Category: software

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.

Goodbye, Instacast

I found out today that my podcast app of choice, Instacast, has been discontinued. It still works, for now, but I guess I should find a new app to use. I was actually thinking about trying a new app anyway, but had been too lazy to actually download and try anything.

I’ve been curious about Marco Arment’s Overcast, so I just downloaded that to my iPhone, and I’m going to give it a try. I’m seeing a few things about it that I already don’t like, but I’ll see if I can figure it out and get used to it. (There’s a good write-up on Overcast at The Sweet Setup.)

There were actually a number of things I didn’t like about Instacast when I first started using it, but over time I got used to it, and I think it worked pretty well for me, with a few little annoyances that continued to bother me.

Overcast made it very easy to set up an account, save the credentials for it to 1Password, and then import my subscriptions from Instacast, so that was quite nice. Once I had it set up, though, it marked all old podcast episodes as “played,” so it looks like I’m going to have to go in and manually download the stuff I hadn’t yet listened to in Instacast. I’m figuring out how to do that now.

I also recently signed up for Huffduffer, so I could easily download and listen to arbitrary episodes from podcasts I don’t regularly listen to. I’m thinking that might be easier to manage in Overcast than Instacast.

I think I’m going to try to start using Overcast tomorrow, during my morning commute. If it works well, I’ll delete Instacast and be done with it. If not, them maybe I’ll switch back to Instacast for a while until I can find something I like.

reading digital comics

This morning, I decided that I’d like to read the Dresden Files comic series that I bought as part of a Humble Bundle last year. I’m using Comic Zeal on my iPad to read DRM-free digital comics. I’ve been using it for a while, and it works pretty well.

Getting comics onto the iPad is, theoretically, easier than it used to be. In the old days, there weren’t too many apps that had good support for loading files into them from external sources. GoodReader was the first iOS app that I can think of that had good support for loading in files from multiple sources. But now, there’s a lot better support for this kind of thing, due mostly to the support for document providers added in iOS 8. So Comics Zeal now supports loading in files from iCloud, DropBox, Google Drive, and OneDrive (and possibly more, but those are the ones I’m using).

Humble also now has a web interface where you can access and download all past purchases. And Safari now lets you download and open files in specific apps, and Comic Zeal supports this. So my first thought was to go to the Humble site, sign in to my account, and download the comics. The series I want to read is a five-issue series and all five issues are separate files. So I went ahead and tried downloading the first issue from the web. It worked well enough, but it took a long time to download, and the default file name under Humble’s library is a bit weird, so I thought maybe I should try a different method.

So I booted up my desktop PC, where I know I already had the comics downloaded, and copied them up to my Google Drive. After waiting for them to sync up, I then tried to pull them into Comic Zeal. No dice. I could see them, but clicking on them did nothing. After struggling with that for a while I gave up and decided to sync them across the old-fashioned way, with iTunes File Sharing. That worked.

So, after all that, I just sat down and opened issue #1. The cover looks good. Then, I swipe to get to page 1. And… Comic Zeal crashes. Now, this is probably not Comic Zeal’s fault, entirely. All sorts of things could be wrong here; the CBZ file could have gotten corrupted at one of several stages. But it’s frustrating, either way.

So I downloaded the file again from Humble, and checked the MD5 checksums on both copies, and they’re both identical. And Humble lets you see the MD5 on their web site, and that’s the same too, so the file isn’t getting screwed up on download. So I gave up on the CBZ file and downloaded the PDF. Then I copied that up to Google Drive and tried to download it into Comic Zeal. That worked, so I guess the original issue with Google Drive is that it doesn’t want to let you download CBZ files, but PDFs are ok. (Which doesn’t make any sense, but ok.)

And I opened the PDF in Comic Zeal, and I can (at least) get to page one now, so here’s hoping I can get through the rest of the issue. Then, we’ll find out if the CBZ files for issues 2 through 5 are good, or if I’m going to have to replace them with PDFs too.

Oh, and the series I’m trying to read is War Cry, which should be pretty good. I haven’t read any Dresden comics before, but they’re co-written by Jim Butcher, and they’ve gotten generally positive reviews, so I’m hopeful.

But if I’d had the trade paperback instead of digital files, I’d probably be done reading the whole thing by now!

a little more griping about Windows 10

My VS 2013 update did finish installing, eventually, and now VS seems to be working fine. No clue what went wrong there. (Or maybe that’s just how long this update takes to install? No, that can’t be right…)

And I just bought Start10 from Stardock ($4 to upgrade from Start8) and installed it. The Windows 10 start menu isn’t horrible, but Start10 is better. The install was quick and easy.

Meanwhile, I decided to try playing solitaire. Well, that was a bad idea. When I started up “Microsoft Solitaire Collection” it gave me an error code while trying to sign in, and an URL to the FAQ. The URL wasn’t clickable and couldn’t be copied to the clipboard, so I had to type it in manually. Then, the URL turned out to be a redirect to a Facebook page, which is kind of weird, but ok, I guess. The FAQ says that the error code I got likely indicates that XBox Live is down. Checking on that, I see that it is, and least partially.

