Category: music

more music organization

Since ordering a Sonos One yesterday, I got to thinking about the state of my music collection. I’ve had a long-running project to rip old CDs and copy MP3s over to my Volumio box, starting back in 2015. I’ve been working my way through stuff, roughly in alphabetical order, with occasional side-trips. The last time I did any major work on that was in September 2017, when I got through to U2. Today, I picked up on that and got the rest of the way through U, then on to V, W, X, Y, and Z. So I’m done with the alphabet at least, though I have a handful of artists I still need to look at separately. (For instance, I have thirteen Chris Whitley CDs and most of them haven’t been ripped yet.) But I felt like I should write a short post to mark the date.

When I get the Sonos, the plan is going to be to use the Volumio as a NAS that the Sonos can access. Hopefully, the Sonos can do that with no problems. If not, there’s other stuff I can try, to make my MP3s accessible to it, though I’m hoping the Volumio works out.

Sonos One

I had, up until today, resisted the urge to spend any money on a “smart speaker” device. The tech is interesting, of course. Ever since ST:TNG, all good nerds have wanted to be able to just yell “tea, Earl Grey, hot” and have a piping hot mug of tea materialize in front of them. So Amazon Echo and other smart speakers are kind of cool. But, in practice, there’s really not that much you can do with them. You can yell “play AC/DC” and, on a good day, “Back in Black” will start playing from the speaker. If you have some home automation stuff set up, you can yell at it to turn your lights on and off, but that never really seemed too compelling to me. I can just as easily flip a light switch.

And, on the speaker side of things, I don’t think an Echo would compete that well with my big old-fashioned speakers, connected to my old-fashioned tuner. I still have my Raspberry Pi Volumio box hooked up to my tuner, and it works reasonably well, for most stuff. There are a few issues though. When I use it as an AirPlay receiver, it stutters occasionally. (I’m not sure if that’s Volumio’s fault or network problems.) And, for some MP3 files, the sound quality is a little off. Also, while it can play streaming radio, it only supports a limited set of stations. (You need to find a specific kind of streaming URL to use, and not all stations support it.)

So when I think about my current setup, there are definitely limitations. I like listening to old-fashioned FM radio, but the particular area I live in is a bit too far from both New York and Philly to pick up stations from either area reliably. I used to be able to pick up WXPN (Philly) and WNYC (New York) reasonably well, but reception has actually gotten worse over the last few years for some reason, so now I can’t pick up much of anything anymore, except for a few local stations. And I have a good CD collection, but no longer have a working CD player. Volumio was supposed to solve that problem, but I’m not entirely satisfied with it.

Anyway, this all leads me into looking into smart speakers. Apple’s HomePod is interesting. All the reviews I’ve seen indicate that it has great sound quality. But it’s $350 for a single speaker, and it doesn’t work with much other than Apple Music. It’s supposed to support AirPlay 2 at some point, and apparently supports the current version of AirPlay now, so I could always stream to it from my iPhone. But I can already do that with Volumio. It might sound better than Volumio, but it’s still $350.

The Amazon Echo is only $100, and the speaker is probably reasonably good, but most reviews I’ve read would lead me to believe that it’s probably not better than my current speakers. It does support a variety of music services and streaming radio stations, but of course it’s likely happiest with Amazon Music.

The Sonos One seems to fit well into a niche that’s somewhere in between the Echo and the HomePod. It’s $200 for one (or $350 for two, right now). The sound quality should be better than the Echo, but not as good as HomePod. (I haven’t actually heard one yet, but it’s possible that it could actually be better than my current setup, though I’m not convinced about that.) And it supports a wide range of sources, so I should be able to listen to WXPN, WNYC, NTS, and a bunch of other radio stations, if I want to. And it supports playing MP3s from a file share, so I should be able to access all of the MP3s that I already have on my Volumio box. It also has Alexa support, so if I want to yell at it, I can, but I don’t have to. (It’s also got an app I can use instead.)

