Tag Archives: hobbies - Page 5

A Christmas Burden

Posted by on December 16, 2019 No comments

As a collector of CDs, sometimes I fantasize about coming across an old collection that’s up for sale, one with lots of old and rare CDs in it, along with CDs that I would also want to listen to.  I’ve read about people having experiences like that – they’re not common at all.  But Sunday, I was fortunate enough to have one of my own.

I had planned to visit my local flea market that day to check out and maybe buying a dart set for fun.  I have a board set up in my garage, but I don’t seem to have any darts anymore.  So I visited the booth with the darts and because there was only one set available, I decided to hold off another week until he got his order with different models.  My flea market doesn’t have a resident “CD guy”, so I don’t stop in very often.  But I did feel like getting some walking in, so I wandered the halls.

I found a couple of temporary sellers with CDs, but their selection was terrible and in poor condition.  Another seller had like 10 CDs out.  Sigh.  But, leaving that seller’s stand, I saw a booth across the hall with a couple of larger CD racks.  I went over to see what was there.  Within 10 seconds of browsing the rack, I could tell this was a personal collection.  There were items there that I never see anywhere else.  in one rack, there was almost the entirety of the IRS NoSpeak series, something I had completed this year.  I could have saved quite a bit of money, here.

Alas, I didn’t find anything in the two front racks, but when I stood back up and actually looked in the booth, there were six more racks and a couple of boxes of CDs.  Oh my god, if it’s all the quality of what’s out front, I’m in trouble.

And without dragging it out, yes, it was and, yes, I was.  There were two criteria I was working with at this booth.  The first was looking for stuff I wanted (duh).  The second was looking for any smooth-sided cases, which would indicate early CD pressings.  In the first criteria, I found maybe 6 CDs.  However, when it came to smooth cases, this collector was seriously an early adopter.  I was pulling out CDs 2-3 at a time and stacking them up into multiple piles.

The total at the end was 62 CDs.  The lady charged me a whopping $55 and even was willing to take a credit card when I explained I didn’t have enough cash to cover the purchase.  I was willing to do PayPal or some other method to avoid her getting a fee, but ok.  She was very happy to move so many of the CDs at once, and I was very pleased with what I had pulled out.

Back at home, I stacked the CDs all up and began cleaning the cases.

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After cleaning them, which took a little over half an hour, I had to step away to let my mind think about what I had to do.  I broke the incoming items into three piles: things that were duplicates of what I already had (and might be upgrades), things I definitely wanted to add to the collection, and the rest was going to have to be evaluated to see if I wanted to keep it.  I ended up with 20 definite adds, 6 or so dupes, and the rest was left for later.  Then I had to take another break.

What we’re talking about here is listening to 50+ albums.  Even being really aggressive about it, listening to one CD on the way to work, one on the way back, and maybe one at night, we’re still talking almost a month of new music.  And listening to an album once isn’t always fair when choosing to keep it or not, and I do want to be fair.  That means a whole lot of music has been dropped into my life.

And that quantity of music is overwhelming.  Believe it or not, I haven’t listened to any of it yet.  You would think I would have immediately popped in a CD coming back from the flea market, but I was too shocked at my fortune.  When you have over 60 albums to listen to, where do you start?  The genres are all over the place, so I could get anything, really.  What a first world problem.

I pulled out the 20 albums that were on the must have list and got them logged into my Discogs account.  It put my collection’s Max total over $20k.  Obviously that’s highly optimistic, but it’s still a milestone.  I compared the dupes in my collection to the newcomers and only swapped one out.  The other 5 have to get compared and posted on my other blog.  So I have plenty of things to do ahead of me next week.

The Second System

Posted by on September 28, 2019 No comments

Last month, I upgraded my primary computer and one thing that sort of disappointed me about that event was that the old computer was still quite serviceable.  Aside from the need to support larger hard drives, it was perfectly fine.  After I finished the new built, I boxed up the old parts and left them stored for some unknown future day.

