Drive Through…

When working at home I invariably end up sitting at my desk working on the Thinkpad whilst my iMac plays music to me or tunes me into BBC Radio 5 (especially PMQs on a Wednesday)

I’ve recently set the iMac to display the iTunes artwork screensaver, and have found myself entranced by it. For those that haven’t seen it, the screensaver shows a mosaic of album covers (40 at a time on my 24″ iMac) and flips one over every couple of seconds to reveal another. My main fixation has been a desire to see a screen full of artwork from what I consider to be good music. Like any music collection, there are a few black sheep in amongst the 830 albums and singles that live in my library. That Simply Red CD seemed like a good idea at the time…

It is quite distracting to sit there and stare at the Gabriel album, willing the screensaver to choose that one to flip over next. The bad ones seem to stay the longest, and Apple plays with your mind by always seeming to make sure there is a bad egg on the screen at all times. It’s not even like I rate my music, how does it know??

A little while ago I reached breaking point and had to just put everything else on hold and wait for that perfect moment:

(Large version on flickr)

I can’t say I’m completely happy with it. Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance are dodgy to say the least, whilst The Darkness and Catatonia are both albums I’d probably not want to be seen listening to nowadays.

However, the more interesting game is to try and spot serendipitous arrangements of albums. This is highlighted nicely in the above screenshot by this example:

If defunct mid-ninetines Bristolians The Crescent and erstwhile singer-songwriter Ed Harcourt ever got together to release a gatefold double vinyl album this must surely be the artwork!

Incidentally, you may wonder how you capture a screenshot of a screen saver? Well on OS X it turns out that if you press Cmd-Shift before starting the screen saver by pressing “Test” in the preferences panel, you can then take as many shots of the screen saver in action by keeping Cmd-Shift held down and pressing 3 for each shot. Nice. And yes, it did mean that I kept my fingers down on those buttons for about 20 minutes in the production of this blog post…

As previously blogged, I’ve been (re)ripping my entire CD collection to FLAC files for future posterity, and then re-encoding those into MP3 for use in iTunes, my iPod and for streaming around the flat.

Well I’ve finally finished, with exactly a week to go before we head off to Dublin. The timing is fortunate as my folks are coming down on Sunday to visit, and five boxes full of my CDs will be going back with them to be stored in their loft. Some final stats on the exercise:

CDs ripped: 618
Number of tracks: 7138
Total size of FLAC files: 183.43 GB
Total size of MP3 files: 26.2 GB

There were only a couple of CDs which were too badly damaged for Max to handle. There were also a few empty cases along the way, which have been swiftly replaced with versions from iTunes. Additionally I’ve been celebrating by purchasing a few albums from Irish artists, including Paddy Casey, The Frames, David Kitt and delorentos. I picked up on delorentos from the blog of our prospective wedding photographers James and Shawna who are also do a lot of work with bands and venues in Dublin.

I also belatedly picked up on the news from March that Lisa Hannigan and Damien Rice have parted ways professionally. Anybody who has listened to most of the songs from Damien’s two albums will be familiar with Lisa’s amazing voice, so it will be very interesting to she what she comes up with on her own now. Looking at her Wikipedia entry, it appears she was also in the year below Lana at school!

As part of the preparation for our move over to Dublin, I’m in the processing of ripping all of my not insignificant collection of CDs.

In fact, having owned a whole series of digital players over the past 7 years or so I’d already ripped a significant amount of them, and for the past two years I’ve bought stuff pretty exclusively from iTunes. However the CD rips were typically 192kbps MP3 and don’t sound particularly good.

Spurred by the desire to be able to store away the CDs at my folks’ place rather than ship them over to Dublin I decided a while ago to make a concerted effort to re-rip them all, and to this time make the digital copies as future proof as possible.

So, armed with my iMac, it’s 500GB disk, about 500 albums and the same number of singes I made a determined start. The trouble is that a few months later I have only got about 1/3rd of the way through

To future proof, I am ripping to FLAC, using Max. I’m using the highest quality setting (compression level 8 ) and am using the comparison ripper, which means it makes multiple passes at each sector, then computes their hashes. All of this slows the actual ripping process down, but does produce good results.

I’m then taking the FLAC files and chucking them through XLD to produce 320kbps VBR MP3s using the LAME encoder. These are then imported into my iTunes library. Eventually they will also be shoved up onto the disk attached to my Linksys NSLU2 which runs the TwonkyVision uPnP server. This in turn allows me to access my music library from my XBox 360 which is connected to my Hi-Fi.

There are two other non-technical reasons for the slow progress. Firstly, I’ve started with the large number of compilation CDs I have. A lot of these are double, or even triple disc albums, and in general have more tracks/disc than normal albums. Secondly, and most infuriatingly, the track info held in the MusicBrainz database used by Max isn’t terribly good when it comes to compilation albums. A lot of the time the CD artist will be “Various Artists” but then the artist field for each individual track will not be set. Instead it seems people just put the track title as “artist / track” which needs manual correction. I estimate this has been the case in about 50% of the CDs I’ve done so far.

Thankfully I am now at the end of the compilations, and am getting onto albums and selected singles. These should go past much quicker thanks to more accurate track info and fewer tracks/disc.

A few stats:

CDs ripped so far: 261
Number of tracks: 3906
Total size of FLAC files: 96.83GB
Typical size per FLAC file: 25 MB
Total size of MP3 files: 14.04 GB
Typical size per MP3 file: 3.5 MB

I always though this would happen. Steve Jobs has posted what amounts to an open letter to the music industry to stop the use of Digital Rights Management for online music downloads. The thoughts contained within it are clear for all to see. Apple Inc. would switch the iTunes Music Store over to a non-DRM format “in a heartbeat” if the big-four music companies would allow it. Jobs elucidates the options they have today: to stay as they are and watch a market fragment into proprietary formats, license FairPlay and watch it get compromised quicker than the blink of an eyelid, or convince the music industry that DRM has never, and will never work.

Interestingly, Jobs effectively issues a call to arms to the citizens of Europe to put pressure on the big four, both because we have been most vocal in criticizing DRM and as the music industry is effectively centered here. Where do I sign up?