There are some vexing limitations to the Sonos One though. It’s got no analog input, so I can’t pipe my TV sound output through it. And it doesn’t work as a Bluetooth receiver or (current) AirPlay receiver, so I don’t think I can pipe anything through it that isn’t explicitly supported by Sonos. (That’ll change when they add AirPlay 2 support, assuming they actually do that.)

So, anyway, I ordered one this morning. Sigh. I based my decision in part on this comparison at iMore, which definitely favors the HomePod, in terms of sound quality, but which points out some of its limitations. And on this article at recode, which talks about how Sonos intends to compete against the HomePod. I like Sonos’ approach of trying to support as many services as they can. And I read this review of Sonos One from Sound and Vision, which was very positive about the sound quality of the Sonos One. So I’m getting one, and we’ll see how it works. If it’s no good, I guess I can return it. But I’m hoping I’ll like it.

Morrissey: Spent the Day in Bed

One more song for today. I’m not usually a big fan of Morrissey’s solo work, but I kind of like this one.  Of course, when I searched for it, I found this link too… so, yeah, he’s still an idiot. But he occasionally writes a pretty good song.

 

I’ll quit tomorrow

I like this Dawg Yawp song a lot, for some reason. And not just because it’s got a lot of sitar. Here’s an article about the album it’s taken from. And here’s a Tiny Desk Concert they did. I feel like their sound is something I could get tired of pretty quickly, but right now, I’m liking it.

 

Slacker Radio changes

I got an email yesterday announcing that the Slacker Radio Plus subscription I have will no longer include offline streaming, as of 12/31/2017. This is a bummer for me, since that’s the main reason I pay $4 per month for Plus. My data plan from Verizon only includes 3 GB per month, and I get pretty close to that most months, so I can’t really stream music over Verizon’s network unless I change my data plan.

To keep the offline streaming feature of Slacker, I’d need to upgrade to their $10/month Premium plan. That’s basically equivalent to Amazon Unlimited, or Apple Music, or Spotify. I’d get full access to their whole catalog, being able to listen to whatever I want whenever I want. (The Plus subscription just lets you listen to streaming radio. You’d can’t pick exactly which songs you want to listen to.)

I started using Slacker back in 2014. Back then, I had a 4 GB data plan, so I could do a little online streaming (though not that much). I’ve been pretty happy with it. I’m currently also using Amazon Prime Music, which is free with my Prime subscription. The iOS app for Amazon Music is pretty good, and it does also include offline streaming. It doesn’t, though, have the same kind of variety in streaming stations that Slacker has, and it has only a limited subset of the music that would be available if I went the next step and signed up for Amazon’s Music Unlimited service, which would cost $8 per month (after a $1 three-month trial).

I could also give Apple Music a try. I thought about that when it was announced in 2015, but it didn’t look like a good idea then. Looking at it again now, it’s still maybe a little iffy. It does have offline capability, but I’d need to check on how easy it is to use. And I’d need to review things to make sure I can set it up without screwing up my iTunes libraries on my Mac and PC.

Spotify still seems to be the 800-pound gorilla of streaming services. I’m considering Spotify simply because so many other people are on it. I often see links to interesting Spotify playlists on Reddit or elsewhere on the Internet. (I never see links to Apple Music playlists, and I’m not even sure if you can share them.) But, last I checked, Spotify’s iOS app isn’t very good for offline streaming. It’s possible, but it apparently doesn’t give you much control.

And as long as I’m looking around, I might as well look at Pandora too. I used to pay for a Plus subscription with them, before I switched to Slacker. Pandora Plus is now $5/month, and includes limited offline capabilities. Probably not enough to justify the cost. Premium is $10/month, and lets you copy anything down for offline listening.

My cheapest option would be to drop Slacker entirely, and rely on Amazon Prime Music for offline listening, along with podcasts and old-fashioned MP3s synced to my phone. That’s probably what I’ll do for now. Maybe at some point I’ll talk myself into being OK with paying $8 or $10 per month for a streaming music service, but not quite yet.