While I am still in my personal rebuilding phase, I’m playing around with a lot of ideas.  Most of those ideas are things from my past.  One specific one is music – playing, recording, etc.  So as I mulled this over, I considered the setup plan.  One thing I wanted was to not use my primary computer for the audio recording, as I had always done in the past.  While all computers are powerful enough to multitask like that now, I just didn’t want the clutter.  And that’s when I remembered I had a whole other quite serviceable computer sitting in a box.  All it needed was a new case.  That makes the idea much more reasonable from a cost perspective.

I got to work shopping for a new computer case, which was easy and not easy at the same time.  I wanted a desktop case (horizontal orientation), but it seems they just don’t make those anymore.  Too old fashioned, I guess.  So I shopped for the smallest tower case I could find.  And since this was a secondary system that would be limited in purpose, I bought the cheapest thing available.  And I bought a cheap power supply to install in it, too.  Maybe a total spend of $60.  Everything else I already had ready to go – monitor, cables, drives, RAM.

The case arrived the other day and I wanted to get a jump on things by installing the motherboard in right away.  Upon opening the box, I saw that all the front panels for the drive bays had popped off.  Then I noted the front panel was also popped off.  This gave me a bad feeling.  After extracting the case from the packing material, I was left with a collection of plastic tabs all over the table.  It appears the box was dropped or mangled in some way to basically shear the front panel straight off.  Every plastic tab that held the front panel to the case was broken off.  Not a single one was spared.

I’m not going to go through a bunch of RMA bullshit for a $30 case, but I’m also not going to just pitch it or give up on it.  I went to the garage and got my big box of miscellaneous screws and permanently attached the plastic panel back to the case with sheet metal screws.  That’ll show ‘em.  And without further incident, I installed the motherboard, video card, and hard drives in the case.  Now I just had to await the arrival of the power supply, which would come the next day.

This computer would be one of those unheard of systems that runs off-network.  No updates ever; first install-last install.  File transfer and backup would be via USB drives to my primary computer.  Ah, the good old days.  Time will tell if Windows 10 can even survive in this environment.  If not, well I suppose I could drop back to Windows 7.  Windows 7 is near end-of-life with security updates being phased out in January 2020, but on an unnetworked computer, what’s security?

Next up, software.

Spreading The Art

Posted by on August 27, 2019 No comments

In a recent post, I’ve talked about the rebuild of my Plex database and one of the things that process exposed was the poor quality of my CD cover art.  Long past are the days where a 500×500 cover image would be sufficient, and you could even get by with 240×240.  After all, MP3 player screens didn’t have any significant resolution.  But now, the “MP3 player” in my house is a 60” television screen, with a beautiful “now playing” screen.  And it’s not all the beautiful when the album picture looks like crap.  So it’s time to remedy that.

For a large part of my collection, I was able to rely on a utility called Album Art Downloader, which is a pretty descriptive name as that’s all it does.  It searches a large variety of websites and lets you pick the picture you want to download in whatever resolution is available.  Initially it’s very overwhelming, but once you get it scaled back to a reasonable number of art sources, it’s quite workable.

I settled on a minimum size of 950×950 for my art.  I wanted to have a nice round number like 1000×1000, but one of the album art sites has a default of 953×953 (how odd), so that’s a lot of what I ended up with.  Ridiculously, iTunes and Google Music both have images up to 4000×4000.  Why so many pixels?!  But anyway, I got the best of what I could, and the rest I would have to handle myself.

It was way back in 2008 that I made a post saying I was scanning my less-accessible albums and posting them online.  Of course, back then, I was posting images at 500×500, which was fair over 10 years ago.  In 2014, I made another run at it.  But now, I’m continuing again, but posting the images online at 1500×1500.  This sharing is all well and good, but it doesn’t have the reach I feel it deserves.  Not many people are going to go to Flickr to search for album art, and also, the Album Art Downloader does not search Flickr for artwork, so that should be a sign.

