Zach's So-Called Life

Have You Ripped Your Music Recently?

2008-11-02T22:10:34Z

This is part one of a (hopefully) multi-part series on organizing a typical geek's music collection. This part provides some background and discusses ripping a CD collection using modern tools.

A few months ago I picked up a NAS (A Thecus N5200 Pro) and some drives for it. I now have a total of 2.8TB of fast, reliable storage.

Since then I have been collecting up my data and trying to organize it all into one place so I don't have to remember which of the 5 bare hard drives has what I'm looking for on it.

Part of this process is getting my music in order. Over the years I've built different collections of music from a variety of sources. I now have 3 or 4 collections of music with a ton of overlap of varying qualities. In all I have some 50gb of music laying around with maybe 20gb of that being unique.

The first part of wrangling some order out of this mess is to start with a collection of high quality (in terms of audio quality) files ripped from CD. Like most geeks I've gone through the pain of ripping these in the past, but I've been inconsistent in terms of format and quality. By reripping all of my CD's I not only take advantage of the higher quality of newer music formats (like AAC) but I can use encoders that are better than what I originally used.

I'm going to assume that you're using iTunes for this. I use iTunes because I'm an Apple whore. ;) There are other programs that do (almost) everything iTunes does, but I don't use them.

Format and Bitrate

The first thing you have to decide on is which format you're going to rip in and what your bitrate will be. If you're using iTunes, you basically get to choose from MP3, AAC and Apple Lossless. If you want the best possible quality and don't mind using up 300mb per 45 minutes of music, choose Apple Lossless and move on to the next section.

Finding that 300mb per album number hard to swallow? So was I. Let's look at the choice most people will make: AAC or MP3?

Everyone knows what MP3s are. They're the standard format in the industry. Everything can play them, including the iPod. The abilities and limitations of the format are well known.

A lot of people are confused about AAC files, and think they're tied to Apple somehow. Additionally, they're often unclear about why you would want to use AAC and why iTunes defaults to this format.

AAC stands for Advanced Audio Coding and it was designed to be the successor to MP3. It's part of the MPEG2 and MPEG4 standards and is actually used by heavily by both Apple and Sony (I just lost the last two anti-apple fan boys still reading this. ;)

The bottom line is that for the same audio quality AAC files will be smaller than MP3 files. On top of that AAC files have more features and ultimately it's the format everyone will move to. I highly recommend using AAC for all your new music rips, even if it means you have to transcode some of your collection to MP3 for certain devices (covered in a possible future article.)

This leaves the question of bitrate. For bitrate you have two basic choices, and it comes down to how much of an audiophile you think you are.

In both cases we'll be setting custom settings, so open up iTunes Preferences —> General —> Import Settings. Choose your Encoder (AAC or MP3) and then select the "Custom..." option from Setting.

First, the audiophile settings. For this we want to ensure that we use the highest possible bitrate at all times and the best sampling rate. First, ensure that "Use Variable Bit Rate Encoding (VBR)" is unchecked. Set "Sample Rate" to "48.000 kHz" and "Stereo Bit Rate" to the highest setting, which is currently 320 kbps.

This will still result in larger files than most people want, for very little (if any) perceptible gain in quality. Most people will want to use VBR to reduce the size of their file.

The idea behind VBR is that you don't always need the full bitrate for every part of the music. The higher bitrates allow you to capture more of the high pitched part of the music. This is especially important for hearing the flutes and piccolos in a symphonic piece or the cymbals and high hats in jazz. However, when these instruments aren't playing that higher bitrate increases size for no quality gain. You can often produce the exact same waveform with a lower bitrate.

When you check the VBR box, you'll notice that you can't select as many bitrates as you could before. This is because instead of specifying an absolute bitrate, you specify a target average. When you specify that you want 192k VBR files, you're saying that you want it range from approximately 128k - 256k.

For most people 192k AAC is fine. If you're using MP3 you want to step up to 256k to make up for MP3's deficiencies. I have a lot of symphonic music in my collection so I choose to use 256k AAC VBR.

