How to Videos

When we designed and launched the new version of the site we found we had a little problem. The tiny bit of code that, we thought, enabled us to display our How To videos worked on our Macs here but sadly that didn't translate to the online version. Result, something of a blank page. Sorry.

Good news!

We've fixed it so you can now see our "How To" videos.

The New Site

This is a great time to look back and reflect on the last twelve months. Before I turn my thoughts to the coming year a couple of things stand out about 2014.

The first is the decline in highly compressed music. We spent much of 2013 persuading clients that Apple Lossless was the way to go, but last year little persuading was needed. Lossless is now the standard people are asking for and I can't remember the last time I had to even debate the issue, Apple Lossless it is and that brings me to the first "farewell" from 2014 - the USB memory stick.

Ok it's over ten years since we started ripping CDs for people but the first batch of music went back on some CDs. Then we took the step up to DVDs, wow, seven times the capacity of the humble CD. For some years DVDs did us proud but as collection sizes grew and small disc drives became affordable that's been the standard way to get music back to our clients. Yes, there have been one or two people with collections small enough to fit onto a USB thumb drive but we've never really found a need for the 8Gb and 16Gb units although we've used a couple of 32Gbs.

So, at the end of 2014, it's hard to think we'll be using any memory sticks for CD ripping in 2015.

The second observation concerns the type of units our clients are buying. At the start of podSERVE all our clients wanted their music on Apple iPods. Although that remains a strong thread so many of our clients now focus on Sonos systems. And that's what I've been thinking of when returning music to clients. The units they're buying now are predominantly wireless. Even the once ubiquitous Bose Soundock has gone Bluetooth. Who needs a mess of cables when it can be avoided?

In 2015 I'm expecting to see fewer hardwired systems in clients houses. I'd also like to see the back of all those wires we have festooned about our houses to charge and sync our portable devices.

Gone and Going

This is a great time to look back and reflect on the last twelve months. Before I turn my thoughts to the coming year a couple of things stand out about 2014.

The first is the decline in highly compressed music. We spent much of 2013 persuading clients that Apple Lossless was the way to go, but last year little persuading was needed. Lossless is now the standard people are asking for and I can't remember the last time I had to even debate the issue, Apple Lossless it is and that brings me to the first "farewell" from 2014 - the USB memory stick.

Ok it's over ten years since we started ripping CDs for people but the first batch of music went back on some CDs. Then we took the step up to DVDs, wow, seven times the capacity of the humble CD. For some years DVDs did us proud but as collection sizes grew and small disc drives became affordable that's been the standard way to get music back to our clients. Yes, there have been one or two people with collections small enough to fit onto a USB thumb drive but we've never really found a need for the 8Gb and 16Gb units although we've used a couple of 32Gbs.

So, at the end of 2014, it's hard to think we'll be using any memory sticks for CD ripping in 2015.

The second observation concerns the type of units our clients are buying. At the start of podSERVE all our clients wanted their music on Apple iPods. Although that remains a strong thread so many of our clients now focus on Sonos systems. And that's what I've been thinking of when returning music to clients. The units they're buying now are predominantly wireless. Even the once ubiquitous Bose Soundock has gone Bluetooth. Who needs a mess of cables when it can be avoided?

In 2015 I'm expecting to see fewer hardwired systems in clients houses. I'd also like to see the back of all those wires we have festooned about our houses to charge and sync our portable devices.

Vinyl for Sonos

Right from day one we've been asked if we can rip vinyl LPs to digital files. Yes, we've tried, no we can't do it economically with decent quality. In the early days our clients just wanted to listen to music on an iPod. Today so many of our clients want to stream their music to in-house systems such as Sonos.

So how about a turntable that plays vinyl albums and can connect to your Sonos?

Flexson, an accessory maker for the Sonos range, has introduced a record turntable which will stream music direct into your Sonos network. Called the VinylPlay it costs around £330 (cheap for a decent turntable) and apparently it will also rip music from albums into digital files - good luck with that. And they have a YouTube video which explains all, enjoy.

http://youtu.be/s6hUDBzJ3cA

The Worst Data Grooming Case Ever?

Last week I collected a Western Digital MyBook Live from a client who has been experiencing major problems with their music. Let me paint the picture - a busy family, husband, wife & children, they have a "family" Mac along with a wired home featuring Sonos music streaming through their home. Sensibly they have a NAS drive installed to store their music and most importantly make it available through Sonos when the family computer is switched off or otherwise engaged. In my opinion, it's a sensible set up.