So, where should I upload my contributions?  There’s one website that is pretty highly respected, Album Art Exchange, and I found them many years ago.  But I was immediately turned off by many factors, primarily the site owner’s terrible behavior and the site’s draconian policies.  For a long time, I stayed with Flickr, primarily for the independence, but also because nothing else out there seemed as organized.  Recently, I learned about Fanart.tv and I’m very hopeful that can be my new home for my efforts.

Of course every site has rules and guides to preserve the quality of their content, but it doesn’t seem to be as toxic as Album Art Exchange.  The site is a little rough around the edges, but on the plus side, they have an integration API, so they are open to sharing their content, unlike AAX, who wants to retain complete control over everything.  Fanart ties their entries to MusicBrainz, which is another site I have a little experience with.  I chose Discogs over MusicBrainz for my collection tracking, but I don’t have animosity for them like I do with AAX.  The point is that their artist and album entries are based on an authoritative source, instead of AAX’s free-for-all text entry is a clear positive.

So right now, I have 200 CD covers on Flickr that I can contribute, excluding any dupes of course.  But then again, I’ve pretty much only uploaded covers I can’t find anywhere else, so that’s promising.  In my collection, I am down to 37 albums under 950px where I can’t find any better source of artwork.  Some of the albums I’ve been scanning I am really surprised don’t have a high-quality image online already.  I have some obscure albums, but Eddie Money’s Greatest Hits?  Surely that would be on iTunes or Google Music, right? Nope.  You can’t find a good image anywhere.  I was also surprised I couldn’t find Styx – Return To Paradise.  On the other hand, I am also amazed at how a lot of classical albums can have different covers for the same album, sometimes with different working, sometimes different pictures.  It’s very strange.  “That’s the album, but that’s not the cover.”

Entering any new community is always scary, especially on the Internet.  Wish me luck.

Taming the Excess

Posted by on July 12, 2019 No comments

Over a year ago, I had written a review of some CD cases that were gifted to me and I was impressed with the quality.  They’ve been in use ever since I got them.  They were initially for my “overstock”, which were CDs of which I had duplicates or had replaced with better versions.  Essentially, the cases held my sell/trade copies.

Over some time, I’ve been scoring a lot of smooth replacement jewel cases, so I started storing them in with my trade collection as my “supplies” collection.  As you would imagine, the supplies come and go with the growth and management of my collection, but the trade selection just keeps growing.  Part of this is because I feel I have some decent value trades.

Let’s address that irrationality of mine right off.  The value of CDs is nothing.  The value only matters to the few people that collect CDs.  I know this.  Otherwise, the CD pressing has no bearing to a person that just wants to hear More Than A Feeling and Smokin’ by Boston.  Again, I know this.  But, my reluctance to simply take them to the local shop and get $1 or less for these is not because I feel I deserve more money for these unique pressings.  My reason is that I’m holding them for the right owner who wants them.  I’m not going to gouge them for the discs.  The money is less important than having the disc appreciated.  And that, is far more irrational than what you might have thought at the beginning of this paragraph.

But that’s not the point of this post.  The point is that I had run out of space with my supplies and my overstock.  When I received the CD storage boxes, my brief research said they cost $65 each.  Out of consistency’s sake, I searched for more cases of the same make.  I figured there would be some used ones on EBay for cheap.  What I found on EBay were brand new ones, with double the capacity, for $37.  And, if I bought two, the price was discounted to $26!  And they had free shipping!  Well, I guess I’m unexpectedly spending some money today.

So, when these cases come in, my overstock storage capacity will go from 120 to 360.  It just seems to be the next logical step in me becoming “the CD guy” at the local flea market.  That’s sort of been my long-range, expected, retirement plan (for social enrichment, not financial).  How many CDs do you need to have an impressive storefront?  Not quite sure, but I should be there when I’m ready.

