Music on Nanikore

Ripping CDs for Fun

Sun, 30 Dec 2012 13:09:53 +0000

OK, maybe fun is not the right word, but over the last few years, I’ve been ‘digitally archiving’ a few items - it started with some old photo prints and negatives (that’s ongoing), and then I tackled my DVDs, and now I’m looking to sort my CD collection out (I think it’s ~400 discs).

So why do this? It’s a combination of convenience and sound quality really. I want to hear the music as I paid for it, but it’s a bit difficult to have all those CDs available around the house, and keep them away from the kids. Also, I have ripped all my CDs once, usually into iTunes, and over the years they’ve been in a smorgasbord of bit rates and formats, from 128kbps AAC and MP3, up to newer ones which are VBR ~256kbps AAC.

Now I’m doing this final rip to a lossless format, I can then simply transcode to whatever size/quality a target needs in the future, and enjoy that ‘CD quality’ of this master.

How am I doing this? For the rip, I’m using Exact Audio Copy which is a nice piece of freeware, and rips the audio from the disc using a variety of methods to try to make sure that what you get, as its name suggests, is an exact copy of the disc. It’ll then save this, with all the meta-data it looks up online as either .WAV files, or several other formats you can set up. I’m using the FLAC encoder, so it’s losslessly compressed, and is quite widely supported across players and platforms. This is also open source, so I should be able to play/convert it well into the future.

With even my lowly Windows machine, this takes only a few minutes per disc, including meta data tweaks I need for some of the non-English discs, so it’s more a case of just feeding the machine than anything else. As for size, FLAC, depending on settings, brings most of the CDs in at around 350MB, about half their native size, but obviously nowhere near the ~65MB AAC or MP3 would give you - alas the price you pay, but given disk space costs, it’s not a deal killer.

When at my PC, I tend to listen on my Sennheiser HD-555 headphones, via Foobar2000, which I find to be a nice, simple sound app. The hardware, for what it’s worth, is a Creative X-Fi Xtreme Audio PCI Express card, which I find to sound better than the onboard Realtek codec, or the HDMI audio feed. On the Mac, it’s the built in Intel HD audio, which sounds acceptable, but the Creative card shows why there’s still a little more benefit in a separate sound card.

When not using the headphones, I have some ancient Sony SRS-Z750PC computer speakers which are fine for podcasts, background music and game effects, but aren’t great. In the future I may get a better set of speakers and even a separate amplifier for my computers, but that’ll have to wait a bit. (A real home music system for the living room is higher up the agenda!).

Is it worth the time? Actually, I think it has been - some of my very old rips always sounded a bit harsh, and going back to listening to the CD equivalent makes it all the more difficult to live with, and its been good to listen to all that music again.

Original Comments

Comments from the original WordPress blog post.

Terrano Spirit — 2013-04-17

I have been reading out a few of your posts and it’s pretty clever stuff. I will definitely bookmark your website.

Kamakura Beach Party '06

Mon, 14 Aug 2006 13:01:11 +0000

Just a reminder that the Kamakura Beach Party ‘06 will be this Saturday (19th). It ’s a great day at the beach with live music, lots of beer and food, and to top it all, it’s all for a good cause - the Christina Noble Foundation. There’s an e-mail version of the flier with a map below, so have a look. Also, the ‘Rocking Buddha’ image was done by old friend Rudolf, so thanks again for that.

Or take a look at the web page of one of the organisers at BrentoLeary.com.

AirTunes

Tue, 21 Jun 2005 14:11:27 +0000

Last week I bought myself an Apple Airport Express. It’s a fairly regular wireless 802.11b/g access point amongst other wireless functions, it’s very small, stylish box, and, being from Apple costs a bit more than other slightly less well designed rival products.

The only wireless product I own right now is my PSP. So now I can get game downloads on my PSP! Great! Hang on, I could do that from hotspots around Tokyo anyway. So why?

Actually, both of the above, but also because of Airtunes. Airtunes is an extension of iTunes which basically pumps out a stream to Airport Express which then pumps it out through it’s small optical/3.5mm jack socket on one of it’s sides and from there into the back of my stereo. The benefit is that in my apartment there’s a wall mounted network port just behind my TV / stereo which my Airport Express is wired into. Thus, I can send my huge iTunes library to my stereo for almost 10 days of continuous songs!

Old Audio Laid to Rest

Sat, 13 Nov 2004 06:34:20 +0000

The digital music revolution, many believe, was sparked by the MP3 format, and is now transforming into a DRM/paid for download market of iPods, Windows Media, AAC and a whole raft of other things which may or may not be a good thing for artists and home users and their rights.

