Driving to the gym this morning when a Billy Joel song comes on and I’m reminded of a few things I read this week.
Music Quality Sucks
When I say that, I don’t mean the content of the song, I mean the sonic quality.
Used to be a time, many years ago, I fancied myself an amatuer audiophile. I had the best needles I could afford for my turn table. I used to only buy vinyl records. When I switched to CD, I always looked for the DDD on the label. My rig was tuned perfect for the room and, when I moved, I would spend hours tuning it again.
Even with my current setup, I bought the best I could for the money I had. Almost pro level receiver. Speakers that cost more than the receiver did (each satellite speaker weighs about 7lbs, and the subwoofer is 12″). It took me an entire day to set it up using only the best wires I could find. I even replaced my old DVD player for one that would play HD Audio. And, it sounds awesome.
Sometime during all of this I discovered the ease and convenience of the MP3. Napster, riffage.com, mp3.com and the like were havens for free music. But the quality was poor. I thought it was the downloads. I mean, they were ok to listen to in the car on the computer, but not so much on the big system.
I started ripping my music collection so I could burn CD’s for the car and, later, transfer them to an MP3 player. I ripped at 192k to have a happy balance between file size and quality. I mean, they were for the car, so it was good enough. And I never listened to those on the ‘big’ stereo.
And now, here I sit in year 2008 with a hard drive full of MP3s. I succumbed, much like the rest of you, to the maven of modern musical convenience, the iTunes music store. I’ve all but stopped listening to music on the big stereo. And do you know why?
MP3s suck.
Quick updates on a few things I have mentioned here at w(t)f over the last week or so.
Mail.app
Been using this for a solid week now with Gmail POP3. It’s been pretty good I must say but there are a few things I think could be a little better.
- Setting up rules and mailboxes could be more streamlined or at least have a keyboard shortcut
- Flagging a message needs an easier keyboard short cut, or someone at Apple needs to stop with those rediculous symbols that I don’t understand.
- Restoring the window from the dock needs to be more elegant/easier to figure out, but this is a problem I have with most Mac apps. cmd-n works, but then I have to close the new message window.
- Better keyboard navigation in general would be keen. Arrow and tab keys are my friend
Next will be getting my address book and iCal current. I’m really excited to see how well they integrate.
Random surfing today led me to this post by Mr. Merlin Mann on using smart playlists in iTunes to do more than just organize music, but as a utility to find stuff that you don’t listen to.
Using one of the tips, I was able to clear out over 6GB of old podcasts that were left behind for whatever reason.
That empowered me to keep going with the pruning, especially after a search for duplicates showed me that I had over 1400 tracks that were doubled or, in some cases, tripled!
So, into finder I delved, searching for duplicates, moving them to a folder on the desktop and deleting them from my music folder. Also deleted a bunch of empty folders and tracks that I know I will never, ever listen to again.
As soon as I finished that, the stray mp3’s were archived onto my backup drive in a single zip file (just in case) and I emptied the trash. All together I think I was able to clear out close to, if not more than, 10gb 15gb of crap!
It’s not that I needed the space because all of my music lives on an external drive with 200GB of available space. It was the fact that my music library was a mess, and I was tired of it. I’ve been moving that folder from PC to PC to the Mac for the last 10 years. Trust me when I tell you it was a mess.
But not any longer. As I type this, my iTunes library is currently rebuilding itself and I expect it be done by the time I wake up in the morning. Once complete, I will do another check for duplicates and get rid of any that don’t belong and rebuild once more. A lot of work? Sure it is. Do I have the time? Sure I do. That’s why I decided to do it.
Sure there are programs out there, but have you tried any of them? Honestly, they pretty much suck and with the amount of dis-organization I was experiencing, it was just as easy for me to do it by hand this time.
I feel much better now. Thank you.
I talk a bit about this in the upcoming video hour, but there is this fancy new service called Animoto. I first learned about them from J/C on his Flickr, then I heard an interview with them on Net@Nite. So, I checked it out.
Pretty neat eh? Only took a few minutes too. It’s free for a 30 second clip, $3 for unlimited length and $30 a year if you want to do a lot! But don’t signup for the year unless you talk to me first. I have a code to save you $5.
Definitely worth checking out.
New wtf video hour should be posted by morning. I was finally able to fix my upload snafu by resetting my FiOS router to factory specs. I was almost thinking it was still the Mac because I was able to get the download started on Windows, but it borked at 84%. That was the last straw.
Busy day today, but I’m much to tired to tell you about it, so you will have to wait until tomorrow.
About a million years ago MTV used to play music videos. For reals!
Also, about a million years ago, there were staples found in videos. Hot girls drapped over something mechanical. Cool shaped guitars. Big/crazy hair. Smoke, fog and other lighting effects. You know, the good stuff.
Unless you were a pop outfit. Then, for sure, you had to have scooters.
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