It wasn’t buyer’s remorse that set in right away, but I started to get a real suspicion that I had bought cheap knockoffs.  You know, “too good to be true” certainly applies here in the price department.  I began studying the pictures in the listing very closely.  They looked nearly identical to the authentic Vaultz product with two exceptions.  There was no Vaultz nameplate on the ones I bought, and the drawers had adjustable velcro dividers.  Both of these differences seemed like reasonable design changes over a few years, and I couldn’t really find any official Vaultz imagery to prove otherwise.

Then UPS sent me a delivery notification that my package would arrive tomorrow.  It was being sent by… Yahee Technologies.  Oh, there’s that sinking feeling.  I’m already preparing a scathing feedback message for them misrepresenting their product as Vaultz.  And you know, they got me.  Shipping these things back will cost me probably half of what I spent, so I might as well keep them.  I guess the best I can hope for at this point is that the quality isn’t complete shit.  Maybe there’s actual wood construction and not fiberboard.  The aluminum edge protectors look decent and the rubber feet look just like the Vaultz. 

I received the cases and as expected, they are not authentic Vaultz product.  However, they are a very close replica.  The locks are different and a lot of the construction that is wood on a Vaultz is thick fiberboard (again, as expected).  I jumped on EBay to vent about it, but after reading their “please contact us before leaving negative feedback” pleas, I slowed down and thought about the whole situation.

All things considered, these cases aren’t too bad.  They aren’t as flimsy as I expected.  Honestly, they were packed quite well and had no China smell.  To be fair, they were exactly the quality for the price you should expect – not cheap, not premium.  For a replica/knockoff/ripoff, they’re well done.  And I think I can live with them.  So instead of negative feedback, I just chose to leave no feedback.

Is that fair to future purchasers?  I think so, because I don’t think the great majority of people who are buying these cases would be like me, actually looking for additional authentic Vaultz product.  They would have no basis of comparison, as as such, they would be perfectly happy with what they got.  After all, I found the product decent for what I paid, too.

The Next Collector’s Goal

Posted by on July 11, 2019 No comments

It was almost five years ago that I made a concerted effort to collect the entirety of a music label, the MCA Master Series.  The Master Series is a collection of largely instrumental “new age” music from the late 80’s.  For a little while now, I’ve been kicking around the idea of trying this again with another label.  I’m going to make a start on it now.

The label this time is IRS NoSpeak.  It’s another instrumental label from the same time period.  The label considered themselves “anti-new age” in the sense it was much more rock-oriented.  The scope of the collection is much smaller, with MCA having been 40+ releases, this label is only 19 strong.  With the price of CDs being depressed across the board, plus having these CDs never really reaching a large audience outside of individual fan groups, these should be obtainable for a reasonable cost. 

It’s kind of funny that with as much as I shop at thrift stores and get CDs for a buck or two, shopping online is actually a little unreasonable.  When you have to pay $3-4 for shipping on a $3-5 cd, that money can get you a good haul at a thrift store.  But when you want something specific, your chances of finding what you want in a random thrift store are pretty slim, so you gotta pay.

My history with the IRS NoSpeak label is pretty limited, and honestly, I don’t like most of what I already have.  But what I do like, I really like, so I’m hoping that I can find some winners again.  I did find some amazing stuff as I built my MCA collection, so maybe this good fortune will happen again.

The first album I got on the NoSpeak label was their first release, Guitar and Son, which was a guitar-based album.  Every time I hear it, I’m taken back to the days when I’d be playing the CD on repeat, over and over, while reading the monstrous Computer Shopper magazine and dreaming of getting back into computers again.  Those were simpler, happier times.

Maybe when the collection is complete, I’ll do the same as I did with the Master Series and make a set of pages for them here on the blog.  The album artwork is nice, although of a much different style than the Master Series.  It might be suitable for framing. 

Current stats: 6 on hand, 3 on order, 10 remaining.

