Category: music

David Bowie

I’m a little surprised at how much David Bowie’s death has affected me. I was always a fan of his, but I guess I took him for granted. The only CD of his that I own is Black Tie White Noise, which is kind of an oddball one. (I might have the first Tin Machine CD too, which is another oddball.)

I’m not going to try to write a eulogy for him; plenty of other people have done a really good job at that. But I’ve come across so many well-written and/or interesting pieces related to him that I thought I’d just post a list of links:

I picked up Nothing Has Changed on iTunes earlier this week, and I’ve been listening to it at work. There’s so much good stuff there. And I’ve been listening to Blackstar too, which is also really good.

HiFiBerry DAC and Volumio setup

My HiFiBerry DAC arrived from Switzerland yesterday. (Amazing how fast something can get from Switzerland to NJ for only $11.) I took my Raspberry Pi out of the old case, plugged the DAC into it (and screwed everything together) and put the whole thing into the new case. Getting Volumio to use the DAC was easy; it’s just a selection from a drop-down menu under the settings page.

The new case is a nifty little snap-together thing made out of transparent plastic. (A small part of it cracked off while I was putting it together, but it’s fine.) I’m not hearing a huge difference in sound quality compared to using the headphone jack on the Pi, but I think I can detect some difference. (It might just be my imagination though.) Keep in mind that I don’t have a terribly high-end setup, so “your mileage may vary” as the saying goes. Also, I haven’t tried any lossless files yet, just regular MP3s and AACs.

And I got a 128GB USB thumb drive from Amazon, which is now plugged into the Pi, in place of the 32GB drive I was previously using. I’m going through my music collection alphabetically, and copying selected stuff over to it. I’ve done A through H now, and still have plenty of space left.

So I think I may have hit on a good working setup for this thing now. It’s relatively convenient to use, sounds good, and doesn’t take up much space, make any noise, or use much power.

playing with Volumio

I’ve made some progress with Volumio, and I’m having fun with it, so I thought I’d write a follow-up to my previous post.

The DAC that I ordered from HiFiBerry has shipped, but it turns out they’re in Switzerland, so it’s going to take a while to get here. (I’d have know that if I’d read their about page.) So I’ve decided to go ahead and start using the Pi as-is, through the headphone jack. Sound quality is OK, but I’m hoping the DAC improves it.

I’ve installed MPoD on my iPhone, and I think that’s the best way to control Volumio, though it doesn’t let you start a web radio station; it’s just good for your local music. But it’s much better for navigating my music collection than the Volumio web interface. I may mess around with other MPD clients at some point, and see if I can find a good one for Mac and/or Windows, but I’m fine with just MPoD for now.

I’m still not sure how I want to hook up my music collection to the Pi, but for now, I’m using a 32 GB USB thumb drive. As of this morning, I’ve copied over about 6GB worth of music, which is enough to mess around with, but not really a significant portion of my collection. Yesterday, I saw a 128 GB thumb drive on sale for $30, so maybe that’s the way to go.

I wasn’t initially that interested in the web radio functionality of Volumio, but I think it might come in handy. Where I live, I don’t have much luck receiving radio signals (too far from both New York and Philly), so I don’t listen to much radio at home. But, if I can get a few interesting stations set up, maybe that will be useful. Volumio ships with a bunch of stations already set up, but around half of them don’t work. I figured out enough to add a couple of stations on my own, but I only got one working, WXPN, which is a Philly station that I can usually pick up on my stereo, but not always. I’ve also tried getting WQXR set up, but I haven’t gotten that working. And WFMU is one of the stations in the default list that works, so that’s cool. I used to listen to them a lot, before I moved out of their range.

So I’m having fun with this. It’s giving me a chance to dig into my music collection, and find stuff I haven’t listened to in a long time. And it’s motivating me to organize the collection a bit more.

And it’s fun to play with the Raspberry Pi. I have a few ideas about other uses for a Pi, so I may find myself ordering another one at some point.

Labor Day

As I posted a few days ago, I’ve been thinking about the way I listen to music a lot lately. I have a rough plan sketched out to consolidate a lot of my music collection, then copy it to a USB hard drive and listen to it with a small Raspberry Pi device that’s connected to my main stereo.

