Tag: Technology

Plastic Logic E-Reader

I’ve recently come across the plastic logic e-reader and this (at least to me) seems to be an incredible thing. A nicely sized and neat (not as small and ugly as Amazon’s Kindle), thin, light, open (you are supposed to be able to put data in various formats on it, such as pdf-files, presentations and much more) and without backlights (which means it’s for your eye just as reading a sheet of paper and not like staring on a screen)

Here a little video to get you to the excitement level I’m on right now.

And this is only a prototype, they’re planning on making bendable!

Seriously this is going to revolutionize the way we read. The downside: It’s going to cost at least 350$ (or so some assume)

Rockbox - Tuning your portable music-player.

Hi there,
it has been a while, hasn’t it? (Shame on me, I know…)

But let’s cut to the chase, I’m writing this post (and I’m planning to write a few more, but more on that another time) because I have a little spare time on my hands right now.

Now, what’s this post about? Since my portable music player (a Cowon iAudio X5, 60 GB storage, more than you could ever need (or at least I could ever need) for your music) lately had a hard time recognizing the ID3-Tags of newer mp3-files I decided to check out alternative software for mp3-players and I stumbled across rockbox, a open source software for various mp3-players.

Now what is so great about it? Well first of all, it recognizes my files! But it also gives me full (or at least much more - and that is a thing to say with the iAudio X5) control over my music-player. It supports not only mp3 but also (and this is nice because much other softwares don’t) ogg and flac, it provides various ways to view your data, has a built in calculator (hell, if you want to you can even install doom on it) and there are some gorgeous (and functional) themes out there to make your player’s interface a pleasure to the eye. And the best: It’s easy to install and remove if you’re not convinced. So try it out.

Live Bootlegs

I am going to review some excellent live bootlegs, therefore I have decided to explain some things about live bootlegs and I’ll also talk a little about lossless audio files (and converting them into more handy types).

Live bootlegs are recordings of live music shows/appearances, they are recorded by fans with equipment of varying quality. In most cases live bootlegs are not explicitly allowed or even forbidden, but in some cases (like Jason Mraz) the artist himself encourages bootlegging, and also allows the distribution of bootlegs through the web.

Where do I get live bootlegs?
You could try googling, or just go to archive.org.

Now what’s the deal with these odd audio formats (such as Flac or Shorten) you might ask:
Well, let me put it this way. If you record a piece of music, you will get a file of about 30-50 MB at size. This is the raw audio data, and it is called “lossless” because all the data recorded is in that file, nothing has been lost. Then there are lossless compressions, that means the file size of an audio file is shrunken without any actual data being lost. SHORTEN or FLAC for example are such audio formats, the file size with these should be around half of the uncompressed audio file.
You can also compress an audio file with a “lossy” audio format, that means in order to decrease the file size some of the data will be deleted (this will be sound you can’t actually hear with your ears, because the frequency is way to high (or low)), that way you can achieve an audio file with about one tenth of the size of the original lossless, uncompressed audio file.

Now, as I said, bootleggers distribute their recorded music as lossless audio files (they do that, so that the quality of the files won’t degrade through sharing) but for most people these files are way too big, so you will want to reduce their size by converting them into a lossy audio format. (Also most portable music players won’t be able to play lossless audio files)

There are several free and open source applications for various operation systems that can do that for you, here are some. If you run into troubles, need more help or other programs, don’t hesitate to write a comment and I’ll look into it. Because so far I’ve only worked with soundKonverter (I, almost exclusively, use Linux).

LastGraph - Pretty graphs for last.fm users

LastGraph is an ingenious, truly gorgeous web-application developed by Andrew Godwin that gives you, as last.fm user the uncanning ability to shove your entire listening history (or parts of it - you decide) up the lastGraph engine, chose a fitting design (from “Ocean” to “Green”, examples available) and receive a little later (waiting in the queue for your turn, and then rendering the graph takes it’s time) a beautiful graph, either as .pdf or in a scalable vector graphcis format (.svg). Here an example how it could look like:

lastgraph

But hey, wait, you thought that was all? Well, guess again. LastGraph also provides you with a neat timleline graphic, showing how much you listened to music over your whole last.fm career, then there’s the artist history, with timelines for each artist. You can also download your data, if you want to do something with it (possibly even prettyer graphs), and least but not least: The interface created to access all these functions, ist impressively usable and clean.

So: Check it out.

Visualizing Amarok Moodbar .mood files

For this blog (and the use of .mood files in my posts) I have searched for a little script to visualize .mood files of the Amarok Moodbar and actually found a tiny little python script.

It can be found here: .mood visualization script (And here ist the page I found it on).

What is it with these strange pictures by the songs of music reviews?

Long title, I know, sorry.

But I decided not to name it “Amarok Moodbar in my music reviews” because, most won’t know what that it means and to explain that is the aim of this post.

There is a great open source music player called Amarok (for Linux and Unix) and there is a plugin for Amarok called Moodbar, it gives Amarok the ability to produce a specific color-pattern for every song, which allows the user to better find specific points in the song. Or less scientiffically: If I want to easily find a guitar solo in a song, I just have to look at the Moodbar and will (after some getting used to) be able to find the start of the solo.

You can read about the concept behind the moodbar, and how it is generated in this paper.