MP3 player madness
September 15th, 2005 @ 9:02 by NormMonkey
From the too-many-DAPs department:
Well, yesterday I talked about a migration towards more photos. So be it! Today’s post looks at the insanity that is my MP3 player collection. I’m a typical engineer/geek type guy: I love the gadgets. I have three players I actually use, and three dust collectors. Not surprisingly every single one of them has something blue about it.
ARCHOS
The big one is an Archos Jukebox Recorder 20. It’s old. I don’t think you can even buy these anymore ‘cept on eBay. It’s got a laptop HDD and holds about 20GB. I got it just before they came out with the cooler version that had an FM tuner in it (you can’t buy that one anymore either — DAP models spend so little time on the shelf you wonder if the truck with the latest models is on the road even as you browse). I built a holder out of sheet metal and covered in duct tape (what project doesn’t have duct tape? to protect against sharp edges) which I mounted to the dashboard of my car.
Things I like about it / use it for:
* Runs RockBox, the world’s greatest DAP software
* Big enough to hold my entire music collection
* Replaceable batteries
* Lasts a long time on battery power (for a HDD based player … did I mention RockBox?)
* Shuffles *very* quickly, remembers random seed and playlist position (go RockBox!)
* Easily adjusted sound settings (I have five customized settings for my desk speakers, crappy budphones, good headphones, car, and home stereo), one of a million rockin’ RockBox features
* Use it in my car, especially on long trips
* Use it at my office desk
* Use it with the stereo at home
* Did I mention that it runs RockBox?
IRIVER
The iRed one with the iBlue iScreen is an iRiver iFP-899. iIt comes with free extra i’s! This is my first flash-based player. It has 256MB. My boss bought it and then decided he wanted something else, so he offered it to people in the office. I drooled a little (new gadget reflex response), borrowed it to try it out and then I broke it while trying to update the firmware. I bought it off him and sent the unit in for replacement. They sent me back the full kit, so I have spare holders and cables and stuff. My collection of mini-USB cables grows.
The thing I actually like about it most is that because it only holds four hours of music I had to write a script to load it with a selection of random songs. I like writing scripts. They don’t let me out of my box into the world of development very much at work.
Things I like about it / use it for:
* Blue EL screen (heh)
* Plays Ogg-Vorbis files
* FM tuner
* Replaceable AA battery
* Use it as my office desk radio (I keep four NiMH batteries and a charger at the office for it)
Things I don’t like:
* 256MB? That’s only 4 hours!
* Crappy non-UMS interface — there’s a firmware update out there now that will allow it to be a Mass Storage device, but I won’t touch it with a ten foot firmware pole. This is another reason I needed to write a script for loading it: the linux interface to it isn’t perfect.
SAMSUNG
The tiny one is my latest toy. It’s 512MB and it’s so tiny I wear it practically everywhere, which means I look like a total nerd. On the other hand, a cute girl at the grocery store asked about it, so that’s a good thing.
Things I like about it / use it for:
* Tiny! Not quite MobiBLU-sized, but still very small
* Blue LED (heh)
* FM tuner
* Replaceable AAA battery
* Great battery life
* Use it when walking, biking, whatever
* Draws comments from cute cashiers
Things I don’t like:
Unless it’s in shuffle mode, it plays all songs alphabetically[1]. When it *is* in shuffle mode, it doesn’t remember the randomness seed (none of the DAP firmwares do this, except RockBox of course d:) so when you turn it off and then on again it can’t remember which songs it’s already played for you. It remembers the song you were listening to, but the next random song won’t be the next shuffle song you were going to get if you hadn’t turned it off.
Crap, that makes no sense.
I’ll try again, this time with examples and hand illustrations: imagine you have ten songs on your player. You’ve listened to 4 of them in shuffle mode; you’re in the middle of the 5th; five are left to play after it. If you don’t turn it off, you will finish the one you’re on, hear the final five, and as the last song finishes you will have heard each of your songs exactly once.
If you *do* turn it off, however, when you next start it back up here’s what happens: you will finish the song you were on, but instead of hearing the final five it will re-shuffle and play a random selection from the original ten songs. You’ll end up hearing some songs from the first five before you ever get around to hearing all the songs from the last five.
OK, so maybe there were no hand illustrations, but there were a lot of words. If you’re not going to have any pictures, you should at least have a thousand words in their place, right?
Here’s the thing about me and music: I really, really like listening to music in random order. Right about now all zero of the people who read this blog who know me are saying, “Yeah, that’s why we get a Young MC, followed by Joe Cocker, then Star Wars Imperial March, and finally O Canada.”
They may have a point, but here’s the thing: most of my music is sappy and/or 80’s and/or Barenaked Ladies. With those three categories I describe at least 80% of my collection. So it’s mostly all in the same theme. With a few exceptions, it does flow pretty well on random mode. It’s a lot like listening to Majic 100, without the talking and commercials (and with a bonus X-Files extended intro, or O Canada (remember when radio stations used to play O Canada at the start of every broadcast?)).
(Another thing to note is that each and every song that goes into my collection is individually evaluated for inclusion. I don’t just rip every CD I own. It’s a lot more work, but I end up with a collection I really love)
The more important thing about shuffle is that the alternatives to shuffle are no good. The choices are:
a) listen to them alphabetically. Young MC will be followed by Z. Z. Top. As good (or bad) as shuffle, but with the same order every time you listen to it. Also, you’ll end up hearing all of the songs by one artist before going onto the next.[2] With my monster collection of BNL songs, you’d never hear anything else.
b) make playlists. This is no good because it takes effort to make playlists. I’m lazy; I just want music. Besides, there’s two things wrong with playlists:
1) unless you shuffle your playlists, you’ll always hear songs in the same order, every time through. If you *do* shuffle them, what’s the point of the playlists as an alternative to shuffle?
2) if you build playlists, odds are you’ll get attached to playing a select bunch of them. This means there are some songs you’ll rarely hear. Also, unless you’re really smart about building your lists, you’ll probably end up with too many songs you really love and not enough of the ones you only somewhat love[3].
Boy, this talking about shuffle has practically turned into an essay. Hrm. The “rant about advertising” essay. The “shuffle” essay. I may have to start an essay section!
[1] I’ve solved this problem by modifying my script that loads random songs onto the player. Now, as it randomly chooses songs to load, it prefixes the filename of each song it loads onto the player with an index number. Then I just set the player to non-shuffle mode and I get a random selection of songs whose order will be retained through power cycles. It’s basically a single-use, shuffled, filename-enforced playlist. Just what the doctor ordered!
[2] This assumes that your files are listed with artist name first. If you’ve got them title-first, then it’s a little more like playing them shuffled, except the order through is the same every time, and there’s an additional snag: you’ll hear all versions of a particular song one after another. I have three versions of BNL’s “If I had $1000000″. I have two versions of “Killing Me Softly” by different artists.
[3] Music needs to hit you in waves, a repeating cycle of songs that grab your attention and songs that are more background to your mind. If you go outside on a bright sunny day, after a minute or so you’re accustomed to it; you don’t notice it’s bright anymore. If you keep going inside and outside, you’ll notice how bright it is each time you go outside.