I also leave Sample Rate at Auto, because CD's have a 44.1k sample rate so the higher rate doesn't gain much except a little bit of insurance against misreads.

While you're here, be sure that "Use Error Correction" is checked. It may be faster to import without, but you'll pay for it with glitches in your music.

Ripping Workflow

Now that we have our format and quality settings worked out we move on to workflow. Unfortunately the CDDB database suffers from a quality problem. It saves a lot of time, but often you have to correct the genre and sometimes the artist. The other problem is that sometimes tracks are meant to be listened to back-to-back, which doesn't work well if you ever use the random/shuffle feature.

This means that we need to set iTunes to "Show CD" on insert, rather than automatically importing. Most of the time we need only set the Genre, but this is still a very important step, even if you don't think you'll use it (trust me, you will.)

Another thing you might have to do is join tracks. For example, Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon has "Brain Damage" and "Eclipse," which flow into each other and are almost always played back-to-back. By joining them you'll end up with a single file containing both songs, and no gap.

To join tracks select two adjacent tracks and go to Advanced —> Join CD Tracks.

How To Deal With The Physical Media

My CD's had been scattered around all over the place. Some were in cases, some were in CD folders, and some were stacked on spindles. Additionally, a lot of them weren't very clean. The first thing I did was to collect them all into one place. I had a 100 disc spool I could easily empty, so that became my "Done" spool.

Tip: When stacking CD's on a spool, alternate which side is up so you always have label against label, and data against data. This will help prevent scratching.

The first task was to sort through all the CD's. Any CDR's got put straight onto the Done spool. Since most of my burned CD's were burned from MP3s I don't want to accidentally put low-quality music into what is supposed to be a high-quality archive. A couple 3" CD's provide an easy to find gap in the spool should I need them later.

After that I had a stack of CD's ready to import. I looked at each disc first, and if it was dirty and/or scratched I took some windex and a clean microfiber cloth to it. Make sure you use a microfiber cloth because paper products are too rough.

For really bad cases I had to hold the disc under the hot water tap (as hot as you can stand, but not as hot as it will go.) Rinse for a few seconds, scrub using your microfiber cloth with circular motions, repeat until clean.

For discs that are scratched and can't be fixed through cleaning you can use a glass or plastic polish to clean them. See instructables or ehow for instructions.

Notes For Symphonic Music

If you are ripping symphony pieces you have a little extra work for each CD. Most of these discs are inconsistently tagged in CDDB. I find that on most discs I have to set the genre (I like tagging mine with the period it was written) and the Artist (Conductor / Symphony if known, Composer otherwise) and I usually have to remove the redundant portion from the titles of joined tracks.

I like to join the different movements of each piece into one track. This allows me to use shuffle for variety without compromising the listening experience. However, iTunes simply concatenates the names of each track, so I often have to fix the names. I find it's easiest to do this before importing, by removing the redundant portion of the name from all but the first joined track.

I've created screenshots showing a CD before and after fixing the tags and joining movements. This part is purely a matter of personal taste, but the better you do at consistently tagging your music now the easier it will be later when you're trying to figure out what to listen to.

Safari XHTML: Enabled

2008-10-12T13:42:34Z

If you use Safari to read my blog you may notice that the page renders more quickly. This is because I've turned on the proper Content-Type. Now Safari, OmniWeb and Firefox browsers get a speed boost.

If you have any rendering errors you probably need to upgrade Safari.

Introducing my Burmerke

2008-09-19T13:08:42Z

People don't often talk about their ancestry, and it occurs to me that not many people know that I'm 1/4 Norwegian. My Grandmother's father immigrated to the US from Norway, and I have other Norwegian blood from assorted parts of my family tree. (Incidentally, the rest of me is mostly European mutt, with ancestors from England, Germany, and Spain making up most of my background.)

In reading up on some Norwegian history, I ran across the concept of the burmerke. It was largely used in pre-literate Norway as a way to identify a man and his family. His children would often take his mark, making minor changes to distinguish it from their father's. This custom died out as literacy spread across Norway.

