Thursday, July 28, 2005

Updated my music collection plus new playlist

Dammit, I just spent my entire evening ripping up twenty odd albums into Windows Media Audio v9.1 format. I am so dead tired...

Well the reason being is I quite like the idea of having album covers on my PDA being shown while the music plays. It is of zero value I know, because who the hell looks at their player while listening to music (except those iPodders on the Tube who always seek excuses to flash the white thingy). But you know, I kinda like the idea...so yes, I spent a couple of the past few hours encoding the albums with dbPowerAMP.



Tried a couple of settings but found WMA 9.1 96kbps, 44kHz VBR 2-pass to be a pretty good middle way between quality and small file size. Yes, the tracks are heavily compressed but I am no audiophile and can hardly tell the difference between 96kbps and 160kbps, even though I am equipped with a Shure e2c.

Managed to fit in almost 300 tracks (600Mb) on my card. I had to leave space for the huge 220Mb Lexipedia (portable Wikipedia) handbook. Not sure why I bother keeping it. The articles are outdated and the software is buggy.

The only problem with using WMP 10 on my PDA is there isn't any equalizer. Apart from that I am pretty happy with it. I archived my Ogg files just in case some enterprising individual ever writes a Ogg player with picture support (PalmOS already has one in the form of BuskerMP3 - it is dead buggy though).

Oh well, here's hoping.

My current 'London Underground'* playlist:

Bloc Party - Silent Alarm
The Bravery - The Bravery
British Sea Power - The Decline of British Sea Power & Open Season
The Coral - The Invisible Invasion
The Dead 60s - The Dead 60s
Doves - The Last Broadcast & Lost Souls
Foo Fighters - In Your Honour (CD1)
The Futureheads - Futureheads
Garbage - Bleed Like Me
Gwen Stefani - Love, Angel, Music, Baby
The Go! Team - Thunder, Lightning Strike
K.T. Tunstall - Eye to the Telescope
Kaiser Chiefs - Employment
The Killers - Hot Fuss
The Magic Numbers - The Magic Numbers
Malcolm Middleton - Into the Woods
Maximo Park - A Certain Trigger
Nine Inch Nails - With Teeth
Pixies - Doolittle
The Ordinary Boys - Brassbound
Thirteen Senses - The Invitation
Sons & Daughters - The Repulsion Box
Stephen Fretwell - Magpie
The Tears - Here Come The Tears

* Because I only really have time to listen to music on the Underground/Bus/Train.

BTW, here is a roundup on the HTC Wizard (aka i-mate JAM2, T-Mobile MDA Compact 2 etc.). Looks pretty ugly to me. Not sure about the QWERTY keypad - I would rather have a traditional numerical keypad. The processor is a 200Mhz T.I. OMAP variant. But after all the problems I had with my current mobile, I am not sure if I want to trust my pounds in another HTC product.

Well good night!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

MortPlayer supports album covers. And it's free.

http://www.freewareppc.com/multimedia/mortplayer.shtml

Jon Choo said...

I tried Mort Player once, the GUI is atrocious.

Cheers anyway.