I Made It Work Again

Posted by on April 30, 2019 No comments

Over the weekend, I made a roadtrip in the interest of thrift shopping.  It was a generally easy-going, low-stress trip that turned up plenty of CDs, mostly smooth-sided cases.  Along the way, I also picked up an early CD player, 30 years old, for $7.  I figured it would be interesting to have an opportunity to experience newer and older players and see if I could determine sonic differences between them.  The price was good, so why not?

When I got it home and fired it up, I found out why not.  It wasn’t operational.  When powered up, it would immediately eject the CD tray.  Pushing the close button did nothing.  If you pulled the tray out a little further, the close button would work, but after a second or two, the tray would eject again.  Huh.

My first thought was that there were some sensors that were dirty.  The ones that tell the player when the tray is fully opened or fully closed.  It seemed like something I could fix.  So I opened the case and disassembled the tray assembly.  I didn’t really see any sensors like I expected.  I did see a pressure switch that would toggle when the drawer was open or closed.  Opening and closing the drawer, I could see that when closing, the switch was not being contacted.  I think I was on the right track here.

Considering why the drawer wouldn’t close fully, I had a memory of a web page I had read about CD player troubleshooting and the primary takeaway was that the great majority of player failures can be fixed by replacing the drive belts.  I inspected the drawer assembly and found only a single belt.  It seemed to be in good condition, maybe a little loose, I don’t really know.  But I figured I could change it out easily and maybe that would do it.

I ordered a pack of various sized belts from Amazon and they arrived the next day.  Without too much trouble, I installed a new belt of near the same size, maybe a little smaller.  The reassembly was a little sketchy since I wasn’t exactly sure where to set the gear so that the open/closed pressure switch would get hit in both directions.  But for my first test, the drawer stayed closed when I powered on, which it should because the switch indicated the door was closed.  I pushed the open/close button and the drawer ejected.  I checked the switch and it indicated the drawer was fully open.  I pushed the open/close button again at the drawer closed.  Then I saw something I hadn’t seen in previous attempts: the laser lens moved up and down trying to focus on a non-existent CD.  And the drawer stayed closed.  I ejected the tray and put a CD in.  I closed the tray and the CD spun up.  I pressed play, the CD spun and the display counted up the time.  I fixed it!

That’s a plenty good feeling to repair something so easily, just a single part replacement and the part was a tiny piece of rubber.

The State Of Collecting

Posted by on January 11, 2019 No comments

When I started collecting seriously in 2015, I had about 620 CDs.  Some people would say that’s a lot.  I remember in the 90’s, I started really building my collection by visiting pawn shops.  CDs were usually $5 each.  Now, they are $1-2 each at thrift shops.  The low cost allows me to indulge in albums I wouldn’t have taken a chance on at $5.

I say that I started collecting “seriously” in 2015 because that is when I started tracking my collection online with Discogs.  From that point onward, I am able to see when I added more to my collection.  The online site doesn’t give any statistics over time, but they do allow you to download your collection for you to analyze yourself.  I’m no Excel guru, so although I tried to create some pretty pictures and graphs, I was unable to get anything that was suitable.

In 2016, I added 207 CDs.  Looking through the filtered list, some additions catch my eye.  This is the year I got a couple of holiday CDs from a secret santa.  It’s the year I first heard Kraftwerk, one of those legendarily influential groups you should hear.  In fact, that was probably when I started really trying to experience “the legends” when up to that point, they were out of my normal musical orbit.  Some other artists that I’d never owned before, notable and not, include: Vince Guaraldi, Steely Dan, Eurythmics, Laurie Anderson, Cyndi Lauper, and The Pretenders.

In 2017, I added 254 CDs.  I was more actively seeking out sources for cheap CDs.  I would hit thrift shops and flea markets on a regular basis.  I learned that some thrift shops didn’t really have the turnover that others did, so some places had to be hit weekly and others could be visited less frequently.  I was also visiting my local record store for the more elusive titles, which came at a premium price.  Some new artists from this year: Madonna, Autograph, Roxette, Loverboy, Billy Ocean, Pointer Sisters, Billy Squier.