People who do genealogical research often run across burmerke used by their family. I have not been so fortunate, but both as a way to remember my heritage and as a way to build my personal brand (whatever that is) I have designed my own burmerke. I am using it as the site's favicon, which is probably the best way to see what I came up with. I've also put it on my MiniCards, which you'll probably have to track me down in person to see.

I based the design on the Swedish-Norwegian Futhork (rune) that corresponds to the letter "U" in the roman alphabet. Combining two gives me a "Double U" to match my surname. I've taken some artistic license in flipping and combining them, but I'm happy with what I've come up with.

Politics

2008-09-02T13:55:14Z

The more I watch this election, the more I can't help but think that McCain represents the part of America that's going through a mid-life crisis.

New Job

2008-07-28T14:12:47Z

Today is my first day at a new job. I'm pretty excited about this one. I'll be the lead admin at an online storage/collaboration company. They're still in startup mode but they just received a new round of funding and are currently in a growth phase. They're currently growing and have a few months before they hit capacity, so they want to take the time now to setup systems that will enable them to grow rapidly and in a manageable way.

They're in Palo Alto, which currently means a commute every day, but I think I'm gonna move over to the peninsula so that won't be an issue.

Debian/Ubuntu Packages for Epic5 and Amenesiac

2008-05-19T19:42:35Z

If you can read this, welcome to my new server.

I've been setting a new Ubuntu 8.04 LTS based server, and I'm retiring the old Slackware server I've been using for the last year or so. Slackware is ok, but I just don't have the time to do upgrades. The occasonal "apt-get upgrade" when I need to deal with a security problem (like this week's openssl fiasco, thanks debian) is much prefered to either compiling from source or having to track down and fetch an updated package.

One of the things that I had to do myself was build epic5 packages. There are packages for epic4, but since I work on amnesiac I need to be able to use epic5. Since other people irc from this machine I like to provide a copy of the script in /usr/share/epic5/script. Given all that, it made sense to build a package for amnesiac as well.

I've automated the whole process, so updates to each should be easy. If you're the kind of person who likes to IRC, and you like to use a debian based distribution, and you like things that update automatically, you can benefit from my work. Just add the following lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

  # epic5 and amnesiac packages
  deb http://darkstar.frop.org/debian/ irc epic5 amnesiac tsx
  deb-src http://darkstar.frop.org/debian/ irc epic5 amnesiac tsx

You will also need to add my gpg key to your keyring. You can do so with this command:

  curl http://darkstar.frop.org/debian/zwhite.gpg | sudo apt-key add -

Finish everything up by running "sudo apt-get update" and you should be all set. The two new packages available are "epic5" and "amnesiac".

An Ode To On Call

2008-04-04T10:36:40Z

once upon a midnight 'berry
as I awoke from dreams so airy
the screen announced like a sorrowful brute
quoth the kernel, unable to mount root

bleary eyed I thumbed the wheel
that would hold back my sire's steel
as I pondered profanity stronger than, "Shoot"
quoth the kernel, unable to mount root

my fingers dance, ciphers entered
I'm in like flynn and down like bender
meanwhile this server just won't boot
quoth the kernel, unable to mount root

I have a look see, and what do I find?
a botched migration, well yes I do mind 
you have to check your hardware first you ignorant kook
quoth the kernel, unable to mount root

Put it all back, is all I reply,
before slamming my leash down onto my thigh
no problem was fixed, but now it's all moot
quoth the kernel, unable to mount root

Peppermint Cocoa

2008-04-03T07:02:59Z

A warm hot chocolate can't be beat. I felt like one tonight so here's the aproximate recipe I threw together. Whips together in under 5 minutes and you only dirty up one cup and one spoon.

Ingrediants:

Semi-Sweet Chocolate Chips
Peppermint Extract
Honey
Milk

Fill mug aproximately 1/4 full of chocolate chips. Add a few drops of Peppermint and 1-2tsp of Honey, to taste.

