Cubegeek

Bach Visualization

Analog Delay

Very cool.

The Music Setup at Vault 330

I had a decent week with brainpower and willpower left over after work to actually get geeky again. It's nice to be able to have spare thinking cycles. A couple notes:

Clementine
If you're going to DJ a party, Clementine is the best free music organizer/player. It is singularly brilliant in that it's fast, handles huge libraries and allows you to work from multiple playlists at once. It's the multiple playlist thing that makes it perfect for gauging moods and then switching songs in real time. The other brilliant thing about it is that once you've aggregated a playlist, dragging and dropping them into a destination is easy, no matter what the source of the original song.  The only downside I've found is that it doesn't recognize playlists exported by iTunes. Weird.

XBox to NAS
So my music management setup is something like this. I've got a big media library on my NAS which is sourced from my own semi-deduped archives and partially replicated on a standalone USB external. Input comes from iTunes buys on the macbook and Amazon buys on the WinTel.  I keep a couple powered speakers on the either side of the Wintel monitor (Samson Resolv 50As). I've got Winamp Remote (powered by Orb) on the same box and that's a source for the XBox's Window Media Server client downstairs. That goes to the Samsung widescreen which kicks out preamp level stuff (simple RCA plugs). I've got a Soundcraftsmen preamp that's about 18 years old and still works nicely taking that signal and sends it to Samson 2.1 (Resolv 65s). So basically I use the Samsung source switch to determine what goes into the preamp and that handles the volume on the 2.1.

Now here's the weird part. The XBox WMS client recognizes two sources. One is the Winamp Remote / Orb thing and the other is the NAS itself. The NAS is the 2TB Iomega ix4-200d.  I still haven't quite figured out where and how the XBox picks out where the playlists reside, but I get the feeling that it does a dumb search across the entire machine's declared media folder, searches for file extensions and caches nothing. Oddly, Winamp's CD rips are automatically added as playlists in the Orb source even though they don't generate playlists I recognize. Then again I haven't looked that closely. It's a ton of music to organized (and dedup), and since I only use two or three playlists from the Orb server, I don't bother with the Iomega server. 

Boxee
I had Boxee running on the throwaway netbook that Verizon gave me with FIOS last August. It crawls, it crashes. It makes me want Apple TV.  I have yet to be fully satisfied with Boxee running on any of my boxes. I want to be, but I'm not. Well, actually I only just got my Mac dongle so that I can route video out to VGA from the macbook, so maybe Boxee on OSX might be cool. I'll try that out today and let you know.  I do love the nicety of using the iPhone as a remote, but as I said, Boxee needs horsepower.

MediaMonkey iTunes Winamp
I still have MediaMonkey but I don't use it much. It's not worth the trouble to try to sync my iphone onto different machines. So now that I have Clementine, it's not worth having yet another media player - BTW I never use anything other than VLC for video, unless it's direct from Netflix. So much for MM. Winamp is inter-combobulated with Orb in some strange way. Like a lot of folks, I had the missing dll problem. But since I paid for the Pro subscription back when I was completely fed up with iTunes, I may as well keep it.  The new iTunes 10 is serviceable and although I registered for Ping, it hasn't helped me at all yet. We'll see. iTunes is slightly better than a necessary evil and gets 3 out of 5 stars. 

Hardware
I have an old (old!) Setton integrated amp. It's a thing of beauty, but it is beginning to fail. I wonder if I can find an old crank who can fix it.