Ian Dixon asks an excellent question: How do you organize your music library?

I’ve been meaning to write this down for a while, especially now that I have my hardware and Media Center setup quite nicely tweaked and tuned.

My Media Center music collection consists of 18,625 songs in 1479 albums from 529 artists. That “album” count is an interesting one. It encompasses mostly traditional albums – i.e., ripped CDs as well as entire CDs I’ve purchased (DRM-free only) from online music sources or downloaded through a subscription service (more on buying versus subscribing later in this post). The second biggest category of entries on the album list are live shows from sources like Archive.org, and I have a smattering of single tracks that were part of online collections or were downloaded individually that are nonetheless assigned to the album they appear on.

I went completely digital in late 2004, ripping my entire CD collection over the space of a couple of weeks in 2004. I used Windows Media 10 for the job, and as I noted at the time, tagging was a bigger hassles than ripping:

The more tedious part came later, when I went in to review tags. There were a fair number of errors and omissions that I wanted to fix. I found the eMusic Tag Editor indispensable for this task.

These days, I find that Windows Media Player 11 does a more than adequate job of tagging as you rip. The Windows Media database has improved dramatically in the past three years. The first thing I do when I get a new CD is to rip it, either to Windows Media Lossless Audio format or to 320KB MP3. I rarely have to change any tags when I do that, and the editing tools in the Media Library are fine for the job.

Continue reading “How I organize my music library” →

In a comment to my rant about Techmeme yesterday, Adobe’s John Dowdell of Adobe observed:

We need a better news aggregator, one not tied into the paparazzi, AdSense mentality.

I present Exhibit A, which appeared at the top of my Google News "Windows Vista" search in FeedDemon this morning:

If ever a headline were crafted to tie into the "paparazzi, AdSense mentality," this is it. No link, because the column was worthless and you would not thank me if I sent you there.

Who’s using an online backup service? I’ve found Mozy, iDrive, Carbonite, Iron Mountain, and backup.com. Not to mention a few roll-your-own services like Amazon S3, which in turn is used by Jungle Disk.

Anyone out there actually using one of these services? Any recommendations, advice, cautionary tales to offer?

I’ve said for a long time that adding a second monitor to your desktop is one of the best ways to increase your productivity. Currently, I’m using a 24-inch Westinghouse monitor (1920 x 1200 res) and a Samsung 214T (1600 x 1200) in a side-by-side configuration. When the Samsung failed last week, I felt lost for a day or two until I was able to dragoon another monitor into fill-in service.

And kudos to Samsung for their warranty support. I filled in a web form, and they shipped a refurbished replacement to my local UPS Store, where I exchanged it for my defective one. About as hassle-free as it gets.

Now that I have my regular multi-mon setup working again, I decided to try out UltraMon. I’ve read a lot of great reviews of this product over the years but never got around to trying it (the $40 price tag no doubt had something to do with that).

I was a little disappointed (and wary) to learn that there’s no official Vista support yet, except via a beta release. I decided to take the chance anyway and am very impressed so far. The most obvious feature is an extra set of buttons that appear next to the Maximize/Minimize/Restore buttons on any window. One button instantly moves the current window over to the other monitor; the other one spans the current window over multiple monitors (I can’t think of many places I would use this).

I really love the fact that UltraMon extends the taskbar to the second monitor, with buttons on that taskbar showing windows on that monitor only. But the killer feature is finally having separate wallpaper on each monitor.

OK, not a killer feature, but still very nice.

I’ll keep kicking the tires for 30 days, but unless I find something really surprising I expect I’ll pony up that 40 bucks when the trial runs out.

Apple tries to foist Safari browser onto Windows users using deceptive tactics. But someone forgot to read the license agreement first.

Hilarity ensues.

Update: Some people seem to think I’m "depressed" because I’m not making enough money and other people are. No, sorry, Gabe, that’s not it. I actually make a pretty nice wage between doing this stuff and writing books. I could make more, but I’m very comfortable with my income, thanks. My complaint is about the intellectual deadness of the blogosphere. Thanks to Tris Hussey for the pointer and the kind words.

