Another sweet item I saw at Hive 76 was an older Sony Vaio automated DVD changer that connects via 1394 (FireWire 400).  Supposedly, using DBPowerAmp and some basic scripts it is possible to batch rip up to 200 CD’s at a time into .flac image files with good metadata and .cue sheets.  Alex Wetmore wrote several years ago, and I’m paraphrasing his sentiment here, that he had better things he’d like to do with his day, like go on bicycle rides, because the fact is that he is not a CD changer.

So the general idea is you use one of these big Sony Vaio XL1B* changers, load it up with your music, walk away from it for about 24 hours and when you come back hopefully you’ve got a hard drive full of music in a format that is future proof.  If I can actually get this to work it would be a beautiful thing, and Brendan said it was good go.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Sony VAIO XL1B* Series 200 Disc Changer

The X Lossless Decoder (see: XLD) is one very good option for OS X.  I find generally his application works best decoding full album single file rips from EAC with .cue sheets.  Usually with EAC you’d have three files, the .log, the .cue and the full album .flac file, XLD will nicely split the .flac into .m4a (Apple Lossless) individual files with little effort.

For larger batches, and because I used Stephen Booth’s “Max” for a lot of ripping, I find batch processing of tags and mass conversion a bit easier.  Where XLD is good on an album by album basis I found that Max was very good for converting whole directories of individual artists with multiple albums.  I find that I’m often fixing tags first in Max and then again in iTunes and then the last step is usually confirming the album art for use with Cover Flow.  It takes probably 5-10 minutes per album and it’d be faster if I had uniformity in my ripping standards.

I think ultimately, as an archive, using EAC and backing up to an image (.flac, .cue & .log) makes the most sense (but takes the longest). For playback and ease of use, unless you’re really crazy about bit perfection, I think the sound quality with Apple Lossless (.m4a) and iTunes is perfectly acceptable, especially with a halfway decent external DAC.  I’ve been using the Mac Mini as our A/V front end and the Apple Remote application for the iPod Touch works very well (over wifi)  allowing me to control iTunes on the Mini.

X Lossless Decoder (XLD)

Stephen Booth's "Max"

http://hiphopiscoolagain.com/jiggafellz-step-by-step-guide-to-secure-cd-ripping-with-exact-audio-copy/

In EAC you’ll click the “Actions > Extract Image + Cue Sheet > Compressed” function using your basic FLAC settings.  Also be sure to enable Accurate Rip and do the automatic detection on all the drive settings.  Save a .log file.  There should be three files upon final output: the FLAC image, the CUE sheet, and the .LOG.  That’s it.  Simple is as simple does.  If you feel like embedding the CUE sheet in the FLAC you can use Foobar2000 to do such, know however that it’s non-standard as far as burning back out.  Apparently it’s always handy to have a separate CUE sheet.  Good to know.

UPDATE: So, two things I realized.  One: XLD (X Lossless Decoder) for OS X does pretty much the same thing as EAC.  However, if you’re still hell bent on using EAC and XP (couldn’t get EAC to go under Darwine) it’s important to know that it won’t easily embed cuesheets (.cue sheets) automatically as XLD does.  Embedded cuesheets do make life a little easier as your playback software can look at either the .cue or the .flac file and see all the tracks from the single disc rip.

To embed a .cue using Foobar2000 right click on the .flac image file select “Utils > Edit cuesheet” a window will pop up, check “Embed cuesheet” and then “Load .cue file” from your extraction directory, click “OK” to save.  Bingo bango.  XLD can do this automatically.  I really cannot say which is better per data integrity, YMMV.  Obviously if you’re running Windows EAC is a “reference” standard.

Album art is another grey area as either the %Album Name%.jpg or simply “cover.jpg” can be used inside the album folder.  Also, what about album dates?  Certainly, we can agree that the album’s original release date is the important date here in metadata, and per genre conventions I tend to trust MusicBrainz.  For a good read I really liked Daniel Stout’s article about simplifying down to 25 main “top level” genres and tagging comments/notes metadata with sub-genres.  The moral here is you should read up as much as you can.  Either EAC or XLD will do fine with rips to backup your audio CDs.  Cover art and sub-genre notes I’m going to have to keep exploring.

Exact Audio Copy

What about mounting the Time Capsule in Ubuntu?  Shouldn’t that be simple beans? You know, smbclient, smbfs, and GO right? It just works.  Hah. Apple doesn’t exactly have a support page for this sort of thing.  The crux of it for me was the domain=workgroup option, and figuring out that with Netatalk everything referenced .local addresses no the local IPs for some reason.  Whatever.  The FLAC flows now.  OGG, wavpac, you name it, this little Linux machine can serve it to iTunes whole.  No more dealing with that cursed iTunes XML library.  Unless of course you want to put music on your iPod.  I still don’t have that part completely figured out.  My feeling is you copy and add music as you want it on your iPod.

