Rusty's Blog

Back a few years ago, I started buying my music on CD. I happen to be old enough to remember my folks buying 8-tracks, I had a 45 player. Actually I had a 78 player, but those were not in record stores any more by the time I was born, aincient I may be, that old I am not. The 78 player was one of my grandparents opening space in their home and I was currious enough about the stuff that I got to take it home with me.

I don’t know if there is a 45 record anyplace in my collection of ‘stuff’. I’m kind of hoping not. Mostly because the conditions they would have to be in are not exactly good for the records. I do know I have some LPs (33 1/3 rpm vinyl) that I’m hoping are not in truely horrid condition, though I’m not going to suggest that they have been treated the best either.

I think I bought my first CD in 1984. I was stationed in Germany, and had bought a ‘midi’ system. (Nothing to do with the Musical Instrument Digital Interface platform.) I bought a Techniques CD player at the same time, and started building a small collection of CDs. Along the way I’ve lost a few due to various incidents, and a few have just gone missing. It’s not like I haven’t had kids or something right?

In any case I’ve been amassing a bit of a collection. Nothing like some people build, and I don’t expect to be hosting a radio station really worth listening to any time in the future, but I wouldn’t want to have to try to dig through the collection to find a specific CD any time soon either.

Back in the late 90′s I picked up my first MP3 player. A 6 gig Archos hard disk based player. I had already converted a few of my CDs to a small MP3 collection as I wanted to listen to a randomized playback without having to pay a couple hundred bucks for a cd jukbox, and having to wait for disks to change, and mechanical parts to fail, etc. I was using BeOS, and the ripped collection easily fit on the Archos drive at the time.

I looked at the various file sharing applications over time. Napster included, and decided for my own reasons that I really wasn’t interested in having copies of music I wasn’t willing to buy the CD for. I know that it was not a decision everyone made, but that was mine. And I continued to buy CDs from time to time.

I bought a lot of used CDs over the years. For the better part of a decade I would visit music stores and look for a couple of CDs that had disappeared, or been broken. and replaced most of them. At one point I had ripped my collection to over 13 gigabytes of 384kbps MP3′s. I got to thinking about my listening environment, and decided that I really didn’t need my collection to be at that high a bit-rate. So I re-ripped the entire collection back down to 128k, and left it at that. Along the way I discovered that some of my CDs had been revised on the various cd databases that the rippers were using, and some which had not been there before happened to match newer albums that didn’t happen to be in the same genera. So a bit of manual updates being used from time to time.

Over the years I’ve used a variety of MP3 players. Anything from devices that look like a USB key drive that a pair of headphones plug into the side, on up to my Nokia N800 with 2 16 gig sdhc cards in it. I have had a cell phone that had a built in MP3 player (SK-3), a Samsung Nexus XM player that worked as an mp3 player as well, and more than enough software MP3 players. There are a couple of other players here and there, but for the most part I’ll be ‘done’ with the hardware players fairly soon now.

The only significant problem I have with MP3, has nothing to do with the players themselves. Though carrying around special purpose devices that only play mp3 files seems to me to be a bit of a waste of resources at the moment. Perhaps not as bad as devices that need a special headset adapter perhaps, but that’s a different matter.

Back to what my biggest problem is, it’s that the encoder’s are pattent encumbered. Well, players are as well, but I’m buying the player from a retailer or manufacturer who is paying the licence fees for that player out of the sales price. Under Linux, I’m not buying the encoders. So any MP3 encoder I end up using also happens to be in violation of the patent that is applicable. I don’t expect that I’m likely to be taken to court over it any time soon over the matter, but it is a thorn in the side. A ‘legal’ way for me to circumvent the issue would be to play the audio through a sound card, into one of my Haupauge PVR-250 cards and capture to MPEG, then strip the MP3 audio out of the MPEG file. That encoder I presume is paid for in the cost of the hardware itself. Personally I think that’s a lot of excess work that I’m not interested in doing, especially as there are other ways of accomplishing the same goal.

Remember that the Goal is to have the opportunity to listen to the music I own the CD’s for. I’m not trying to resell any of them. I’m not trying to hand out copies to all my friends, or my family. Just me, listening when and where I would like, preferably without hauling around 20 pounds of CDs.

Obviously I could install a CD Jukebox in my car, duplicate the collection of CDs I have by buying another copy of each one, and so on. You know, I don’t think that’s a reasonable solution. It doesn’t help me when I ride the bus to and from work. It doesn’t help when I’m at work, etc.

A few years back, someone else who wasn’t happy with the situation regarding the pattents related to MP3 developed a new encoder, called Ogg Vobis. (or Vorbis, not sure at the moment) There’s another solution for video called Ogg Theora. (again, I think that’s the title.) They both do a very good job of encoding and playing back music and video, however there hasn’t been a lot of hardware on the market that has support built in for it. One odity related to that is the N800. This device is built around a Linux kernel and platform. Ogg has been available for almost all varients of Linux, but Nokia decided that there was insufficient demand for Ogg to include it in the software included in the N800. Now there are some reasonable explanations for this, in that the device does have a limited amount of space, but since the device supports full motion video and more, there are people who are not particularily happy about the situation. Yes, some people have ported the necessary libraries, and it would be reasonably easy to get them to work, but for most people it’s not really worth the effort.

Last week I bought a new cell phone. I like a lot of what the iPhone has to offer, but really don’t like the idea of having to do almost all update processes through iTunes. (If for no other reason than I don’t want to fight with trying to get that to work under Linux.) However Google anounced the Android cell phone platform specification some time back, and about 2 weeks ago T-Moble started selling the HTC Dream G1 in broad distribution. It’s no more for ‘everyone’ than the iPhone is. And I don’t expect the G1 to be an iPhone killer. However it does provide significantly more service than my previous combination of cell phones, N800, and ‘disposable digital’ camera provided. Mostly because with 1 device I have taken care of all three of those resources, as well as my GPS, and a few other things that I am hoping it will work out for. It won’t be a remote head for my ham radio gear, but…

One of my co-worker’s is a musician. He just released a new CD, of which I bought a copy. I went to rip it so I could listen (again without having to cary the CD itself around) and the CD-ripping software on the computer I used didn’t support ripping to MP3. Flaac and Ogg though are both supported. Again since I’m not too concerned about compression artifacts, I chose the ogg format and once the tracks had been ripped I copied them over to my phone figuring that at worst it would work as a way of getting the tracks home.

I disconnected the phone from the computer, and pulled up the music player. Now if you guessed that with all that I wrote above I was disapointed to find that the song’s were not in the collection the player would handle, you need to re-look at the title of the posting again. Yes it did work. I wasn’t expecting it to, but the Android platform is built around a Linux kernel and they did include the ogg libraries.

So, it’s time to go back to the collection of CDs, and start ripping them again. This time to ogg. I may not be able to do all that much with the podcasts I listen to, however there are a couple that do distribute in ogg.