In 2018, I added 327 CDs.  My local record store had moved father away, so I was spending more time at thrift shops and travelling longer distances for flea markets.  I was also discovering other sources for CDs.  ReStore by Habitat For Humanity was a newer discovery.  Antique malls and indoor flea markets were another.  The latter were good sources as they were usually personal collections being sold.  Some of the new artists this year: Testament, Exodus, Dio, Krokus, Black Sabbath, Mercyful Fate (good time for metal), Adam Ant, DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince, Level 42, Aretha Franklin, Annie Lennox, Bruce Springsteen.

All of the purchase counts are exclusive of the duplicate CDs that I bought.  Usually they were upgrades to existing CDs I already had – maybe a foreign pressing, maybe an earlier pressing, maybe a target CD.  In 2018, I sold off 80 of those CDs to a local store.  I have about 30 queued up again.

Is it weird that I am adding to my collection every year a quantity that exceeds most peoples entire collection?  Maybe.  But as in just about any sort of addictive hobby, there will always be examples of those much worse than yourself.  I mean, I have 1500 CDs, but there are people out there with 10x as many.  I’m not even sure I have enough musical interest to span 10,000 CDs.  Since my music tastes only span a couple of decades, that should keep me from going full hoarder.  One collector posted his collection of 40k CDs and it consumed the entire wallspace of two adjoining rooms, plus multiple island cabinets in the middle of one room.  He also said he just returned from a trip to a couple of stores and bought over 160 more CDs.  So, it’s not as bad as it could be.

Another Brick In The Closet

Posted by on September 6, 2018 No comments

Last year, before the holidays, I found a nice, massive keyboard sitting unloved at a thrift store.  I assume it was still sitting there because anyone that tested it would have found it to be broken.  I, however, am foolish enough to buy things without any consideration of functionality.  So I brought this keyboard home, discovered it was broken, and proceeded to fix it up enough to make it work.  And it’s been sitting in my closet ever since, waiting for its moment of glory.

On this most recent holiday, I saw something else at a thrift shop – a nice, tiny keyboard.  The price was right, so I bought it – untested as is my way.  As soon as I got the device to the car, I realized it was broken.  One of the controller knobs was completely snapped off.  Oh well.  The price was right.  Let’s get it home and see if it even powers up and makes noise.

I got it home and it powered up and made no sound.  Well, it made a buzzing sound, sometimes.  I started doing some online research and learned that this particular synth has a well known issue with that control knob failing (not sure if being broken off is considered “failing”).  So replacements are generally easy to get.  At this point, I don’t even know if that’s the actual problem.  But let’s take a step back and look at this thing.

This little bugger is the Alesis Micron, which is an analog modeling synthesizer.  It originally sold for $400 back in 2004.  It still sells for about $200 on the used market.  I got it for $7.50, half-off the original $15 price.  So you see, it was worth the gamble.  I’ve spent far more on far less (which should be my life’s motto). 

When I saw “analog modeling synthesizer” on it, I got really excited.  The only synth of that type I’d really known about before dropping out of the music scene was the Nord Modular, which I remember being a 4-figure keyboard.  These types of keyboards emulate the older synths of the 70s and 80s. and they typically do it very well.  They also have a lot of the features of older synths like arpeggiators (for playing Who Are You) and vocoders (for playing Mr. Blue Sky).  There is a video on Youtube of someone playing Mr. Mister’s Kyrie live and solo on the Micron. But before I can have that kind of fun, this device needs repair.

