08.04.07
ID3 tags are dead
Well, they’re not yet. Which is sad. Even if I’m the only one, I hope they will not be used in two years. Did you notice how restrictive the management of music with ID3 tags is? You have these predefined categories like artist, genre, album. When you want to browse through your library you have to stick to these categories. What if you want to sort your music by quality? This is the stuff I listen when I need to relax and these songs I listen on the go… What if you want to have other categories? I have stuff I don’t listen anymore very often but want to keep them as a memory or whatever. One day a friend loan me her iPod for an irrelevant reason. I put a bit of my music collection on it and it was hard to find in there between all the stuff of my friend. There are numberless reasons to want to have individual structures.
What I do is just use a folder structure. Some players support this out of the box, others run Rockbox. It works very well for me. I just drag and drop the folder if I want to get an album from the “trial” place to the “yeah, great” place. Editing ID3 tags is a mess.
This will not be the solution since tags are very common. And they have some serious advantages. What I have in mind is an easily configurable tagging system. You still have the ID3 stuff but can modify it. Out of the box it may work just like ID3. But you can change it, create new categories and change them in several ways. Of course the players also had to be more flexible.
This is my little vision of the future of music browsing. If it doesn’t happen I will just stick to my folders as long as possible.
08.03.07
AudioXplorer
There is a nice application called AudioXplorer. It’s an oscilloscope which uses the sound input as source. You can also tell it to use the microphone, but this makes no sense for an oscilloscope. Since sound is stereo you have two channels. As mentioned here the sound output is not the best in the world. However I didn’t test the input. For simple usage scenarios it could be sufficient. The spectrum of course is limitted too. For handicraft enthusiasts it may be a nice solution.
08.02.07
MacBook Pro and Sound
I have this amazing new MacBook Pro. One thing about it is very annoying. I know it before, but didn’t expect it to be so bad. It’s the 3.5mm sound output. It makes noisy and beeping sounds. And it’s too loud. I talked about this problem with a few people and most of them can hear it too. The only solutions seems to be a attenuation. Since the noise is independant of the system sound intensity you can increase the volume and pull everything down again. I use the attenutator which came with my Ultimate Ears Super.Fi 5 Pro earphones. These earphones may support the problem because they are pretty good. They transmit fine sounds quite well. That’s good but works also with unwanted sounds like the MacBook Pro noises. Anyway, I’ll never go back to crappy earphones. Once I started using this kind of earphones the models went up in quality and price. I started with ER-6 from Etymotic Research. Not much of low frequencies but very clear. I believe they were the clearest phones I used ever. But since I believe in change the next ones were the E3c from Shure. There were the basses again. Just when they broke I was lucky enough to win the Super.Fi 5 Pro. They have two sound converters in each phone. However the difference to the Shure was not as big as I expected. But they are still the most pleasing phones I ever had.