I’ve completed the first part of this plan, which was to merge the iTunes libraries on my Mac and PC. I had looked at a few possible ways to do that, and settled on SuperSync. I bought a two-seat license to it, and installed one on my Mac and one on my PC. I didn’t actually run a full merge of the two libraries. Rather, I found all the full albums that were on my Mac but not my PC, and copied them over to the PC. So now the PC definitely has a copy of all the full albums that I’ve either ripped from CD or bought from iTunes (or Amazon or wherever else). My full music library is around 50 GB now. (That’s just music, not video.) So that’s pretty substantial, but not out of control.

I would recommend SuperSync to anyone else needing to do something like this. It’s fairly easy to use, and I didn’t have any problems connecting the two computers over the network and transferring files between libraries.

So now the next part of the plan is to rip some CDs. I’ve ripped a fair number already, whenever I had a CD that I wanted to listen to on my iPod or iPhone. But I have hundreds of CDs that I haven’t ripped.

When I started thinking about this, I remembered that I had a ridiculous number of CDs in the trunk of my car. With my old car, I had a six-CD changer in the trunk, and I used to buy a lot of music in MP3 format from emusic, then burn regular audio CDs, and listen to them in the car. So I just kept tossing CDs into cardboard boxes in the trunk. And sometimes I’d take some regular CDs out to the car, then they’d wind up in those boxes in the trunk and never get back inside the house. Well, when I got my new car, I just moved those boxes to the trunk of the new car. But I have an aux jack in this car, so I can just plug in my iPhone. I do listen to CDs in the car occasionally, but all those burned CDs in the trunk have really become just dead weight.

So instead of doing something normal and fun for Labor Day, I decided to clean out the trunk of my car and go through all those CDs. Most of the burned CDs went straight in the garbage. The regular CDs are getting tossed back in with my main CD collection.

I also remembered that the single-disc CD player in my current car can play MP3 CDs. I’d always meant to try that out, but never got around to it. So I decided that I could put together a much more focused CD collection for the car, with just MP3 CDs, so each CD could have a half-dozen albums on it. And I also figured that I could start on some more CD ripping too, maybe ripping some of my favorite old CDs, then consolidating them on MP3 CDs.

So I started this morning, and now it’s almost 3pm. I made ten MP3 CDs total, and I even went out to the car and double-checked them to make sure they were playable. (And they are!) So I’ve got maybe 60 hours of music, which ought to keep me out of trouble for a while. (And, yes, I could have just loaded all this music to an iPod or something, but the nice thing about the MP3 CDs is that I can use the regular controls on the CD player to control things, instead of having to fumble around trying to deal with an iPod. Also, I don’t have a working iPod, and I don’t have enough room on my phone to load a lot of music, and I have an ample supply of blank CD-Rs. So this way works better and doesn’t cost me anything.)

Overall, I’ve now got another 20 or 30 CDs ripped, I’ve organized my collection a bit more, and I’ve cleaned out the car a good bit. So that was worth doing, though if I have to tell anyone at work tomorrow what I did on Labor Day, they’re going to think I’m a nerd and/or an idiot for wasting a perfectly nice day.

By the way, I stuck with iTunes for the CD ripping, tweaking my settings a bit so I’d be getting fairly high-quality VBR MP3s. I still want to try dBpoweramp, but I don’t think I need it. Recently, I had been allowing iTunes to rip CDs with its default settings, but that leaves me with AAC files instead of MP3 files, and my car CD player can’t read AAC’s. (I was pretty sure it wouldn’t, but I checked and verified that it can’t.) So now I’m going to be sure I rip only to MP3.

thinking about music

Listening to music used to be pretty simple. I’d turn on the stereo, put a record on the turntable, and that was it. It’s gotten a lot more complicated now, though, and I’ve been going back and forth on a few things, thinking about what kind of hardware, software, and services I use to consume music.

I could (and probably will) write a new post about how I’m listening to music on my iPhone right now, but this particular post is going to be about listening to music at home.