I have a couple of options.  I can just replace the knob (a potentiometer, if you want to sound cool), which requires some soldering work.  The part costs less than $2 (plus shipping), and of course, I’ll need a new knob button to cap it off.  Yeah, that’s one option, or I can buy a whole new control board with knob for $40.  That’s the plug and play option and the one I opted for.  That and the cap were about $50, so if this works out, I will have a really neat new synth for a little under $60.  And then, it can sit in my closet, too.  How stupid.

It is dumb, but I have a lot of fun rescuing junk and making it (or trying to make it) usable.  I should consider myself fortunate this desire is just for musical equipment and not, say, cats.

The parts are currently being shipping and I should have them next week.  Let’s hope I have as much success with this little Alesis as I did with the huge Alesis.

The Superior Feeling

Posted by on August 18, 2018 No comments

To somewhat paraphrase that Shania Twain chorus, “God, I feel like a God today.”  I’ve mentioned before that being a programmer is the best thing in the world and it’s the closest you can get to being a god.  Parents, you may think you get to play god, too, but there’s a little issue with deleting your creations when you’re done with them.  So, being a programmer is still the best.

I’ve mentioned before that one of the best things about programming is the ability to automate.  Taking what would be an insurmountable task and making it simple.  And that is what I managed to do today.  As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve set up a music server in the house, Plex, and in prior posts, I’ve talked about my digital music collection.  Occasionally, I mention that the metadata in the files needs improvement.  And that is also what I’ve done.

Metadata in digital files can be as extensive as you want them to be.  At a minimum, you want the artist and song title to be in there, because most players display that important identifying information.  You can go further and add the album release year and genre, so you can sort and group things that are of similar values.  You can go further still and embed artwork in the file, usually the album cover, so your music player can display that, too.  You can go even further than that and put the lyrics for the song in the metadata so some players will show you the lyrics while the song plays.  That is where I am at and it is what I have done.

There are utilities that let you edit the metadata directly, so you can create a new tag and paste in the lyrics for a song.  But, is that even fathomable to do with over 15,000 songs?  There are tools that will let you look up the lyrics to a song and create the tag automatically, but still, song by song.  I never got to the point of finding utilities that would process a whole album at one time, because I realized I could do it better.  I could do it exactly as I needed it to be done.

With Plex, there is no support for embedded lyrics in the metadata.  Instead, they use what’s called a “side-car” file, which is the same file name, but different extension.  So you have your .flac file and a duplicate .txt file with the lyrics.  Ok, that’s pretty crappy, but I can do it.  But, if I’m going to go through the trouble of getting all these lyric files, why not embed them at the same time?

So I did a quick search online and found a code library that would read and write FLAC metadata.  That’s the only thing I couldn’t do on my own, so I was golden now.  I learned of a website that had a simple means of downloading lyrics through their website, as long as I stripped out everything else from the webpage.  A simple RegEx statement accomplished that.  Writing to a text file, recursing through directories,  all that is simple stuff.

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So, I process each artist in a batch, which enumerates all songs for all albums.  One button click to retrieve all the lyrics for all the songs, then a review of any songs that had no matches.  Correct the titles for the non-matches and get lyrics again.  Then a button to process the lyrics which both embeds the lyrics in the FLAC files and also creates a sidecar text file with the lyrics.  So, if all goes well, one double-click on the artist folder, click on Retrieve Lyrics, scroll to confirm that all lyrics came in, click Process.

So, yeah, I do have to process a little over 500 artists, but that is substantially better than thousands of albums or many thousands of songs.

KATT Radio – Late Night Jazz

Posted by on July 24, 2018 No comments

My CD collection is pretty large right now.  I’ve surpassed 1200 albums and I’m not sure there’s ever going to be an end to the growth.  Sometimes, the realization of this prompts some soul-searching and the question comes up, “why?”  Yes, why do I do this?  What is the actual goal?  There is no real goal, it’s just an ongoing feeling of happiness, tending my collection like a garden.  But sometimes, the thought sneaks in, “That’s a lot of stuff to have.  You can only listen to one CD at a time.”

