Like the rest of the cool kids, I finally rendered some of my music listening via LastGraph. LastGraph munges my data from Last.FM, my favorite, unobtrusive, social music service and listening recorder. A snippet from last year showing who I was listening to (click for larger size):

I also find the artist history quite interesting, such as this graph of my Aimee Mann listening habits (click for larger size):

For geeks, the data: by artist and time period is available in Excel, CSV and JSON format so you can play with it yourself.

Just a heads-up as I have yet to listen to it, but John Willinsky was recently interviewed on IT Conversations. John was one of the more interesting speakers at Northern Voice last year and someone whose work I really admire. If this isn’t worth listening to, I’m sure someone will let me know!

I don’t usually link to requests for support, but this is one I’ve personally donated to– help Save the Fresh Air Archives.

[ruminate, freshair, causes]

My current MP3 player is a Rio Nitrus , a small, 1.5g, USB 2, mini-hdd player. It’s certainly a step up from my beloved Nomad II, with its relatively paltry 192mb of flash memory, but it is far from ideal.

Before I bought the Nitrus I did a fair bit of research into the current crop of hard-drive based players. My intent was to buy a 15gig or higher unit– possibly an iPod, but I couldn’t find a single make or model that didn’t have some fairly significant drawback. The iPod is expensive, not particularly suited to Windows, and I am leery of the battery problems. The Dell Jukebox only has USB… and I couldn’t imagine transferring gigabytes of files over USB. The Zen Touch is basically a Dell Jukebox. The Rio Karma has fairly widespread reports of reliability problems. The Nomad Jukebox is too big. The iRiver HP-120 looks pretty good, but again no firewire and not the best drive. I figure if I am going to invest a significant amount of money, I want to at least meet most of my wish-list, which is as follows:

• 20 gig minimum, 40 gig preferred (60-80 would be wonderful, but those players are generally too large). I have over 1000 CDs and gigs of audio books, spoken word, and audio interviews, not to mention a ton of downloaded music.
• USB 2.0 minimum, Firewire greatly preferred.
• Must play well with Windows and not be tied to a single music manager (or that music manager better be really good)
• Must play all common variations of MP3. I’d prefer that it handle OGG, and possibly FLAC/WMA. Real Audio would be really cool (I snake a lot of streams from NPR, etc), but I don’t know that any players do that.
• Needless to say, it needs to read and use ID3 tags (and the equivalent in other formats)
• It would be great if it were driverless and could serve as a simple storage device for computer files.
• 8 hour battery life is fine, 12-16 greatly preferred. The battery must be reliable and relatively simple to replace after many years.
• FM Radio capability, even as an add-on, would be useful, but not necessary.
• Voice recording would be nice, but not necessary.
• It needs to be small enough that it can be comfortably carried in a shirt/coat pocket or armband. Doesn’t have to be tiny, but it must be sturdy.
• Sound quality must be good, though it doesn’t have to be the best. I shouldn’t have to add an external amplifier to get decent quality, and there should be some equalizer functions including user-specified EQ.
• A line-out of some type– for when I am plugging it into the stereo– is almost a necessity.
• Ethernet, even on the docking station, would be great. I love that the Rio Karma has ethernet and a line out on the docking station so it can be accessed over the network or ported to the stereo. Unfortunately, the Karma tops out at 20 gigs… I’d much prefer 40 or 60!

I’m given to understand (lots of discussion on the Head-Fi Forums) that most vendors will be coming out with new models over the next few months… maybe then something will finally meet these– reasonable, in my opinion– requirements.

In a related note, my headphones are Koss Plug earbuds… that I modded myself for a total cost of about $20 and 30 minutes of effort. And they sound just as good as the $100 Shure E2c’s I tried out!

Jeff Veen recently posted an interesting article on a simple (but useful!) way to get some new music to listen to by using the command-line tool wget in conjunction with mp3 blogs. His techniques work fine with OS X or on Windows with Cygwin or some other wget port.

I don’t know why I didn’t think of this– I’ve been using wget to scrape music from the archive.org audio archive for quite a while, and before that it was other websites (even emusic back when you could that kind of thing). Of course I didn’t really know about the whole mp3 blog phenomenon until I came across Jeff’s article…

There are a lot of tools for creating mp3 files, many of which are not very good. In general, the tools for ripping and encoding tracks that come with various players are not particularly good. The tools that purport to do it all– rip, encode, and burn– are not very good.

Here’s what I use (and recommend) for creating mp3 files using Windows XP:

• Ripping: Exact Audio Copy is a free program that has no parallel in accurately ripping files from CD. Most other software does little or no error correction and doesn’t report potential problems. I’ve had good luck with EAC on some pretty scuffed and scratched CDs (and for the rest, there is always Brasso)

• Encoding: The LAME encoder provides the best mp3 encoding. Period. If you are not uber-geeky, you may also want to add RazorLame which provides a handy little interface.

• ID Tag editing: Good, consistent ID tags are an essential for a large MP3 collection (I have about 700 full CDs that I have ripped… so far). By far the best tag editor I have ever found is MP3/Tag Studio. If there is something you need to do with MP3 tags, this will do it. Rename files from tags, tag from file/directory names, mass tagging, macros, etc.

• Playing: I prefer both the Quintessential CD Player, which is less memory intensive and more featureful than WinAmp, while retaining all the plugins, and eye-candy, and FooBar2000, which has a simpler interface masking its immense power and audio-lovers features like A/B testing and signal processing.

• Burning: There are many good programs for burning CDs (some are even free), but I keep coming back to Ahead Nero which continues to be the most stable and sucessful without skimping on features… it also burns DVDs quite well. I am not recommending buring as CD Audio!

If you are into digital music, you might find it hard to separate the truth from the disinformation. Vendors of digital music players would like you to think that perfect sound can be had in tiny, over-compressed files, while self-styled “audiophiles” with “golden ears” are convinced that there is no such thing as good compression without ever performing blind A/B tests. Every format hass proponents that claim it to be superios. The best resources I know of are the Hydrogenaudio Forums where you will find not only find a whole range of enthusiasts eager to talk, but the results of many tests of formats, compression settings, and other audio tools.