Brentwood - Thailand Floods Hit

When clients ask for their ripped CDs to be returned to them on a USB hard drive I normally buy one in Brentwood High Street. For years I shopped in our branch of Dixons but they closed earlier this year so now I rely on Argos.

Argos has been patchy for technology supplies but they do have the advantage of being competitively priced. I’ve just walked in and picked a drive, but not yesterday - they had no disc drives at all. Not a single drive. When I got back I tried to order one from the Argos website but that wasn’t possible, none available for order either for collection in store or home delivery.

This afternoon I had to drive into London to collect CDs so I stopped off in PC World on the way back. Talking to one of their staff about the reduced stock of drives they had and he explained the problem. Apparently 90+% of the worlds supply of drives are made in a relatively small area of Thailand, and they’ve been hit hard by floods recently. He pointed to a sign rationing drives to two per customer until supplies are back to normal.

So, if you want your music files returned on a USB drive we might struggle at least until Thailand has dried out. Wonder if the BBC has a weather forecast for the Far East.

Sonos & High Quality Music

If you’ve seen our CD ripping blog you’ll know we had a panic when the installer of the Sonos system for which we’d ripped several hundred CDs, had pointed to a post on the Sonos website to say AIFF files were not supported.

Here’s a footnote. I was contacted by our client on Monday. He explained that he’d been listening to his music over the weekend and thankfully it was streaming fine. He’s happy, I’m relieved. So we’ll continue to rip CDs for Sonos users, into AIFF, Apple Lossless or into AAC or MP3 formats. With confidence.

Sonos Drops Highest Quality Audio

We don't always get it right, when we get it wrong the best thing is to hold up your hand and apologise. Then fix it. Which I'll have to do today. We've been ripping CDs for nearly eight years, initially exclusively for iPod / iTunes configurations and more recently for Sonos. That part of our business has grown rapidly so today we have ripped CDs for many clients who don't even own an iPod. These music lovers have invested significant sums in their music so naturally they don't baulk at buying a large capacity NAS drive to store their music. Storage capacity isn't an issue in these cases, clients want the highest quality sound. CD ripping for Sonos took us into new territory, that of uncompressed music. The best quality digital music is AIFF. It has the benefit of being entirely uncompressed, it's exactly as appears on the original CD plus the features of a digital "wrapper" that holds the album, artist, track data etc. Before I leapt into this with Sonos clients I made some checks. First, I looked on the Sonos website where it clearly said they support AIFF files. Indeed I looked again earlier today and on the opening sales page for their music player's features it lists AIFF as one of the supported file formats. Second, I rang Sonos and asked them. I got confirmation of what's on the website. So I went ahead with confidence and ripped a batch of CDs for our first client. When we delivered the NAS drive with its files (I think the first one was over 700 CDs) I connected the drive, pointed the Sonos software at it, and updated the library. My client flipped through his controller, hit play, and we listened as Verdi filled the house. Since then I've lost track of the number of Sonos / AIFF configurations we've worked with, all without issue, until yesterday. We ripped just over 650 CDs for a client but the signal drops out. Some tracks play fine, then another drops out. Frustrating and not what anyone wants. My client went back to the installer and he's replied quoting one of the Sonos FAQs - this says that while AIFF is "supported" it is not "recommended". There's a footnote at the bottom of that page which says - Sonos does not recommend choosing AIFF files for your library because of AIFF's outdated metadata support. You can acheive the same audio quality by using FLAC or Apple Lossless, both of which fully support metadata and album art. The installer is interpreting this as if "not recommended" means the same as "unsupported", and is refusing to help our client any further. Where does this leave us? For my client it means I'll have to say sorry, admit that I'd not seen this example of weasel words, and possibly challenge the installers interpretation of the footnote. I will gladly offer to convert his music into Apple Lossless. Enough of my problems. What does this mean? Staggeringly it means Sonos no longer supports the highest quality audio. Nobody who's really into music is going to accept anything less than the best. Sure, Apple Lossless is very good, but it's not the best. If you want music streamed at its best (uncompressed) Sonos has ceded the ground to other suppliers - Apple will stream AIFF all day long, as will better systems such as Crestron. Future home entertainment demands aren't going to be for more compressed formats so unless Sonos can address this they're going to struggle. What does it mean for you, if you're planning to buy a home audio system? Talk this through with your installer but get an unequivocal statement about AIFF before you sign on the dotted line.

Christmas is coming, it's voucher time.

I’ll admit it, I’ve lost track of time. We’ve been so busy these last few weeks it’s been heads down, nose to the grindstone, backs to the wall. Just didn’t look at the calendar. CD ripping like crazy.

We have several amazing clients but one I think of each year is the lady who has bought a Christmas voucher every year for four years. On Monday she rang to remind me what time of the year it is, yes, it’s voucher time. This year we’ve added a bit of a twist, the chance to secure a 10% discount simply by paying in advance. You can take the discount either by paying that bit less for the voucher or by having an extra 10% of CDs ripped by us. Alternatively we’ll bill you after the project is complete.

Click here to read more about our Christmas vouchers.