Vista is so wonderful...

[Stephan Rose]

....that it can't even handle my Music collection. I'll explain.

First off, I don't like using lossy compression. So, MP3 is out of the
picture.

Secondly, I don't like proprietary operating-system dependent file
formats for my data. So Windows Media format is out of the question.

Luckily there is an easy solution and it's called flac. Not restricted to
Windows and it's a lossless format. Perfect.

Now, can Windows Media Player handle flac? Of course not. There are some
3rd party plugins supposedly that are supposed to add the capability but
I've yet to find one that actually WORKS!

Now why am I even bothering with Windows Media Player? I have a sansa
E260 MP3 player (Got it for my birthday last month) that uses MTP as a
protocol and I'm looking for something useful to sync with it. More on
that later.

So luckily Ubuntu has a lovely utility to convert all my files, including
all my tags, to MP3 files. Works flawlessly. Two hours later, I have a
complete copy of my library in MP3 format. Hopefully Windows Media player
will be able to handle THAT!

Well...erm...no, it can't. I mean it can play back the files, but it
can't deal with my tags. My entire collection is in Japanese and so are
most of the tags. They just come out as garbage under windows media
player. My MP3 player supports the tags fine though so there is nothing
wrong with the tags.

So why am I bothering converting my files to MP3 so that I can load them
in WMP and sync to my device? Well quite frankly, at this moment, Windows
does have the better support for MTP. It's Microsoft's own protocol after
all and support under the current Beta version of Ubuntu is somewhat
flaky. I've submitted bug reports but that obviously does me little good
now. Though hopefully they'll be fixed by release time.

So on one hand, I have an OS that can handle MTP without a problem but
can't do shit with my music. And on the other hand I have I have an OS
that can handle my music without a problem, but has problems with the
device.

Lovely!

So on that note, if anyone has any bright ideas, I'm all ears. I
currently don't care if the solution is Linux or Windows...I just care
for a solution.

I've though of just putting the device into Mass Storage mode and
manually copying the mp3's onto the device...but too many file names
conflict with what FAT32 allows and no, I'm not manually renaming them
all. There too I was hoping WMP would just automatically convert the file
names to something FAT32 can handle (though I have no clue if it actually
does / doesn't as I have yet to get that far).

I suppose I may just need to look for a utility that'll auto-rename all
the files to something FAT32 compatible and manually move them to the
device via mass storage mode...that's currently kind of my last resort
though.

--
Stephan
2003 Yamaha R6

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[Tiberius]

you can actually hear the difference between a good MP3 and a non lossy
format?
Or you just want to have the data in the best quality for archival purposes?

if that is so, you are losing your time because that if you had better
speakers the sound would be better than you now have.

mp3 with a good sound system will be better than non compressed with a poor
or mediocre sound system...

 

[Stephan Rose]

you can actually hear the difference between a good MP3 and a non lossy
format?
Or you just want to have the data in the best quality for archival
purposes?

if that is so, you are losing your time because that if you had better
speakers the sound would be better than you now have.

mp3 with a good sound system will be better than non compressed with a
poor or mediocre sound system...

Given equal sound systems, MP3 *cannot* be better as it is a lossy
format. Something *is* missing. Of course if you play back a lossless
format with a bad enough sound system, a lossy format can sound better
with a better sound system. But at that point in time, sound system
quality is the deciding factor here, not encoding. Compare apples to
apples please and not to oranges.

That said, yes one of my reasons is for archival purposes. And the second
reason is why save in a lossy format when I have a lossless format? It
makes no sense. It's not that I'm short on hard drive space or anything.
Actually contemplating on building a 2 terabyte raid array soon.

Also it depends a little on the type of music. Someone encoding the
latest crap...err...rap, (sorry...typo, pretty much the same word
anyway), doesn't really need much of an encoding. It's not that there is
any quality in the so called music to begin with so not much is needed to
encode it.

But some of the stuff I listen to does have a dynamic range that goes
beyond what's needed to record someone screaming "**** that bitch" into a
microphone.

So yea, I like using lossless formats.

--
Stephan
2003 Yamaha R6

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[Tiberius]

What you say makes sense.. if disk space is no problem then the better
quality the better!

what lossless format do you use? and why did you select a perticular one?

Flac?

 

[Stephan Rose]

What you say makes sense.. if disk space is no problem then the better
quality the better!

what lossless format do you use? and why did you select a perticular
one?

Flac?

Yep Flac is it.

Reasons are pretty simple:

- It's lossless.

- It has reasonable compression. It compresses to about 7.5 megs per
minute of audio. Not breathtaking but it beats using uncompressed wave
files.

- It's not proprietary. I don't like storing things in proprietary file
formats that bind me to a single vendor.

--
Stephan
2003 Yamaha R6

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