Yet its gone wrong, the whole thing has become a mess which is why the NAS drive is here with us while we try to unpick the problems and put it all right.

We have been through the NAS, along with three large folders of music copied off their Mac. We've put a first pass of the entire collection into iTunes on one of our Mac Minis and this is what we've found. The total music library is just over 1.2 Tb in size and iTunes has found 3,115 albums. That's a pretty big music collection.

There are 58,619 tracks - sadly a large number which are either not labelled other than some sort of track name, tagged with an album name such as Unknown or Untitled or something that isn't right. There's a fair sprinkling of missing artist names, and one family member has tried to tackle the problem with classical music composer names by replacing the proper artist / performer field with the composer's name.

Our software has made a first pass to tackle the issue of duplicated tracks. As soon as you look at the library in iTunes you can see duplicates and the first count is 16,493 duplicate tracks. Around 25% duplicated. No wonder they've been complaining that "Sonos has gone wrong, it keeps playing the same track over and over again". Actually Sonos is fine, they are so many duplicated tracks in their library it just sounds like its playing the same one over, and over again. You can see the same track listed four or more times.

So the nest step is to remove the duplicated tracks. Our software deletes the tracks from the main music library and deletes it from the hard drive at the same time, rather than empty trash after the operation. Although this sounds simple we're erasing some 400 GB of data and that's going to take a long, long time. So what do we do tomorrow?

Once the music library has been shrunk down we'll go through the album names. We have to do that more or less manually and already we can see yet more duplication. Someone has added a chunk of CDs and helpfully added the word "NEW" before the album name, despite there being many of the same albums in iTunes already. You can see many more examples of duplicated albums being added by someone not checking to see if the music was there already. Actually iTunes does check if an album is in your library when you insert the CD but it can't if the tracks have been ripped already and added as files with a different album name.

Once we've brought some further consistency to the album names we'll take a look at performer names, another area of rich potential for duplication. Tidy up album and performer names then again look for duplicates and that will probably weed out another 500 - 600 tracks.

I've also made a note to look at Genres. This library has 98 entries under the genre heading. That's not in itself a problem but there are some typos - Hip Hip for Hip Hop, Opera and Operae - so we'll fix those. In terms of time, not a big task. What will take longer is fixing the classical composer names and examining the consistency of applying genres to classical music. If you're going to split-off some tracks from Classical into Chamber or Opera you've got to be consistent for the whole of the work in question. No point in having the first album of an opera in "Opera" if you leave the rest in Classical.

And yes, when we've done all that we run de-duplicate again. Why? We operate a pretty tight definition of a duplicate track - we remove only those tracks that have the same name, same track number, genre and appear on the same album. As we tidy up more tracks fall into the clutches of the de-dupe sweep.

Then we're on to checking for album art (on a library this size, filling gaps could be another afternoon's work) and trying to fill in the gaps in artist and album names using some of our "secret sauce". When this is all done we'll have a simplified and slimmed-down library, primarily one without duplicated tracks. The final step will be to delete the originals from the MyBook drive and copy it all back. Sounds simple, but that in itself can be a 48 - 72 hour chore. At least next weeks tube strike has been called off so we'll be able to take the drive back on Monday or Tuesday.

Pirates, Players, Music Lovers, Thieves and 24 Bits

Today's Times has a brief announcement suggesting that very soon there will be a major announcement from Apple. A new music file format. One that cannot be copied. Really?

Just think about that, and wonder if there might be a grain of truth behind a different story.

If there's going to be a new music file format Apple are going to be spending money - in all probability a lot of money. Why? To confound those dratted pirates? Well they might be, but piracy is hardly Apple's problem in that it doesn't really impact their revenues. If anyone takes a hit it's the music labels. This is an area I follow closely and I haven't heard any squawks, neither parrot nor pirate, from the industry for ages. It may all be happening behind the scenes but I don't see any evidence that the industry is trying to get Apple or anyone else to do more to control piracy. I think it's an issue whose time has come and gone.

Would it even work? I remember when labels issued CDs that supposedly couldn't be copied or wouldn't play in a PC. You might also remember the trouble Sony got into for injecting code onto peoples PCs when they played a music CD. As a CD ripping service we've worried about our business being abruptly curtailed by some techno sleight of hand that rendered our service invalid. There's been nothing so far.