Apparently Hulu’s content providers (which I believe includes FOX & NBC) decided to pull their support for Boxee.  Now if you haven’t been following Boxee, they are one of the few companies actually making inroads into “set-top conversion” software, allowing people with computers to get the TV shows they want legally from their computers onto actual television screens.  It’s sad really, that this should be an issue.  Almost every show we watch online (legally, usually via the networks’ streaming sites) usually only has one commercial.  So if you’re watching an hour of television at NBC.com and you’re hoping for a variety of commercials you’ll be disappointed, you’ll simply get the same commercial over and over again.  How is it they can’t figure this out?  I distinctly remember watching a Verizon LG Chocolate phone commercial approximately 30 times (with the Feist song as soundtrack) as multiple episodes of a show simply had the same commercial.

Anyhow, at some point I’m going to try and put together a small low power HTPC that can record and playback at least a 720p stream.  Most of the Intel Atom motherboards simply have abysmal video performance and NVIDIA is supposed going to release something soon (and possibly a new Mac Mini). XMBC or Boxee, or even XP Media Center would work as far as a front end.  My requirements are pretty minimal, I’d like to have a Firefly MT-DAAPD server running for music (transcoding .flac to .wav for iTunes/Airtunes) and possibly a second instance of it running for the rest of the mp3/aac/m4a’s.  I’d probably record shows via the SiliconDust HDHomeRun, which would give two tuners for playback/recording.  Mostly the challenge has been finding something that is close to silent and fanless (especially as the Atom could be fanless) but it really hasn’t been optimized for HTPC applications yet.  OSX86 (search “Hackintosh”) with Boxee and Elgato EyeTV could potentially be an option as well.  MythTV could work too.  Who knows?  Right now I’m pretty happy with the Airtunes and Firefly setup.

Another option is the Squeezebox Classic which also can be found for about $200 plus $200 for the Touch running iPeng Squeezebox Remote Control app ($10), so for ~$410 you have perhaps a slightly more robust playback system that is open source and can play FLAC or any other file format for that matter and doesn’t require iTunes, but still requires a server/laptop running SlimServer.  Sonos sells a similar setup and they also have a free iTunes app.  The one cool thing about the Sonos is that no laptop is required, it seems it can pull directly from the TC as a NAS but that would be $350 + $200 iTouch.  

Maybe the cheapest, and I think I might try this route first since I already bought the damn Time Capsule which functions as a pretty good NAS / Backup server… For $25 Rogue Amoeba sells AirFoil which allows you to send your iTunes stream to either an Airport Express unit or any other computer on network (AirFoil Speakers is a free download) which means I could simply stream directly from one of our newer Mac laptops to the old thing in the closet which is plugged into the Edirol UA-5.  It’s a free download with 10 minute tests.  All the data would be on TC or a USB drive.  This might be the solution I was looking for.

Okay.  I tested it.  It works.  So that’s an option.  The final option is just the $50 Airport Express, no iPod Touch remote, and simply stream from the laptop to the base station SPDIF > DAC > Analog Out and control on the laptop as a remote.  The fan on the old laptop is really loud.  If can figure out a way to quiet it down.

Okay. Weirdly the stream from 89.9 WKCR doesn’t work in Winamp under Win2k on the old laptop.  So I’m back to the iTunes Foobar2000 plugin scenario and that seems to work fine, it’ll play any internet stream I give it.  Oh well.

Which leads me to the question, how is it that with a fresh installation of Windows XP SP3 Windows Media Player cannot instantly play .PLS playlist streams? Why do i have to upgrade to WMP 11? or 13? How is it, that 10 years ago Winamp could play streams but Microsoft chose not to add this ability natively. I’m sure there is a way to make it work in WMP 9 or 10 but how in the world did Microsoft not see this as being important? John C. Dvorak had a good article in PC Magazine (his Windows 7 “wishlist”) expressing amazment that something as simple as VLC Media Player can do everything WMP can and more without requiring an upgrade or a reboot or Vista. And he has a reasonable point when he mentioned code base improvements. When I installed Leopard on my Core Duo it actually ran faster than Tiger. That was one of the biggest reasons I was hesitant, but now that I know OS’s can actually improve in speed over time on the same system, really it must blow Microsoft’s collective mind. Also, as aside do you know what plays them just fine?  iTunes.  Do you suppose people running Window’s have installed iTunes on their machines due to WMP’s shortcomings? I’m just punting here.

Still talking about music, I watched the bio-pic Control about the band Joy Division.  It was good.  The movie’s sound quality and sound mix in general were fantastic.  It co-starred Alexandra Maria Lara who I had just seen in Coppola’s Youth Without Youth, she played the French-Belgian ‘zine writer that Ian Curtis had an affair and fell in love with while the band toured Europe.  She and Sam Riley (Ian Curtis) were pretty good as the hot young couple that complemented Curtis’ life outside of Manchester to his young wife Deborah (Samantha Morton) with their daughter.  I don’t know what the moral was, except that it was sad, he was young and that epilepsy treatment especially at that time was still hit or miss.  Now to find a decent used tuner.