Toby's journal

That is my new guitar!

I swear I looked at a few hundred new and second hand guitars, but in the end settled upon this one.. I liked the way it looks, and the way it is balanced/fits on me, and I'm told it's a good quality body too. One massive chunk of solid "Alder" wood. (I like the raw un-lacquered look, rather than the shiny finish most electric guitars seem to have.)

After some experimentation, I think it sounds nicest with the bridge pickup and centre pickup linked.. I am using quite "clean" sounding settings while I'm learning, so no doubt I'll figure out what works well for other sounds in due course.

I've been playing with it and reading online tutorials for a couple of days now, and people weren't kidding when they said my fingers would be sore! However I'm happy that I can now just about pluck out the intros to "Hurt" and "Wish you were here" - slow, but recognisable.

Thanks to Tom, Bekki and Sean for their advice so far. Much appreciated!

MP3s encoded in the bad old days usually sound rather bad. Not only were they often encoded at 96, 112 or 128 kbps, but the encoder software wasn't very smart either and didn't use those few kbps as efficiently as later software would.

After being annoyed by listening to one too many mushy, warbling tracks, I decided to write a script to go through my collection and identify all the albums where the average bitrate over the whole album was too low. (initially the script reported every album where at least one track had a low bitrate, however that resulted in false positives, due to the tendency of artists to have long, mostly empty tracks inbetween "hidden tracks", where modern encoders will justifiably encode all that empty space at the minimum bitrate.)

Using the revised script, I still had well over 400 albums with bitrates of 128 or less! There's another 180 or so which are at 160. :(

I've spent an entire night ripping and encoding my CDs, and only managed about 20 albums. It just takes ages to rip them, at least on my DVDROM drive with high levels of cdparanoia enabled to avoid scratches or glitches. I've also taken to looking for albums on thepiratebay and mininova, since it's a lot easier to just queue them for download rather than hang around ripping them!

However I just checked the latest results from the script, and there's still 385 128k-or-worse albums to go, and I haven't even started on the 160k ones.

I guess if I just try to whittle down a dozen or so every week, in slow moments, I'll gradually work through the lot in a year! I guess I'll target the albums I like and want to listen to a lot first.

I also worry that I should be using FLAC rather than MP3s from lame with preset=extreme, except that to be honest, I can't really hear the difference between the two, and MP3s are far more portable.. If I used FLAC, not only would I need to buy a couple of new harddrives to fit them and the backup copy, but I'd then need to maintain an entire other tree of them in MP3 anyway, so I can play them in the car stereo or on my ipod.


Has anyone else solved this problem (of needing to re-rip everything) before? How did you solve it?

Every time I start Rhythmbox, it says that some music could be loaded because I'm missing the codecs for it..
The music required is in VQF format, a codec that was briefly popular then died. The music is now effectively unplayable. Luckily, it's only an album that I don't care about.

So, which album was encoded (by me) in this now-dead format? "Obsolete" by Fear Factory.

I'm not paying $200 to see Opeth in Melbourne (going rate on ebay). I should have bought tickets earlier :/
Also, apparently Victoria's anti-scalping law is aimed at sporting events, not so much general concerts. Damn :(
Meh. if you can sell out a venue months in advance, surely you should consider playing two sets, or getting a larger venue? (eg. like the Ladytron gig.. original tickets sold out in 48 hours).
Oh well. Have two other gigs lined up that haven't sold out yet at least.

Ripping this meme from nervegasattack..

Step 1: Put your music player on shuffle.
Step 2: Post the first line (unless the first line reveals the song title) from the first 20 songs that play, no matter how embarrassing.
Step 3: Strike through the songs when someone guesses both artist and track correctly.
Step 4: Looking them up on Google or any other search engine is CHEATING!
(Additional: Looking at my Last.FM stream is cheating too!)
Step 5: If you like the game, post your own!

( cut out the meme )

OK that took ages.. it seems I have a lot of music without audible lyrics :/ (not really a surprise).
Oddly, out of 1655 albums, two of them turn up twice in the above 20 tracks.