(Phaysis)

Just so you know, I’ve been nerding out pretty hard this past week.

Last Monday, I picked up a very used Roland D-50 keyboard at the pawn shop. Although it was manufactured in 1987, it still output audio and the MIDI still works, but the poor thing has problems (I should’ve talked them down on price, but even still I got a decent deal). All of the keys on the fingerboard worked, but a few of the keys had screwed-up velocity sensitivity. The pitch bend was busted. And some of the panel buttons either don’t work or require a heavy push to get them to work. This poor piece of gear needed some serious TLC.

Knowing what I was up against, I made the due diligence to get some required tools to do the cleanup and minor repairs. Got some paint brushes for dusting, a wire brush to scrape any rust, some 91% rubbing alcohol (because 70% has too much water), and a can of electronic contact cleaner.

Within an evening I had it taken apart. The damned thing had spiderwebs and cat hair in it. No wonder it half worked. Last owner didn’t give a shit, and it shows. I got most of the crap out of the case in short time, but it took another evening to get the fingerboard completely disassembled, and I mean completely, like down to the frame. Pulled the keys off and soaked them in soapy water; they were as nasty as the bottom of a computer mouse.

It took a few evenings, but I got both circuit boards under the keys cleaned, got the rubber contacts wiped down, all the dust and “water damage” (to doctor the truth) are cleaned up. I found proof that the keyboard has been worked on before by someone who didn’t have the smarts or the tools to do the reworks correctly, and that probably accounts for one of the keys reporting full velocity on each press. I redid the rework; hopefully that fixes that.

Yesterday, I decided that I was tired of having sub-par tools to do electronics work. After having the pleasure of working with professional soldering equipment at work, my piss-poor Radio Shack iron just won’t do anymore, so I went to the electronics store and got a good Weller soldering station, a handful of different tips, a bottle of solder flux, a dispenser, and a cheap multimeter to replace the piece-of-shit I’ve had to use for the past 25 years. Nerding hard core.

This afternoon, I pulled the entire unit apart, taking the boards and cable assemblies off of the master frame. Took them to the balcony for dusting and a heavy session with the contact cleaner. Afterwards, more of the panel buttons went non-functional, so I spent part of this evening tracking down replacement parts. I desoldered and removed one of the switches, and I’ll take it to work tomorrow to get its exact dimensions with some proper measuring tools. If it matches the replacement switches I’ve found so far, I’ll be placing an order for an entire panel’s worth of buttons.

This is all very exciting!

Hopefully by next week’s end, I’ll have a fully-functional Roland D-50, refurbished and ready to go. And then the hard part will begin: writing music. D’oh!

Now that my CD collection’s ripped to FLAC, I had to filter through my entire MP3 collection and pull out all of the MP3 rips of said albums. That took a few hours, to say the least. Still have those copies, just in case, but after symlinking my FLAC folder into my music folder so my player software can pick up the new files, I really don’t need the old MP3 rips. But they’re there, y’know, just in case.

I use Rhythmbox for my music listening. It’s OK as a player, and it’s got some…idiosyncrasies, but it’s usable. Usually. In my early phase of ripping my collection, I examined Rhythmbox’s handling of FLAC content. It plays fine, edits tags fine. It will even transcode the FLAC if you transfer it to a portable media device. The selection of file format is automatic based on the player, but will default to MP3. In your preferences, under “Music” tab, use the dropdown to select your preferred format — this is usually for ripping CDs with Rhythmbox (ugh, use Sound Juicer instead), but also applies to transcoding for media players. I edited my MP3 profile to encode at 256KB instead of my old 192KB.

That leaves the final piece of the puzzle: sharing this collection with portable thumbdrives. According to some docs out there, you can have Rhythmbox automatically transcode when copying media to a flash thumbdrive by placing an empty file called .is_audio_player in the root folder of the device. Then, when you insert the thumbdrive, Rhythmbox will notice, check for the file, and act like it’s a portable media device if it sees the file. Then you can drag-drop the files to the drive, and everything will be automatically transcoded. It’s a cludge, but what the hell.

As an aside: I know the latest version of Ubuntu desktop ejected Rhythmbox and is now using Banshee as the default player. I assume it’s got similar functionality, but I’ve not tested it myself. I’m just not ready to jump into “Natty Narwhal” or whatever they’re calling it. Progress comes with clenched fists.

It’s finally done. My month-long project to rip my entire CD collection into FLAC files was completed this afternoon. 560 albums, 186GB, roughly 339.2MB per album. Aside from a few low-priority sounds effects discs (and a copy of U2′s “All That You Can’t Leave Behind” which got destroyed in the ripping process), here’s my collection up to this point:

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This question goes out to all you librarians and taxonomists in my readership.