However, it was interesting to me in the last few days to see 2 old apps from simpler days effectively disappear from active development - Winamp and Audion. Actually, I should qualify that - Winamp will continue, but all of the original team has now left the parent company and it has been in a state of lacklustre development for a while. Audion, on the other hand, has been officially put into retirement and is now officially freeware.

I used Winamp in about 1998 when I was working for a ‘digital media’ company [sic] - with it’s llama themes demo track and it’s different skins Winamp really was a nice way to listen to MP3 and CDs at the time on Windows - add in visualisations and it was a nice little app. Unfortunately, it (Nullsoft) was bought by AOL and it seems the bloat began - the small app added more and more windows and popups. Version 3 wasn’t as good as 2 and as if to admit this, version 4 was skipped and the next one was (to me) the equally disappointing version 5. Added to this that other players in the Windows market such as Microsoft, Real, MusicMatch and even Apple with their iTunes had better apps it was obvious that Winamp had become an add-in to AOL and not much else, as mentioned here as the last Nullsoft person has now left the building.

Audion was around since OS 8 (and still works on 9 I believe), and I used it a lot, and even licensed version 1 - it was a nice app, and the company who made it - Panic - are a great bunch of coders who have released a lot of very cool applications. I bought it, and the N2MP3 encoder and between the two of them, put in as many MP3s from live recordings I made in Japan’s live bars as I could on a Powerbook 190 (68K processor running at 66MHz on a 1GB hard drive). I liked Audion - it’s faces were cool and it did what you wanted - had simple functionality and was nice to look at, but faded into the background when you needed it to. What happened? Well, the long and the short of it was iTunes, the iPod and the Music Store. Panic founder Cabel Sassar has written an amazing page on this situation, and I encourage everyone to read it - and to click on the pop-up links - there’s some great things in there. Ultimately, iTunes and it’s iPod and store were just too big a juggernaut to overcome. I commend Panic for retiring the app though to conserve a small company’s resources to move on and live to fight another day. Another Panic person, Steve Frank has put some more thoughts on his Blog here.

Ultimately it shows how a market place can change and how competition truly works. Winamp I think was the victim of a corporation and a startup just not understanding each other, whereas Audion seems to have been the victim of the market convergence between a player, an encoder, hardware and a music shop.

Blast!

Sat, 14 Aug 2004 02:12:04 +0000

Last night we decided to have a more civilised Friday night and went down to the Bunkamura Orchard Hall in Shibuya and checked out Blast!.

Blast! is a brass band/percussion dance ensemble meaning people are dancing with their instruments, doing ballet inspired dance and all manner of things on the stage (and if you remember to look) in the boxes at the back of the stage. It was all very impressive, with some great snare drum pieces, and a lot of colour. It was hard to watch all the movement at once - one minute there would be two people on stage, next there would be ten, all moving around, as all the players quietly come on, perform, and then leave the stage again. It was definitely a great night out for some live music - especially if you’re a brass or percussion fan. Musical styles went from Ravel’s Bolero (amazing) to Jazz to taiko-esque drumming and the musicians not only play the instruments and dance, but could really draw the crowd in. It certainly wasn’t cheap (our tickets cost 9,800 yen each I think) but I must say that I actually thought it was worth it for for about 110 minutes of performace over two acts.

I think all the Shibuya shows for August are sold out, but there may be tickets left for the week’s worth of shows at the Kokusai Forum next month. Go on, treat yourself!

Summer Sonic 2004

Sun, 08 Aug 2004 02:00:40 +0000

Yesterday was day 1 of the 2004 Summer Sonic music festival in Chiba. It was a great line up and is similar to an urban Fuji Rock festival, as half of the stages are indoor at the Makuhari Messe the rest outdoor in the Chiba Marine Stadium, or on the beach. In an added twist, the two-days are swapped with a twin venue in Osaka, so Chiba’s Saturday bands play Sunday in Osaka.

We spent a couple of hours checking out some of the smaller bands at the indoor stage, but they weren’t as interesting as the smaller bands from FujiRock. Then we headed out to the sweltering Marine Stadium to watch some of the bigger bands.

Pennywise were on when we arrived, and they did an OK set. I was looking forward to seeing The Darkness, but unfortunately they cancelled earlier that morning so the organisers got another band in to play - old British rockers The Wildhearts, who I haven’t seen live for about a decade, but I have to say that even though they’d only landed at Narita a few hours before, and minus a lot of their own stage gear they actually did a damn good set.

Inaba (one half of the group B’z) did a great set too - the guy is pretty good on stage, and mixed with rock and more blues influenced songs. Next up were Canadian band Sum41 who I’d never heard of, but to their credit they did a pretty good set, with some good festival music. Then the first of the ‘headlines’ came on - Avril Lavigne - but I was a bit disappointed - it all sounded and looked like it was straight off the album to me - I’m not saying it wasn’t good, but it was a bit formulaic, especially for a festival.