So I don't think Apple are spending money to protect tin pan alley, nor wipeout those of us who are left in this market. But I do expect, and very much hope, Apple are working on something and if it's what I suspect it is, then it would need to be very secure.

High quality digital music that goes beyond CD quality. Specifically 24 bit music.

At the moment whether you rip your own CDs, use an outsourced CD ripper, or buy music from iTunes Music Store (or Amazon or Spotify etc.) you get music that is recorded using a calculation based on 8 bits of data storing each part of sound. If you could make that sound using more data, using 24 bits, then think how much better the sound would be. It would take digital music into a new league of high quality audio. But ....

But one, the files would be huge. The trend over recent years has been to move to much less compressed music as storage costs have fallen. Bigger drives abound in laptops, home PCs, network attached storage and bigger portable devices like the iPod Classic. But haven't Apple just killed the Classic, leaving only the iPod touch and the iPhone as portable devices? They have, and of course some while ago Apple introduced iTunes Match which for a modest cost gave you 256 kbps music stored on Apple's computers and probably streamed to your player over the internet.

Imagine the impact on Apples server farms if they had to hike their hard drives up by a factor of three or four to handle 24 bit music.

Imagine the cost of having to stream from Apple HQ files that are hogging three times as much bandwidth.

But two, where do you get source 24 bit music files? Not from the CDs you buy from Amazon or your local music shop, even if you still have one. Existing CDs are all 8 bit and you can't transfer from 8 to 24. The only place you'd get that high quality music is from the labels who have the original tapes. Remastered you'd then have a source of 24 bit music.

But three, the music industry loves money for old rope. Remember when we went from vinyl LPs to cassette tapes, and how we were expected to buy tiny plastic boxes of music to play in the car or on our Sony Walkmans? Remember when CDs came out, and the industry hoped we'd all be replacing vinyl and cassettes with CDs? All of these were happy days for the labels, tsunamis of cash from the music loving public without the need for anyone to troupe back into the studios to re-record all those millions of tracks we know and love.

The stars are combined in heavenly aspect. Better quality music via 24 bit files is the next big thing. The labels would love another excuse to urge us all to re-buy all that music we know and love.

But four, they'd go ape if they thought there was anyway we could copy that music or use it to create super-CDs to share, and in so doing defeat their revenue hopes. Equally Apple would keep their place at the head of the music quality queue.

However - for this to work for Apple they would ideally want a music file that squared the circle. A format that would be 24 bits in quality, but equal to or ideally even smaller than current iTunes Music Store / Music Match files (8 bit, 256 kbps AAC). I can't see the labels allowing access to their source material without a technological guarantee that the new files couldn't be copied.

So, my conclusion is that Apple will shortly announce a new music file format that is higher quality and more compressed. Maybe they're even talking to the nice folk who made all those DVD / CD drives we used to have in Apple systems. Sony. They have a technology called ATRAC.

How to Download the New U2 Album - Songs of Innocence

First you'll need to have an iTunes Store account. Opening an account is free so if you don't already have one, that's your starter. Assuming you do have an account it's pretty simple.

Open iTunes and hit the Store button on the right of your screen.






Look for Quick Links, arrowed above, it's on the right of the screen.



After you've clicked that, as well as anything else you've purchased, you will see that waiting for you is the new U2 album. So click on that and it will start to download from Apple to your computer. To get the new album onto your iPod or iPhone simply sync with your computer in the usual way and you'll be ready to enjoy U2.

Sonos + NAS + iTunes = Trouble

Sonos users who store their music on a NAS drive may be falling foul of an iTunes glitch.

This is what can happen. You point your Sonos Controller to the iTunes music library on your NAS and you do the same with iTunes. At the outset all may be neat and tidy but after a while things change, let's suppose you face a problem of some duplicate tracks.

How do you fix this? Naturally you'd go into iTunes and highlight the tracks in question, then delete them. When you do this everything will look neat and tidy, with just a single copy of the track / album. When you play music, the deleted tracks don't play, just as you'd expect.