 

Super-Fast Podcasts

I like this article on People Who Listen to Podcasts at Super-Fast Speeds from BuzzFeed. Mostly, I like the fact that I haven’t fallen down the hole of feeling like I need to listen to podcasts at 10x speed or whatever, like these folks. I’m perfectly fine listening to them at 1x, and allowing Overcast to delete old episodes from my iPhone, even if I haven’t listened to them yet.

In the old days, I used to let podcast episodes pile up on my Mac, and I’d let myself feel a little bad if I didn’t keep up with them. Nowadays, I just have Overcast set up to keep the most recent 5 (or, for some podcasts, 10) episodes. If a new one comes out, and I haven’t listened to the oldest one yet, it just gets deleted regardless.

And I do sometimes use Overcast’s “Smart Speed” feature, which will generally speed things up to 1.1x or 1.2x without it being really noticeable. But, if I’m listening to, for instance, Judge John Hodgman, I usually don’t bother with Smart Speed, since I’m listening to stuff like that largely to relax, so it doesn’t make any difference if I get through an hour-long episode in 50 minutes or 60 minutes. (And I can relax a bit better if people aren’t talking too fast.)

I do sometimes wish I could jam more episodes of .NET Rocks into my head at a faster pace. There’s a lot of good stuff on that show, and it comes out 2 or 3 times a week. I wind up skipping a lot of episodes. Listening to it at  high-speed would, I think, just result in me understanding even less of it than I do now, so I’m sticking with regular speed on that one.

U2 Mastered, Remastered, Deluxe, Confused

Since I got interested in U2 again recently, I’ve started looking into their history of remastering and reissuing their older albums over the last decade. It looks like they remastered and reissued a few old albums in 2008. And they’ve continued to remaster and reissue a handful of other old albums over the years, generally including a “deluxe” format release, usually a 2 CD version with bonus tracks. The most recent reissue is this year’s Joshua Tree. There are four different versions of that: single disc, 2 CD, 4 CD, and 7 LP. (So they maybe overdid that one…) For the older reissues, the deluxe versions are sometimes still available on CD and sometimes not.

Looking at Amazon’s U2 page is a little frustrating. They’re clearly pushing the digital side of things. The deluxe two-disc versions of their first three albums (Boy, October, and War) are all available to stream, which is cool, but I don’t see them available on CD, though I may not be looking hard enough. (The single-disc versions are definitely still available on CD.)

In iTunes, they have a nicely organized U2 page. All (or most) of their studio albums are available in Mastered for iTunes versions. I looked into that a bit, and they seem to have been released earlier this year. And all of the deluxe versions are in there too, though those ones don’t have the “Mastered for iTunes” badge on them. So I’m wondering if those versions use the MFiT files for disc 1 and the older files for disc 2, or if they just didn’t update those at all.

I went down a bit of a hole this morning, reading up on the whole Mastered for iTunes thing. I’d read about it a bit when they first announced it, but haven’t paid much attention to it. Ars Technica has a couple of good articles on it, from 2012, one on the general concept, and one evaluating the end result. I’ve wondered if there’s any advantage to buying MFiT albums from iTunes vs buying the CDs from Amazon and ripping them myself, and I guess I’m still not sure. I probably don’t have fancy enough equipment (or good enough ears) to tell the difference, so I probably shouldn’t worry about it.

But I have noticed that I don’t like the sound quality on some of the older CDs that I’ve ripped recently, including U2’s October and War. I can’t quite figure out if I should buy new versions of those albums, re-rip my CDs with different settings, or just give up and live with it. I definitely don’t want to go too far down an audiophile rabbit hole that ends with me buying a bunch of new stereo equipment! I don’t currently own a working component CD player though, and that makes it a bit harder for me to narrow things down. I keep forgetting that I can play CDs through my PlayStation 3, though, and that’s routed through my main stereo system, so maybe I should give that a try, and compare the sound to MP3s played through my Volumio box.