Finally the day’s headliner came on - Green Day, and they didn’t disappoint - a rocking 90minutes of fun and good music and stage work. They did many of their top songs, and now just from the last ‘Warning!’ album. They also got a guy out of the crowd to play guitar on one of the songs. All in all, it was a great set, complete with a couple of fun cover versions, ending on Queen’s ‘We are the Champions’.

The venue itself was very good indeed, but suffered from a complete lack of decent signposting and staff who knew where things were, but overall summersonic is a great festival to check out. Is it better than FujiRock? Maybe not - it feels more ‘corporate presentation’ than festival, but it’s proximity to Tokyo (and Osaka) make it a pretty simple way to see quite a few bands over a weekend.

Original Comments

Comments from the original WordPress blog post.

Tohoku Ben — 2004-08-13

Hey - I checked out the first day of SS as well. Pretty much agree. Avril was a disappointment - Zero crowd interaction; she didn’t seem to have a care of where she was or who she was playing too. Was basically already headed off stage by the last cymbal crash. Who knows, maybe she was having a bad day, but I think fans expected more. The All American Reject who opened on the Marine Stadium were GREAT. Good tunes, good repoire with the crowd; impressive. As was Sivertide. Not sure if you caught these guys or not, as you said you headed to Pennywise; we left Pennywise and headed indoors, and just caught the last tune of ST. REALLY impressed. SAD SAD SAD that I missed their set. Kind of straight ahead, 70’s style rock. What I heard reminded me of the Black Crowes first album (in the sence of classic, olderstyle rock). Solid singer, rock/blues riffed guitarist, and they don’t even have a full length album out. They were almost as excited as the crowd; singer thanked them all afterwards, brought out the previous band and thanked them, then came back onstage 3 times while the crew was taking down just to video tape the audience, toss some EP CD’s to the crowd, then finally to toss his vest into the crowd. Check out silvertidemusic.com - looking foward to their album.

Yes, was also d’pointed that the Darkness in all of their falsetto-hood cancelled as well - they would have been good to see.

Greenday was impressive as well. I’ve liked their hits, but wouldn’t consider myself a CD buying fan. They level-up a few notches for sure though - GREAT interaction with the crowd; smooth set. To hear the whole stadium singing, and then chatting OOOOOOOooooooo for the encore was something else. The guy-out-of-the-crowd-stand-in guitar’s song-ending guitar jump was classic, and finishing with Queen’s WRTChampions, and then fireworks; will see them live again if given the chance.

graham (nanikore) — 2004-08-13

Hi Ben,

Thanks for the posts!

Yeah, the temperature has been pretty hot this summer. I’m hoping for a matching cold winter for the snowboarding, but I’m not sure if it follows. I’ve been using the fan where possible, but the humidity is what seems to get me.

I’m wondering if my electricity bill goes up when they do some more checks on the powerstations and realise they all need rebuilding. I was pleased actually at SummerSonic that I didn’t get any sunburn for being out all day (factor 50 and a good hat!). Can’t wait till the end of the month for the Kamakura Beach Party.

Graham

Appleseed - the Movie

Mon, 26 Apr 2004 01:54:39 +0000

Just got back from seeing Appleseed - a CG animated sci-fi film based on the popular manga. Although it’s CG - and very well done CG, the makers have tried to keep it very cell based looking, and the fusion works well.

The story tells of a future where humans have all but destroyed the world, but where some are trying to rebuild from a new state. Human’s now live with Bionoids - human looking clone mixtures who help humans, but who are infertile, and with limited life spans. Into this there are several main characters who race to discover whether humans can live without destroying everything.

There’s a deep political plot with quite a few twists, but more importantly there are huge robots, battle suits and lots of gun battles. It’s a great film - decent plot, and none of the tiring speak-a-thons of ‘Innocence’ or ‘Matrix : Revolutions’.

Also, it features a pretty decent, loud score and soundtrack, available on CD.

Zatoichi

Sun, 19 Oct 2003 02:31:20 +0000

I finally got to see ‘Zatoichi’ with Beat/Kitano Takeshi a few days ago, thanks to an English subtitle version at Virgin Roppongi Hills. I have to say that although it’s a bit slow, it’s actually a good film with a fairly complex plot and some well acted character parts. The fighting is well done although some of the computer effects aren’t well done.

The most impressive part of the film has to be the soundtrack (including the tap dancing samurai at the end of the film) - the sounds of people chopping wood, walking, sowing rice and other facets of everyday life are woven into the soundtrack - it’s very atmospheric. I still have no idea why Takeshi dyed his hair blonde for this role…

A good film, check out the DVD, or, for the sake of the soundtrack, try to get to see it at the cinema.