2007 — 18 May: unglumly with Lumley
Joanna Lumley is "doing" Desert Island Discs as I type. Comment is superfluous. Meanwhile today's Guardian need hardly detain us, though it does contain a grimly fascinating 4-page extract from my current bedside reading (whose acquisition1 in Jonathan's Arcade bookshop went unreported a couple of days ago): Fantasy Island by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson. The subtitle of the book says it all:
Waking up to the incredible economic, political and social illusions of the Blair legacy.
The Martin Rowson front cover image is pretty fine, too. That's Gordon Brown grimly clinging on in the background. But talk about switching from the sublime to the ridiculous. That grey emblem of greyness, John Major, is now rabbiting on about cricket. That's quite enough of BBC Radio 4 for a bit! But since Tony Blair2 is on NPR's Morning Edition now I'm retreating to Radio 3.
To be MP3 or not to be
That certainly seems to be the question. In my brave new world of potentially re-ripping the entire set of CDs, there is much to ponder here for example. Ogg Vorbis also seems to have been making good progress, and then there's the whole issue of variable bit rate (which makes sense, of course) versus FLAC lossless (for example) for me to agonise over.
My listening tests (oh, my aching electrostatically-headphone-fed ears!) suggest I simply cannot reliably tell the difference between highest variable bit rate Ogg Vorbis and highest variable bit rate LAME-encoded MP3. But I can certainly tell the difference in both the resulting file sizes and just as crucial, the elapsed time I will be taking to do the encoding. (After all, I do have some form of life away from my various PCs, hard though it is to describe.) So, it looks as if I'll be roughly doubling my disk storage needs, using LAME 3.97 to produce high variable bit rate MP3s. The only downside being if I cut any of them to CD or DVD compilations, I won't be able to play them on my kit downstairs (which only handles constant bit rate MP3s) but then, given the network server and the network player, why would I be cutting them to disk?
So the next decision is exactly which music server software to use. My current choices seem to include, in likely order of study:
- the curiously-named TwonkyVision (which purports to run [and, indeed, to be easily installed] on my particular brand of NAS drive, making it an instant front-runner for my investigation as I wouldn't need to have any of my PCs on to get my music downstairs),
- iTunes (on Windows and OS X), which has the merit of "just working" on the iMac
- Firefly (on Windows, OS X, and Linux, which has in the past failed to work with the Roku, despite my repeated attempts),
- Windows Media Connect (which has so far failed to work, despite repeated attempts at what are reported by XP as successful installation),
- On2Share (only for Windows Media Player, it seems),
- and Musicmatch Jukebox (if I were running Windows prior to XP).
Biased by whichever one looks like playing most co-operatively with the (now, indispensable) Roku network player.
Ironically, my initial experiments with Roku's own open source Firefly server on XP were not characterised by outstanding success. But each server also has its own opinions about which format to support, and what level of browsing and searching. One thing I've discovered in just a couple of days of successfully using iTunes on the iMac upstairs to serve the MP3s from the NAS drive to the Roku downstairs, is the need for a slicker searching facility. Yet I don't much care for the concept of playlists as what I wish to hear varies too frequently.
Seduction of the Innocent... department
Not merely the title of the book of outpourings from that strange chap Fredric Wertham. I found this amusing site, delved within it for a while, and offer a fairly typical sample here. I used to like Lois Lane. (It seems her well-known curiosity got the better of her during a stay at the Fortess of Solitude and she was suitably chastised by one of the guardian robots!)
Shops etc?
After a reluctant session in M&S wherein She treated me to a few (necessary, I suppose) items3 of clothing, I was allowed to escape into Waterstones, which yielded:
- That's me in the corner by Andrew Collins
- The progressive patriot by Billy Bragg
- Taking liberties, since 1997 by Chris Atkins