[Blog]

Permanent link to: <br /><br /><a href="http://www.chrisboylan.com/blog/archives/000300.php">Chris Boylan, consumer.</a>

<p>After laying back for much of the Thanksgiving weekend, I joined the fray, making an electronics purchase today in celebration of my upcoming birthday. My parents have generously funded the purchase as a present.</p>

<p>The selection? An Iriver HP-140 Digital Audio Player. It is becoming harder and harder to find nowadays as it is no longer in production, but I snagged one of the last 3 from Amazon.com. Now, it's only offered through one of their sub-sites for $50 more than I would have paid, had I not gotten the $30 Amazon Visa discount as well. So, I got what I wanted for $80 less than what I would have had to have paid for it tonight. Good times.</p>

<p>What is the Iriver HP-140? Well you can check the <a href="http://www.iriveramerica.com/products/H140.aspx">Official Site</a>. basically, its a 40 GB external USB2.0 hard drive that plays MP3s, WMAs, and most importantly OGGs. OGG files are like MP3s, but of much higher quality at lower bitrates - with the added bonus of being open source. That means anyone can play them without paying any licensing fees. They're more popular than you might think, especially amongst fellow geeks.</p>

<p>I'll get more excited when it comes.</p>

<p>Ooh, and I put up some Christmas lights outside. Some. Five out of six of the light strings I have are busted. I've repaired one, with four to go.</p>

[brian]

good stuff on the iriver ihp, you'll enjoy it.

i picked up the ihp-120 myself a few months back, its been quality stuff. i suppose i've now marked myself as a geek but really, did anyone not see that marker before anyway.

good forum (that you've may have already found) for all things iriver is: http://www.misticriver.net/boards/

oh and fordham tidbit of the day, sports guy on espn's page 2 has a great line at the end of his column today:

"One thing bothers me about last Sunday's show, though: You can't promote the death of one of the housewives, then have it end up being the nosy next-door neighbor who isn't even in the opening credits. That's like ESPN promoting an upcoming "SportsCenter" by saying, "Which Pistons star blew out his knee tonight?" and it ends up being Smush Parker. Gimme a break."


happy upcoming bday.

[Chris]

Have you heard of Rockbox? If you know of misticriver, I'm guessing you do. That's actually one of the major reasons I bought it.

It arrives mid next week. What program are you using to extract audio files? I'm thinking of CDEx from sourceforge. I will, of course, be extracting to OGG, except for all the MP3s I picked up from Napster sophmore year when Fordham decided to upgrade to an actual network. Remember when we were blown away by almost 100KB/s speed? That was ludicrous. Nobody lives that fast!

It's either CDEx or Winamp.

Oh, and how quality is it that the great recruit that left Fordham early for the NBA is now at best, a punchline. Bob Hill, how you have forsaken us. And to think we actually thought something was going to happen there.

[Chris]

Not to let this thread get to geeky - but Brian, have you used that tag database thing they talk about often on those message boards? Basically, I'm looking for advice on the way you ripped and in what organizational style you saved them in.

I'm also psyched because I'll be able to pick up other people's CDs without having to install a proprietary client like iTunes. It's my USB thumb drive plus MP3 player.

Also, I'm tempted to try to write a playlist generator that creates playlists based on a rating I give the songs. Like a five-star song will appear five times as often as a one-star song. I'm guessing it can be done using a seperate database and a field in the ID3 tag. That will probably be my post-Christmas project. Along with my website, tweaking the TiVos, playing more X-Box, and other crap.

[brian]

hey. i'm at work so i have to double check some of your questions on my pc back at the fort. i can't remember which program i used for a few things.

i went crazy doing most of my music back in june when i got it before i went away on vacation so it'd be set for the trip. since then i havent been quite as dilligent about cleaning up new files, but i did work out an organizational system. i avoided there database, found it took a hit loading wise and such on the device, plus it kinda takes over your pc as far as scanning for any sort of new music.

personally i organized it like a filing system. 2 main divisions, albums and artists (for single songs and stuff). then from there broke it down as you'd expect, under albums did artists, then the album names as file folder names, then songs within; artists section got individual folders for artist name, then whatever hodgepodge of songs i had. its been handy and an easy thing to keep up to date as far as dropping new songs on it via windows explorer, plus you can navigate it pretty easily within the iHP.

plus i used a program that scanned existing tags and could build a file structure which was a huge help to start things up. didn't like the way this program renamed things but it was quite flexible. will get you the name of this one tonite. i had another program for renaming the files themselves, so that when i went through my file folders its easy to pick them out.

organizing was the biggest hassle at first and took a good week or so plugging away for a few hours at nite. but as i'm sure you'll agree, the satisifcation of having it all set your way was second to none once complete.

i had never heard of that rockbox thing, it sounds pretty cool. kinda disappointed there still hashing it out for the iHP, but ist got some serious potential.

your spot on about the benefit of it as a hard drive to hook up to people pc's. i ripped music off people i knew computers when i was setting things up and its quite easy. sometimes with older ones, like win98 i think, you have to let it install a driver, but xp is a snap.

taking this even deeper into geekdom, how were you thinking of writing a playlist generator? that sounds like a cool idea, espeically to tie in the personalized ratings. i've used winamp to create a few playlists for it but generally let it do the shuffle thing.

for extracting audio i believe i went with cdEX (gotta check - yeh i know, why write now when i am so woeful scant on details...its work, i'm bored).

anyway, dunno how much your into the napster style stuff still but i found ares to be good for that angle on it. i went about 70 ares/ 30 cd music initially. format wise i'm not so up on this stuff, read about OGG but think i ended up largely mp3 format.

[Chris]

It's supposed to arrive tomorrow. The weekend shall be a blur of audio capture.

I will be sure to pester you for more info as time goes on.

P.S. I have no idea what "ares" is.

As for the playlist thing, I have abolutely no idea. The closest thing to knowledge I have is php/mysql. I could use it to generate a table.

To tell you the truth, the easiest thing might be to just add any song I really like to the playlist five times, and on down the line, but it might be tougher in the end. I was mostly just talking out of my ass.

[brian]

sorry for the slackass delay in getting these names to you. the program i used for both the tags and renaming the files was media monkey. its also the one that can do the folder generation on your pc for you if your music is tagged. pretty fleixible, takes a few goes through the interface to figure out what's up but once you do its worth it.

also, i did use cdex for ripping cds.

following my 2 week old trend of a random fordham note, article in the local westchester paper today all abotu wfuv and how students do sport. of crouse, being a craptacular local paper, this was actually the giagantic front page article for sports. thank you journal news.

heres the link: http://www.thejournalnews.com/newsroom/ ... thesc.html

[Chris]

Seeing as how I am easily brainwashed by forum discussions, I have been lurking at [url]hydrogenaudio.com[/url] and they have convinced me to use EAC for ripping, basically because it's better at dealing with scratched discs than CDex. Right now I'm just fooling around with different OGG settings before I decide on a compression level.

I'm deciding between q5 and q6 which are about 160kbps and 192 kbps if I am correct. I enjoy being anal about these things. I'll probably go q5.

I'm still a little iffy about the directory structure, but I'm reassured by the monkey thing, which looks like it could fix any mistakes I make after the fact.

By the way, that article just made me feel utterly replaceable, like the four years I spent there were worthless, because I have absolutely no idea who those kids were. And they know nothing of me. Unless they're cool and they visit this website frequently.