I have a large music collection, and I make every effort to keep all of my file tags as clean, correct and complete as possible. This allows me to easily search my collection and drill down to the artist, album, and song I demand to hear at that moment. If you’ve ever seen my CD collection, you’re aware of my meticulous arranging and sorting by certain criteria. The same is with my electronic collection. Physically, I prefer to sort by artist, then by album release date. Electronically, I can sort by any taxonomy I so choose. Easy enough.

So, going back to my library research orientation in my first year in college, I learned that books are sorted by subject, then by the author’s name, last name first, and then by book title. If the first word of the title is an article like “a”, “an” or “the”, it is moved to the end of the title after a comma and the book is sorted appropriately. So if I were to search for H.G. Well’s “The Time Machine”, I would search in the fiction section under the author “Wells, H.G.”, then for “Time Machine, The” somewhere after “Ten Thousand Leagues Under the Sea”. This makes sense. If the author was a publishing group or authorship can’t be pinned to one author, then it would be sorted under the group name.

I do the same with my music collection. If the album is published under a band name, then it’s sorted alphabetically under the band name. Aerosmith would be sorted before Aphex Twin. But if the album is published under the artist’s name, then it’s sorted by the artist’s name, last name first. So Fiona Apple would be sorted between Aphex Twin and Apples In Stereo under Apple, Fiona. This makes sense.

When I first built my music collection, back when music software wasn’t so smart, I would manually put articles at the end of the album and song titles because the software could clump all of the “The”s together, etcetera. It’s a pain and a hassle to do it manually, and sometimes the “extra album info” features of the software would break because it didn’t recognize the album title, but I lived with it. Luckily, modern music software has gotten smart about the use of articles in the song and album titles and sorts appropriately in the music browser interface.

But the problem comes with the artist names, which I store in my particular, perfectly reasonable way according to my training and my experience with sorting physical media: last name, then first. However, the software doesn’t know that I’m listening to Fiona Apple; it searches the web for Apple, Fiona and finds no data to show. Just like the old days with the title articles, so it is with artist names.

So what do you guys do about this? Is saving the artist name as “Last, First” still viable, or is it a vestigial relic of an older technology? I like to sort by this method because it makes sense to me; I shudder to think about trying to scroll through a page of Michaels just to get to Michael Hedges. I don’t know, maybe doing the “Last, First” method is as obsolete in the electronic realm as typing double spaces after sentences; a complete necessity on technologies now rendered obsolete. Should I get modern and save artist names in the natural format? Most player software has a search box to allow me to jump straight to my desired songs, but I’d have to change my habits.

What’s your thought?

Last weekend, I began the slow, arduous process of re-ripping my entire CD collection into files easily playable on my computer. This time, instead of ripping into 192kbit MP3 with the LAME codec (like I did last time), I’m ripping them into FLAC. This has important implications.

First and foremost is that FLAC is lossless, meaning no data is thrown away between the transition from CD to the final sound file. MP3 is a lossy codec, and uses tons of statistical mojo to analyze the sound data of the CD and throw away the bits that your ears can’t hear, crunching the file size tremendously. The problem with this method is that you’re losing the quieter nuances of your music. FLAC’s strength is that it’s able to take the input waveforms and chop them up into similar, easy-to-compress chunks, making the file smaller than the original uncompressed form but on playback the audio is a perfect, exact copy of its original form.

Secondly, since FLAC doesn’t compress the file sizes as well as MP3 (with the obvious quality tradeoffs), the overall space needed to store my music collection has grown tremendously. Instead of storing an entire album in roughly 80 megabytes of space, it now takes an average of 350 megabytes. That’s a large bite to swallow, but with the falling prices of high-capacity hard drives, it’s nothing nowadays. Considering the audio CD format stores around 700 megabytes, that’s not so bad.

I’ve been meaning to do this, because even with my bad ears I can still sometimes hear the strange audio artifacts of the MP3 compression — called “sizzle” in the industry — when I’m listening to my stuff. After I ripped my first disc and gave a listen, I was shocked at the quality difference. There were little pieces of the sound, stuff from the studio, or the audience, or quiet stuff put into the mix, that I never knew was there after listening to the MP3-encoded form for years. The sound came out of my speakers; FLAC saves the exact same stereo phasing that’s mixed into the CD in the final file, and no amount of MP3 bitrate is going to capture that level of nuance. I’m shocked.

So last weekend, I bought a 1 Terabyte hard disk (that’s roughly 1,000,000 Megabytes), installed it, and started ripping the CDs on my shelf. Within two days, I had the shelf of CDs I’ve acquired since 2007; about 60 discs total. And then I cracked open the 120-pound crate of CDs that I’ve collected since my first disc in 1991. These were packed up at my last place, and I’ve just now gotten around to digging them out. I’m about 1/8th of the way through my entire collection, so I expect this to take a while.

When it’s all said and done, my hope is that I will never have to break out a CD again to get quality audio. The end FLAC files can be used as perfect copies to produce any sort of MP3, OGG, or next-generation compressed audio file for ease of portability. Any other use (like for listening at home), I can rely on the FLAC.