Peter's Blog

Decided to take the plunge and rip my entire CD collection. Recently moved house and decided I don't want ugly shelves in my new room, I'd prefer to rip all the CD's and put them in storage (definitely NOT sell them at a boot sale). Also, hifi can been streamlined to:

• pc
• old NAD3020 amp
• hifi speakers (mission surround sound things, cannot recall model)
• REL Q100 subwoofer (which I have switched off now as it makes whole house shake).

CD player, tuner etc also put in storage.

Ripping solutions came down to:

• iTunes: have a few iTunes tracks, would be nice to consolidate all music
• Winamp: advantage is that it's NOT iTunes
• K*****: some linux based thing or other

Decided on iTunes for these reasons:

• it will rip AAC files which is better than vanilla mp3 but is not an Apple proprietary standard, other devices will play it. Found an AAC player for The Core Music Player on pocketpc so decided mp3 was not a must.
• PC has two CD drives and iTunes can be set up to automatically rip a CD as it is loaded. With two drives, after ripped one has been ripped it will immediately start ripping the other, giving minimal down time. This was fine in theory but in practise one of the drives caused problems, halting the rip so I had to use just one drive.
• didn't want to mess around with linux: if I had hours of spare time then maybe I would track down the lame mp3 codec and piece it all together but I'm a busy man.

Ripping is progressing, 30 or 40 disks through and the iTunes CDDB lookup has not failed me so far, despite some pretty obscure CD's.

Next decision is: do I try squeezing music onto 1G compact flash card on pocketpc or buy an 8G ipod nano? 8G should be ample for me and no hard disk to skip tracks. If I go pocketpc then:

• one less gadget to carry around
• can use winamp to load music and playlists

Dell Inspiron 500m is tethered to a mains socket so now I have it running 24/7. One advantage of this is that I can use iTunes for podcast downloading. Using the Apple podcast directory I found The Week In Technology (TWIT) which the laptop downloads at it's leisure. Come rowing time, I fire up the desktop pc in the rowing room and use the iTunes sharing thing to play the podcast back. And it works! Before I could not be bothered to find any podcast other than the Daily Source Code and now I am spoilt for choice thanks to the iTunes podcast directory. Ok, I'm not a great fan of iTunes but Microsoft built an empire on seductive ease of use.

Trying to burn CD from iTunes and getting pretty useless and uninformative message 'None of the items in this playlist can be burned to disc'. Why? Setup problem? DRM? Is this a typical example of mac error messages?

Googling amongst clueless macites, it's not because I am trying to write the wrong kind of CD, data rather than audio, so I assume it may be a problem with my CD Burner. When I try to copy disks in Nero I tend to get bluescreens.

So I tried using my laptop and burning from there, running iTunes on that and accessing the shared library on the desktop pc. This setup does not appear to allow you to copy the tunes from one pc to another or burn a disc directly from a selection. I could copy the raw files but I have to fiddle about.

I would go to another package for organising music only I have some purchased music in iTunes. Maybe the solution is to use two packages, iTunes for purchased music (I cannot bring myself to buy a whole CD just for one or two good tracks) and another to organise my cd collection, a package that is not so obsessed with DRM and stopping you from doing things, or if it does stop you it gives an explicit reason why.

It would be good to set up a Multimedia Server to play music in the lounge but it would involve:

• buying Video card with TV out, wireless network card, wireless keyboard and mouse
• continuing with my efforts to make pc silent (silent psu)
• training the wife to use it

It could also download podcasts and remote backup my server. Hum, have to think more, I can always have it turn itself on and off to a schedule.