Music on the machine

Thought I'd start with my favourite commercial-free radio station streaming at 192 kbps. If you've come to despise FM radio as I have, this is a great place to discover new music. Just having the playlist is useful, but by clicking on each song, you get listener generated information and ratings (often heated). Just click on the arrows at the top of the note to navigate the trail. The little pointer on the right let's you find the note again if you X it out to read under it and the pointer on either the top left or bottom left corner of the note enables you to drag and make it bigger.

You can just record a few hours worth of this great station and take it with you. This is fantastic open source software to capture some of the great audio content on the web such as this gold mine of health info. http://www.jonbarron.org/audio.html Since it's a waste of time to always sit at the computer to listen, it's easy to save it as an mp3 file and listen on the go. Sorry, got sidetracked - back to the trail.

One more plug. Yeah, I'm a Firefox evangelist. Trailfire is an example of a Firefox extension - one of hundreds you can choose from to enhance your browsing enjoyment and productivity. Here's the other ones I use. Adblock filterset g updater All-in-one Gestures All-in-one Sidebar Copy Plain Text del.icio.us Dictionary search Disable targets for Downloads Fasterfox Flashblock Answers Full Screen History Menu I.E. tab Inline google definitions MR Tech local install New Tab Button on tab bar Open New Window From Here Password Maker Quick Context Searchbar autosizer SmoothWheel Tab History Tab Mix Plus Unread Tabs Adblock Plus Googlebar Lite Clipmarks Viamatic foXpose Wizz RSS News Reader

OK, now to the substance of this trail. Just click the forward arrow if you're not particularly interested in the technicalities of audio. This just serves to illustrate how important it is to get the bits right - and Exact Audio Copy is the best at doing that. (free, I might add)

I guess I'd better include a glossary. The sheer volume of acronyms is what makes this undertaking a little frustrating.

Once you've got the music into the computer, you need to put it into mp3 format (compress the bits into a smaller file size) so an mp3 player can read it. There are easier ones, but I use LAME because it's open source and great quality. Mp3 is called a "lossy" compression format because you can't reconvert back to CD quality.

Here's a pretty good site with links to ripping and encoding with lame.

There is also "lossless" compression - cd quality that takes up a lot less hard drive space than the regular "wav" file. Don't ask me how it's possible to compress bits and bytes and still be able to convert back to the original size, but FLAC does it. More and more mp3 players support this which is why you can now put !00's of CD's worth of audiophile quality music in your back pocket. My Squeezebox also plays FLAC, so I can send music from the computer to the stereo in the living room.

Because of Apple's digital rights management scam and monopoly mentality, I've avoided I-tunes and i-pods like the plague even though they are acknowledged by all as having the best interface. But now you can dump Apples proprietary firmware and use this open-source Rockbox firmware to play your Flac files in crystal clear CD sound. Now that they're making 8 gig. flash players (no moving parts), I think the Nano will be my next mp3 player buy.

OK, here's the Squeezebox. This is the device that the audio world is raving about and with good reason. Not only does it play your computer music, but even if your computer's not on, it streams thousands of radio stations or will just play one of many different themes all day like waves on a beach or wind etc. I still haven't discovered all its talents.

This is the software that makes for dead simple playlist generation that can instantly stream to the Squeezebox.

Good intro to the Squeezebox.

The best place in the world to learn the latest digital music information.