Then you log into your music via Sonos, when you find that much to your surprise the duplicated tracks are still in your music library. How did this happen? Well, I recently found that the way iTunes operates in handling drives such as a NAS, is that in effect although the files leave the iTunes database the files remain on the NAS drive. My understanding is this applies only to files stored on a NAS (rather than an internal hard drive, or a directly connected USB drive).

How can you get round this. First, you should check to see if music you delete from iTunes does actually leave the NAS. I've only tried this on a couple of makes of NAS and so can't confirm it happens on all systems. If your music is being left behind by iTunes I think you have three options. One is to manually go through your folders on the NAS and manually delete the files that are duplicated. Second is to copy all your music off the NAS onto another (internal or directly connected HD), run iTunes against it, then copy your files back onto the NAS - but for a large library will take a long time using this method.

The third option is to use some software that recognises this and has a feature that directly deleted the tracks on the NAS you want to erase. The program is called Dupin and its available from Doug's Applescripts. You'll need to look at the options for deleting tracks and select the route for direct deletion without going via the trash can.

Mighty Red Face Here at NAS Central

One of the reasons I give to people for outsourcing their work, for example getting us to rip their CDs rather than do it themselves, is that we make the mistakes first - so you don't have to. Indeed I may well have said that to the client who has asked us to spread the musical love across his three properties, each of which has a NAS drive. His simple requirement is for a copy of his music to be placed onto a hard drive, then copied across to other drives, which will be installed inside the NAS box in each location.

We've had some problems with this. Initially we'd been given some Seagate drives to use but after much trial and far too many errors we established that the drives, whilst OK to use inside a PC or a free-standing USB enclosure, simply weren't up to the task of running trouble-free in the NAS enclosures he's bought. After much toing-and-froing we now have a collection of Western Digital Red drives, tailor made for a NAS. Very good they are too. We're in the process of copying 1.5 TB data from one of our PCs across the LAN to the NAS.

On Saturday evening I was talking to a friend who manages a major international network for a financial services company. We talked about what I was doing and I mentioned this project, which for us is rather unusual, for him rather routine. I told him how long each transfer is taking and ran through a list of the kit we're using - mainly variations on gigabit ethernet. He thought for a few moments then said it shouldn't be taking anywhere near as long as that. Doing some mental arithmetic out loud he thought it should take around half the time the first transfer had taken.

Why?

"Have you got your wires crossed?" he asked. I didn't think that possible but first thing this morning, before we started on disc 2, I was checking cables and connections. The router plugs were all present and correct as were the plugs into the NAS and the PC into which the USB hard drive with the source files was plugged. I even made sure that USB 3 interface was functioning OK, which it was. The only thing left to check was the quality of the cables. All looked fine and blue, no sign of mousey rodent attention, and the two key cables ran neatly under a mat. Two one side, two coming out the other. For some reason I thought it best to lift the mat and see what was underneath. To my amazement the wires were (physically) crossed, and the effect of the odd footfall on the mat was that at the crossover point the cables were compressed. I took a close look and they both looked fine and undamaged but when I put them and the mat back I made sure neither ran over the other.

When I started the data transfer I didn't think it would make any difference, but something has punched the go-faster button. Just as my friend predicted, data transfer seems to be running twice as fast as it did first time across. So if you have any data wires running anywhere in your home or office, just check that transfer rates aren't being artificially choked by a crossed line or two.

Sonos - Major Upgrade

Sonos have just announced a major update to the features of their product line - you no longer need the bridge unit to connect their mesh into your home network. Yippee. Why is that of any consequence?

First, it saves you money. You were being forced to buy a box that did next to nothing for you. As the name implied it was simply the bridge from your home data network into Sonos and their proprietary mesh network. Second, it's yet another box, something else to go wrong, another set of wires, another thingy to dust.

Mainly its another element of complexity removed from the equation. Over the last few years I've become a frequent visitor at several London houses where the owners had "lost" their Sonos system thanks to the bridge failing. It's never been a hardware failure and usually remedied in a few minutes but it's a weak link that all too often fails.

Restoring the link is counter-intuitive. You have to make the link work and then crawl around the house bringing each bit into play. We've got the hang of it but it took a while to realise what the game was. Maybe this was all OK when Sonos was a product sold by premium suppliers whose hand maidens of audio technology would lovingly massage their boxes into life - for a fee - but today Sonos are pitching the same consumer market as Apple. Sonos needs to play nicely with everyone else in the home technology market, this is a big step towards that goal.