I have a fairly old, but still good, stereo setup: a receiver with a handful of standard RCA inputs, and a decent pair of speakers. I used to have a low-end DVD player hooked up to it, which I was using as a CD player, but that broke a while back. (I hooked that up after my original CD player broke.) And I used to have a turntable and a cassette player, but I got rid of those a long time ago. I have a mini-stereo cable hooked in to one of the RCA inputs, and I plug that into my iPhone when I want to listen to, say, Slacker on my stereo. But I currently have no way to listen to CDs on it, or to stream music from my Mac or PC to it. I can also listen to music via my Roku, Apple TV, or PS3 (using various services), but I need to have the TV turned on to use any of those, and I don’t really like to have to leave the TV on while I’m listening to music. It generates a fair bit of heat, and a little noise. (If there was a way for the TV to pass the audio out without having the screen on, that might work, but my TV doesn’t do that.) And I can use the PS3 to listen to regular audio CDs of course, but that’s serious overkill, given the amount of noise and heat produced by the TV and PS3 combined.

So I’d been halfheartedly looking for a new CD player to hook up to the stereo. Well, it turns out, nowadays, that it isn’t as easy to find a small, simple, CD player with regular RCA outputs as it used to be. One limiting factor for me is that I don’t have that much room, so I need a small one. (I actually have my Dad’s old 5 CD changer, and that would work fine, but I just can’t fit it on my shelf.)

So now I’ve been thinking that I’m really a bit behind the times, and I should instead come up with a good way to pipe my digital music collection through my stereo.

First, I started thinking about consolidating the two iTunes libraries that I currently have. I have separate libraries on my Mac and my PC, with significant overlap. But there’s a lot of stuff I ripped to the Mac and never copied to the PC, and vice versa. So, first, I’m looking at ways to merge my iTunes libraries. I looked at a few programs, and SuperSync looks like it would be the best option for me. If it works as advertised, I should be able to install it on my Mac and on my PC, and consolidate the libraries over my network, without pulling over all the duplicates.

Second, I started thinking about ripping all of my CDs. I’ve ripped a number of them already, maybe 20-30% of the CDs I own, but I haven’t ripped everything. I’d say I have a couple of hundred CDs that I don’t have in my iTunes library. So I considered doing something vaguely fancy, like using dBpoweramp to rip them to FLAC, so I’d have lossless copies. Or maybe using EAC. But after thinking about it, I think I’d be fine just using iTunes, and ripping them using the higher-quality AAC settings, or maybe the Apple lossless format.

From there, I’m thinking about building a little box with a Raspberry Pi running Volumio or OSMC. I would just attach a USB hard drive to it with all my music files, and plug it into my receiver with the regular mini-stereo output on the Pi. (And if that doesn’t sound good enough, I could add a DAC with RCA outputs to the Pi.) So that would be small enough to fit on my shelf, use minimal power, make very little noise, and it should be controllable from my laptop and my phone, via a web interface.

I’m not sure how far I’m going to get with this plan. And there are a number of alternatives which might be simpler than my Raspberry Pi plan. But I had some fun today investigating software and hardware options for this. And I like the idea of messing around with a Pi and some open-source audio software. If I go that route, and it works well, maybe I can consider trying some other Raspberry Pi projects.

Apple’s big music announcement

There were some interesting things in this week’s WWDC keynote, including multi-tasking on the iPad, open-sourcing Swift, and transit directions in Apple Maps. But the Apple Music announcement probably got the most attention in the general-interest press.

The announcement prompted a few interesting articles, including this one from the Washington Post on how it stacks up against other streaming services, and this one from Mashable comparing it to iTunes Match.

I’m currently using Slacker Radio for most of my streaming, which isn’t mentioned in the Washington Post article. I have their lower-end $4/month subscription, which is similar to Pandora’s $5/month plan and includes ad-free streaming, with unlimited track skips, but no ability to listen to full albums or otherwise select precisely what tracks you want to listen to.

I’m not sure why Slacker doesn’t get more attention. Their $4/month subscription compares well to Pandora’s $5/month subscription, and their $10/month subscription compares well to Spotify’s paid service. They have some interesting “curated” playlists, plus content from ESPN and ABC News, if you’re into that sort of thing.