Memory Playlist

Every time I read one of Warren Ellis’ newsletters, I find myself going down a bunch of paths off into weird music and blogs and stuff. Today, I found myself at Hannah Peel’s Memory Playlist page:

Like a time capsule or even an insurance policy for music… from the present day right back to my earliest memories of my fondest songs and music… so if I was to ever fall into dementia these lasting first songs, embedded into the auditory cortex of the brain, would be a way to reach out and still connect to family.

I like that idea. Tie it together with this essay, and now I’m thinking about how I’m using this blog, and Day One, and my ongoing project to organize my music collection, to organize my own memories.

My recent rekindled interest in Paul McCartney and U2 is, in large part, an indulgence in nostalgia, which isn’t a bad thing (if you don’t overdo it). I’ve also become interested in trying to put together playlists that allow me to listen to artists like McCartney and U2 in a new context, that let me appreciate familiar music in new ways, and that maybe spark some new connections. The Pure McCartney collection that I recently bought does that, a bit. For U2, I’ve been listening to a playlist on Amazon called 50 Great U2 Songs, which is pretty good. (Both of them contain some songs I’d never heard before, and many that I hadn’t heard in a long time.) But I think there’s probably something more interesting that I could put together, maybe mixing in other artists.

I don’t want to fall too far down the “assembling playlists” hole. That can turn into a pointless time sink, if you let it. And it’s really nice out today, so I should probably stop here, and go outside.

Rediscovering U2

I’ve been screwing around with my music library a lot lately, ripping old CDs, copying stuff to my Volumio box, and so on. This has led me to a few points where I’ve gone back to bands I haven’t listened to in years, and rediscovering them. My most recent rediscovery is an old favorite: U2.

I was a huge U2 fan back in the 80s. I even remember when and where I heard my first U2 song. It was on WNEW, on Scott Muni’s “Things from England” segment. The song was their first big single, I Will Follow, from Boy. I specifically remember hearing it on my old “boom box” while sitting in my backyard.

Anyway, that was the start of my U2 fandom, which lasted from Boy (1980) up through Rattle and Hum (1988), with only increasing admiration. Things tapered off a bit with Achtung Baby (1991). I still kept buying most of their albums through the 90s, but my interest waned quite a bit. At some point I guess I lost interest entirely, and it seemed like Bono (in particular) had turned into a parody of himself.

But, as part of my ongoing efforts to consolidate and organize my music collection, I had listed U2 as an obvious candidate for a bit of cleanup. Well, I decided to do that a couple of weeks ago. I looked in iTunes, and saw that I didn’t really have much U2 in there. I had, at some point, ripped the two “best of” collections (80s and 90s). And, of course, I had Songs of Innocence, the infamous free U2 album that everybody got via iTunes, whether they wanted it or not. And a few singles and random songs, but not much else. So I found all my U2 CDs and ripped them all. In total, I have about 18 albums in iTunes now. (Some of them are really EPs or CD singles, but it’s still quite a lot.)

Just picking songs from that collection at random and listening to them, I’m reminded of what I liked about U2 in the first place. And I recently read a couple of pieces from The New Yorker that have made me think about them a bit more deeply. One is about their relationship to Christianity, and the other is about a lapsed U2 fan who rediscovers them (so I’m identifying with that one a bit). Now I kind of wish I’d figured this out earlier, so I could have gone to see them on their current Joshua Tree tour. I’ve never actually seen them live. (Hmm, there are still tickets available for tomorrow night’s show in San Diego, so technically I could still see them on this tour. If I wanted to call in sick tomorrow, and book a last-minute flight to San Diego…)

Somewhere in all this organization, the “completist” bug hit me, and I realized that I’m missing exactly three of their studio albums (Boy, Pop, and No Line on the Horizon). (I probably owned Boy on cassette or vinyl at some point, but never on CD.) So I thought about buying them. But I see that they’re all available on Amazon Prime Music, so I guess I can just listen to them that way and save myself $30. (Though, of course the completist/collector in me won’t be satisfied with that. I must OWN my music!)

Meanwhile, I’m getting interested in their next album Songs of Experience, which should be coming out before the end of the year (probably).