That’s right.  It is a lot of stuff for such a limited use.  It’s too bad I couldn’t share the awesomeness of it all with people.  And that thought led me down a path that ended up with me considering another potentially obsessive hobby – running a radio station!  You can get low-power AM radio station licenses pretty cheaply.  I started thinking up radio programs and what kind of expenses would come along with such an idea.  Everyone knows there’s no live radio now and all DJs pre-program their sets in advance.  I could easily do that, right?  No one really wants to hear my voice, so it wouldn’t be a banter kind of station, just music.  Hell, anyone can create a playlist, right?  That’s all a radio station is anymore.

But that idea faded as I thought about the reality of trying to make enough music shows (I mean playlists) to keep the station interesting (as I daydream about upending my local radio stations… ha).  So I considered an easier route:  An Internet radio station.  And I researched that and found I could get licensing for about $60/mo, and the licensing software would integrate with some common radio software.  I looked in the radio DJ software and immediately felt less enthusiastic.  It’s like my dilemma when I want to do music.  You have to master this software before you can actually start a project.  And by the time you understand how, you don’t care anymore.

At the same time I was kicking around this idea of broadcasting in my mind, I was pursuing another thought.  The idea that I had all this music doing nothing was nagging at me a little.  I do rip all of my CDs to my home computer (sitting at about 430GB right now) for playback at my desk.  And the idea that I could only really play it at my desk was a slight annoyance.  That’s a lot of music to sit there and do nothing.  So I gave consideration to how to broadcast it.  It would be a nice start to have devices throughout my home that could play my ripped music.  It would be even cooler if I could play it from my phone, anywhere.

As it turns out, there is such a way to do it.  Actually there’s plenty of ways to do it.  And the idea wasn’t all that new to me.  Back in my Zune days, there was a way to have Zune broadcast your music and videos to an XBox.  And I was actually sort of on board with that.  But since I never actually went through with buying an XBox and pursuing the “media center” dream, I had to reconsider my options.  As it turns out, the old XBox software grew up and broke its dependency on XBox.  That software is now called Plex.  And this software will broadcast to all kinds of devices, near and far.  Lots of people use Plex to share their music and videos with their friends.  That’s pretty cool, whether legal or not.

So I installed Plex on my home computer and had it go to town on my music library.  It grabbed a ton of info on my albums and artists from last.fm and it was flexible enough to let me edit anything left over on my own.  I went out to my living room and installed the Plex client on my Samsung TV.  It worked, which was impressive.  What wasn’t impressive was my TV’s sound quality.  So, I wrote the experiment off as useless.

Fast forward to today, I was dealing with cat issues.  My new cat has millennial-grade anxiety about everything.  Every sound freaks him out.  He hid under a bed for days, leading me to think he was dying.  But in the short time I’ve had him, I’ve discovered he likes music – a lot.  He likes a lot of the new age, smooth jazz instrumental music I like.  So I thought I would start playing it while I was out of the house, maybe to keep him chilled out.  I was getting ready to grab a Sansa Clip MP3 player and was sort of dreading all the work that would go along with that.  The player needs charged, I have to choose the music to play, the music has to be transcoded to fit onto the Clip, there won’t be a lot of music on there.  This was going to suck.  But wait, I have my entire music library available to stream to my TV.  And I doubt the cat is going to be overly picky about the sound quality…

So I popped back on the living room TV and this time installed the Plex client for the Roku.  It installed quickly and I was off and browsing my collection.  I chose Acoustic Alchemy, which was the music he had heard on his transport to my house.  I played all tracks from all albums on shuffle.  And it just worked.  My TV has a video mode where you can turn the screen off and just use the audio, so I didn’t have to worry about screen burn-in.  I think I have a solution here.

I came back from dinner and the cat was not hiding under a bed, so I consider the music plan a success.  I will try again tomorrow while I’m at work and see how well that works.  And in time, I can build a huge playlist of instrumental songs for him – his own radio station.