So here’s my full list of WTFs involved in trying to play Solitaire on Windows 10:

  1. Tying solitaire to XBox Live.
  2. Showing a numeric error code instead of a useful description for the error.
  3. Showing a link to an FAQ page that isn’t clickable and can’t be copied to the clipboard.
  4. Having your FAQ hosted at Facebook, when you’re Microsoft, and certainly have the ability to host your own web pages.
  5. XBox Live being down for no good reason.

Well, it’s possible to play solitaire, even without XBox Live. but I didn’t really want to play solitaire anyway, I just wanted to see what it looked like. So, mission accomplished, I guess, and I got some entertainment value out of the error message, so there’s that.

Visual Studio 2013 update 5

After upgrading my laptop to Windows 10, I thought about maybe taking a shot at installing Visual Studio 2015. I may do that eventually, but I don’t have any reason to do it right away. But last night, I decided to at least apply the latest update to VS 2013, which is update 5. I’ve had some bad luck with Visual Studio updates in the past (going back to VS 2005 and 2008), but recent updates have been pretty smooth. Well, I don’t know what went wrong with this one, but I started installing it last night, and it’s still going this morning. It seemed to hang at about the halfway point. Rather than cancel it, I decided to just let it keep running overnight.

When I woke up this morning, it had made a lot of progress. Right now, it’s at the step that says “Configuring your system. This might take a while.” So it’s pretty close to the end, I think. I guess I’ll let it keep going while I’m at work, then see if it’s done when I get home. So this could well be a full 24-hour update install. I understand that updating a complex product like Visual Studio isn’t easy, but really, there has to be a better way to do it.

Windows 10 upgrade – ThinkPad

I upgraded my ThinkPad to Windows 10 yesterday. It was a pretty uneventful upgrade. All of my software seems to work, including some stuff that I thought might be dicey, like Norton, VirtualBox, and OpenVPN. (Well, technically, I installed an upgrade to VirtualBox right after the Windows 10 upgrade, so I’m sure that fixed up the network stuff and whatnot.)

The new start menu is OK, I guess, but I’m not super excited about it. I was using Start8 with Windows 8, and I’ll probably install Start10 at some point.

I haven’t had a reason to play around at the command-line much yet, but I’m happy to see that they’ve made some (much overdue) improvements to it.

The ThinkPad upgrade was smooth enough that I now feel like it would be relatively safe to try the upgrade on my main desktop PC. I may do that next weekend, if I’ve got nothing else to do.

Windows 10

I haven’t upgraded either of my Windows 8.1 machines to Windows 10 yet. Neither machine has popped up a notification saying that it’s ready yet. Per Microsoft’s FAQ, “Your notification to upgrade could come as soon as a few days or weeks.” I know I can just download an ISO, and I might do that if I get too bored this weekend. But I’m not in a hurry. I’m probably going to use Start10 rather than the fancy new start menu anyway, so Windows 10 will look much like Windows 8 (with Start8) and Windows 7 for me.

I’m thinking about watching a few Scott Hanselman videos today to learn a bit more about Windows 10. And I should probably run backups on both machines too.

The Amiga’s 30th Anniversary

The Amiga 30th Anniversary Event at the Computer History
Museum in Mountain View this weekend looks like it should be really fun. Too bad I’m in NJ and not CA.

I get nostalgic about the Amiga once in a while. I keep thinking I should try the emulator from Amiga Forever, but I never get around to it. (There’s enough current technology that I don’t have time for; not much point in messing around with a 30-year-old dead OS. Heck, I’ve done almost nothing with the Windows 10 preview that’s installed on my laptop, and working with that would actually be useful.)

The Amiga 500 was my third computer. (The first was a TRS-80, and the second was a Commodore 64.) I bought it when I was in college. It was the first computer I owned that had a real OS, and multi-tasking, and all that good stuff. I could actually use it for some of my programming assignments! (Prior to that, they were all done on the school mainframe, or on shared Unix machines.) I remember that picking up a copy of the Lattice C compiler was a big deal for me. It wasn’t hugely expensive, but it was a significant purchase for a college student.

I wonder if I have printouts of any of my old programs around here somewhere. If so, it’s probably best to leave them buried. I’m sure the memories are better than the actual code!

Trying out Blogo

So now I’m trying out Blogo, another Mac blogging tool. It’s kind of nice, but there doesn’t seem to be any option to view/edit a post in HTML; there’s only the rich-text WYSIWYG editor.

So I think maybe this would be a good tool for someone who didn’t want to get too fiddly and just wanted to stick to WYSIWYG editing. But I know I’m going to want to at least look at the HTML once in a while.

It’s kind of a shame that it doesn’t have HTML editing, since, otherwise, it’s got a really nice user interface. But, I think MarsEdit is more my speed, if I’m going to use a desktop editor at all.