a whooping 10 for the month of July J  I’m trying to disprove Dan’s theory that I only do something with zealousness while it is “new.” 

I just drove about 800 miles over the course of two-and-a-half days and brought my iPod in tow.  Unfortunately, I don’t yet have the “iPod your BMW” part installed, so I used the Monster iCarPlay Wireless - FM Transmitter instead.  The overall experience was pretty good – static would only be introduced if the station you were tuned to was also broadcasting locally, and it seemed that as you drove different locations did have local stations broadcasting, forcing you to switch channels.  Once the part is in and installed, this will be a thing of the past.

Having 2,208 songs on the iPod and putting into shuffle play is quite a fun experience – though you can do this with any digital audio player out there.  But just letting it cycle through music randomly was a great way to gain exposure to lots of different styles and types of music that I wouldn’t normally listen to.

My next step is to get into playlists and begin organizing music the way I want to listen to it rather than always listening “by album.”

I’m actively ripping my CD collection to MP3 using CyberLink’s MP3 encoder for Windows Media Player.  I had ripped about 100 CDs at a fixed 192 bit rate and then discovered that the CyberLink encoder supports variable bit rate.  The size difference is significant, with the variable bit rate files being smaller than their fixed rate counterparts.  I was a big variable bit rate fan for Windows Media, so I’ll give the MP3 version a shot for a while.  If I don’t notice any audio quality problems, I may go back and redo the 100 CDs I already did in order to save on space.  The down side is encoding of the variable bit rate files takes noticable longer than fixed rate files.