The other service I’m using is Google Play’s service that scans and uploads your music library, then allows you to stream it through the Google Play app. It’s similar to iTunes Match, but free, and has a higher limit on the total number of songs you can upload (50k vs. 25k). There are a few downsides to Google’s service, though. First, the program that scans your music library and uploads it doesn’t have much intelligence built into it. In addition to all my songs, it’s also uploaded a bunch of my audiobooks, and occasionally decides to stick a chapter or two into an auto-generated playlist. Second, I’ve found that the Google Play iOS app isn’t quite as nice about bandwidth usage (and battery usage) as Slacker is, so I’m careful about using it when I’m not on wi-fi.

I’m also occasionally using Amazon’s streaming music service that’s free with an Amazon Prime subscription. Their service, honestly, isn’t that compelling, but it’s free, and it allows me to stream full albums, so it comes in handy once in a while. Their selection isn’t as good as Slacker or Spotify, but there is some good stuff on there.

I don’t think I’m likely to sign up for Apple Music, given that I’m already getting enough music through Slacker, Google, and Amazon Prime, but it’s interesting to see what they’re doing.

Streaming Music Services

In general, I’ve never been the kind of guy who likes to listen to music at work. And in most of my previous jobs, I really wouldn’t have been able to listen to music, since there were a lot of interruptions and interactions that would have prevented me from getting too far into anything before I’d have to take my headphones off to answer a call, or run over to a user’s desk, or whatever. But, in my current job, I’m doing a fair amount of “heads down” programming, with few interruptions. And I’m actually finding that some of the office noise distracts me enough that drowning it out with music allows me to be more productive.

For a while, I tried just listening to Coffeetivity. This was kind of helpful, but also kind of boring. I may give it another try at some point. I also tried focus@will. The idea here is kind of cool, but I’m not convinced it would make me more productive than listening to music of my own choosing. Again, I may give it another try at some point, maybe the next time they run a 50% off sale on a year’s subscription to their “premium” service. And, as I’ve mentioned previously on this blog, I was really in love with turntable.fm. Unfortunately, they shut down a while ago.

After messing around with all this stuff, I settled into a habit of listening to Pandora a lot. I set up some “stations” based on my favorite artists, and that worked out pretty well. About a year ago, I paid $36 to subscribe to Pandora One for a year, so I could get rid of the ads. That didn’t seem like a bad price, even though it really doesn’t buy you anything other than ad-free listening.

This past weekend, I got a notice that it was time to renew. (Normally, that would have happened automatically, but my credit card got stolen a while back and I had to replace it, so they couldn’t put through the charge on my old card.) I really wanted to just renew it for another whole year, but Pandora discontinued the annual plan a while back. So the $36/year (effectively $3/month) plan would become a $4/month plan with no annual billing option. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go forward with that, so I basically just let the subscription lapse. Then, on Monday, when I looked again, I realized that I was no longer eligible for the $4/month “loyalty price,” and would have to go on the new $5/month plan. So I decided that was a but much, and I’d look around at other options.

For now, I’ve settled on Slacker. The ad-free version is $4/month, and it gets you a few things that you don’t get with Pandora. The one feature I really like, and I wish Pandora allowed, is the option to download stuff for offline listening. I can’t use my employer’s wifi to stream music to my phone at work, so I have to rely on my Verizon data connection. This generally works OK, but I can wind up getting pretty close to my data cap sometimes, and I think it drains the battery a lot more than listening from a local cache. So just being able to download a cache of stuff over my home wifi, before leaving for work, is useful.

I’m also finding that Slacker’s “curated” stations are interesting. I listened to “The Current” station today, and it was really good. I’m not sure how often the content on that station is refreshed, but I could see myself listening to that one quite a lot. So, overall, I’m finding Slacker to be just as good as Pandora, but with a few more bells and whistles. Over time, I’ll see how well it holds up — whether or not there are any glitches with the app, how often content is refreshed, and stuff like that. But I’m feeling pretty good about it.