Zoli Erdos comments on my remarks at ZDNet about Apple’s evil updater, which tries to push Safari on Windows users who previously installed iTunes or QuickTime. Here’s how he starts off:

I’ve been observing an annoying trend on TechMeme for a while now: when a good discussion happens over the weekend, obviously some writers will miss it – then they sleep on it, come back to it a few days later and TechMeme picks it up as a new theme.

To be fair, the rest of Zoli’s comment is fairly insightful. But I note that he didn’t actually give his readers a chance to go read what I wrote so they could compare his reaction to my original argument. Instead, he sent them to Techmeme. Ugh. [My mistake. As Zoli points out in the comments, there is a link to my post, but it doesn’t appear until nine paragraphs in. My name is in the second paragraph, and the links there both point to Techmeme,. Apologies to Zoli for getting that part wrong.]

Techmeme is the Short Attention Span Theater of the blogosphere. It’s an echo chamber. It encourages reactive, uncritical thinking. The blogswarm gets outraged by whatever they see on Techmeme, they write down whatever pops into their heads (without checking any facts and in most cases without even following the links), and then moves on to the next topic. A "discussion" lasts 24 hours.

Techmeme is a template for a gazillion me-too bloggers who manage to write a dozen posts a day without ever expressing an original thought. That, depressingly, appears to be a successful business model, at least for now.

I could make a lot of money if I followed that same business model. But as those who visit here regularly have probably noticed, that’s not my style. It’s rare if I write 10 posts a week at this site and ZDNet combined.

Meanwhile, back to my post, What Microsoft can teach Apple about software updates. How dare I actually look at an issue and provide a detailed discussion about it?! With screenshots and everything! We already had this conversation last week! It dropped off the front page two days ago! It’s old news! You missed it! Don’t you read Techmeme?

Uh, no. I look at Techmeme once or twice a month, just to remind myself what a waste of time it is, and then I go read stuff that matters. I have more than 100 technology-related websites and RSS feeds in my reading list. Very few of them ever talk about whatever is hot on Techmeme right now. Which suits me just fine.

And please, don’t get me started on Digg.

I’ve heard some complaints from people with dial-up connections that the SP1 download takes too long. Well, Newegg.com is selling the SP1 DVD (x86 and x64 versions) for $5, with free shipping.

Good deal, and they will ship faster than Microsoft would if they were to do fulfillment.

Update: Looks like the product has been pulled. Too good to be true? Violation of some license agreement? Newegg doesn’t want to handle the gazillion requests? Who knows?

Ian Dixon is one of my favorite interviewers, and he just posted the edited version of our live conversation from a couple of weeks ago. Even with the editing, it’s well over an hour long, but if you’re interested in what I write here I think you’ll find it thought-provoking.

Show notes and download link.

Earlier today, Microsoft made Windows Vista Service Pack 1 available for the general public. Don’t bother with the 400MB+ download; the best way to get it is through Windows Update. I’ve got details over at ZDNet:

Want Vista SP1? Here’s what to expect

If you’re curious about what’s in SP1, see my Vista SP1 FAQ and More Vista SP1 answers.

Long Zheng makes a non-snarky case on behalf of Windows Me:

What a lot of people forget or don’t even recognize to begin with is that Windows Me is actually a rather innovative and forward-looking operating system. Instead, almost everyone focuses on its reliability problems which can be largely attributed to the flaky and inherently unstable Win9x kernel.

Another reason Windows Me got a bad rap was Internet Explorer 5.5, which was bundled by default. It’s hard to remember, but a lot of machines from that era shipped with 64MB or 128MB of RAM, and I recall testing and discovering that a lot of the slow and/or flaky performance of Windows Me was directly attributable to not having enough RAM. The IE 5.5 upgrade was just enough to stress out a system with not enough RAM, and that was true for Windows 98 as well.

Anyway, Long makes a very good point that many of the features introduced in Windows Me are ones we take for granted today.