Microwave on HIGH for 10 seconds and stir. Repeat once or twice and then fill mug with milk to halfway point. Microwave 30 seconds, stir, and then microwave an additional 30 seconds.

Finish filling mug with milk until full. Microwave 60-90 seconds on MEDIUM until hot.

Review: Outback Steakhouse (Don't go there if you value customer service)

2008-03-11T15:06:26Z

Blah blah blah, it's a large chain, blah blah blah, fill in consistant but never excellent food type review here, involving getting a steak that's actually medium rare (instead of medium) when I ordered rare, which is pretty good for a californian restaurant.

With that out of the way, we get to the meat of this review, and the part I wish to "get out there." If my experience causes 2 or 3 others to not eat there I'll feel vindicated.

So I was eating there with friends, and I decided to order a Dr Pepper. The waitress told me they didn't have it. My response was, "That's too bad."

To my surprise, the waitress continued. "It's worse, they got rid of Dr Pepper last week for Coke Zero. Now we have Coke, Diet Coke and Coke Zero."

That got my blood set to a slow boil, so I didn't really realize how upset I was at first. But it ate at me. That was wrong. They replaced a soda that was tasty (if not particularly healthy) with one that contains a known carcinogen. One designed to replace an already successful product (didn't Coke learn anything after that New Coke fiasco?)

I went to outback.com and I sent in the following comment:

   You got rid of Dr Pepper at this restaurant in order to serve coke zero.
   You already have diet coke. Why do you need coke zero? There's no
   difference between the two. They taste the same, they both have
   aspertame, they both suck. That was the last time I go to an outback for
   a while. Hopefully the next time I go to an outback you will have
   regained your senses and I can actually eat there again.

I sent that Friday evening, just before midnight. This morning (Tuesday) I got a response from Patrick Kruk. Mr. Kruk's email signature identifies him as a Joint Venture Partner.

   Zach:
   Thank you for your email. We will be reviewing our fountain selection
   after the current promotion we have partnered with Coke Zero that will
   end in April.
   Patrick Kruk

Oh dear. Mr. Kruk seems to have forgotten basically every customer service rule that has ever been written. He addresses my main complaint without doing a thing to address my anger, or even acknowledge it. In response, I sent back the following, which pretty much says everything I want to say on the matter.

   Patrick,

   Thank you for your concern over an upset customer. I'm glad you showed 
   me such concern when I sent out an obviously upset email.

   Additionally, thank you for your condolences over my anger. It surely 
   soothes a wounded soul to see such compassion and understanding.

   Finally, thank you for taking the proper time to respond to me. There's 
   nothing worse than someone who takes 15 seconds to dash off an irrelevant 
   and irreverent response to a customer complaint.

   I'm glad I can feel good about eating at an Outback again, instead of 
   feeling like I have the choice between being "that guy" in the social 
   group and eating at an establishment that has disrespected me as a 
   customer and therefore doesn't deserve my business.

   In short, thank you for going above and beyond the call of duty in 
   providing excellent customer service and customer relations.

   -Zach

   PS, if you're as bad at judging the tone of this email as you were on my 
   last email, everything but this PS statement is intended as sarcasm, and 
   I have no intention of stepping foot into any Outback ever again.

Beards

2008-01-22T19:41:48Z

Growing a beard is a gradual change. A good beard takes time to grow, months for some men, years for others. Sure, you can have the basic outline there in only a few days, but it takes times for the slow peachfuzz to grow out and help fill it in. Your family, your friends, your coworkers, the people at the coffee shop, they all have a chance to get used to it. Sometimes they don't even notice, one week you don't have a beard, the next week you do.

Shaving a beard, on the other hand, is a drastic and immediate change. You have a beard. Five minutes later you don't. The very first person you run into who knows you, no matter how casual the acquantance, will notice something different about you.

I started growing my current beard about this time of year in 2004. I couldn't tell you exactly when, such is the way with beards.

Sometimes a drastic change is needed.