John Walkenbach started with the idea of having a commercial service rip his CD collection for him but has since given up on that idea:

After doing some more research, I decided to abandon the idea of using a company to convert my CDs. As it turns out, the total number of CDs is closer to 1,000, and I failed to take shipping costs into account. All told, this project would cost about $1,000 — definitely not worth it. Plus, the idea of removing all of those CDs from their jewel boxes, shipping them, and then returning them to the correct jewel box is not at all appealing.

Wise decision. Actually, I did a similar project last fall (800 CDs) and it took less than two weeks. I used Windows Media Player 10 and configured it to rip automatically as soon as it recognized a CD. (You can choose WMA or MP3 format in bit rates as high as 320MB.) It was able to identify and correctly tag well over 95% of the tracks, downloading the album art in the process, and each CD took no more than a couple minutes. Anything that wasn’t immediately recognized I put on a stack for later handling. I did a couple of marathon sessions over one weekend, doing a few hundred CDs each day as I watched baseball games and dumb movies that required little concentration. Mostly, though, I just got in the habit of keeping a stack of CDs by my desk. I’d stick a CD in and (ahem) let ’er rip. I didn’t really need to do much more than pop out the old CD and insert a new one, and I was able to continue working on other projects throughout. All in all, it turned out to be pretty simple.

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.

If you plan to do a similar project, I recommend you get two external hard drives and keep a duplicate copy of your music collection on the second drive. Don’t believe me? Just imagine the feeling in the pit of your stomach if that first drive grinds to a halt someday and you have to go through the process of ripping and tagging all over again.

Update: Based on some interesting questions from Ken in the comments, I’ve posted some follow-up thoughts in a separate post: What’s the point of digital media?

Digital Media Thoughts has word on a new announcement from Dolby Laba at CES:

“Dolby Digital Plus builds on the original Dolby Digital specifications, allowing for higher bit rates and more channels. Dolby Digital Plus has a maximum bit rate of 6mbps, and support for 13.1 channels. In comparison, Dolby Digital caps out at 640kbps and 5.1 channels. So Dolby Digital Plus essentially provides 10 times the bandwidth of the original Dolby Digital. The new format also allows for extremely low bit rate multichannel sound for streaming on the Web or over the air. The benefits of the Dolby Digital Plus codec include transient prenoise processing, enhanced channel coupling, adaptive hybrid transform processing, and channel and program extensions.”

I live in a ritzy part of town, and I know a few folks who have big houses. But I can’t imagine any home theater that needs thirteen channels of sound. I’m not even sure my local multiplex has any theaters that need that many channels.

I can only imagine how deafened I would be if I were walking around the show floor at CES.

Mike Williams explains the mysteries of Windows Media Player Artist fields:

WMP gives you three primary fields to work with for musical artists: Album Artist, Contributing Artist, and Composer. While functionally different, successive versions of WMP have hopelessly complicated how these are presented to the user. In v10, the Library has a tree associated with each, whereas v9 only exposed a [Contributing] Artist tree.

I had figured out some of this stuff during the writing of Windows XP Inside Out, Second Edition (when WMP10 was still in beta), but this post taught me several really interesting things I didn’t know. If you use WMP and you have a large media library, this is a must-read.

I discovered Mike’s blog thanks to Matt’s wiki. Isn’t the Web a wonderful thing?

Just before the holidays, Matt Haughey had some first impressions of Motorola’s serious looking DVR, which is now rolling out to Comcast users. In a fresh post today, he has designer James Duncan Davidson’s first impressions of the unit and links to a screenshot of the unit in action.

Only 15 hours of HD recording? Only 60 hours total? That would be a deal-breaker for me, even if the interface looks way better than the horrible Scientific Atlanta software.

I’ve ordered a Fusion HDTV card for the Media Center PC and will be experimenting with over-the-air HDTV. (They say it supports MCE 2005.) If it works, the Cox/SA box is going back…

In a previous post, I included a snippet that linked to Chris Anderson’s blog The Long Tail. (Chris is editor of Wired magazine.) After I posted that, I read a little more. I’ve been meaning to write about digital rights lately but haven’t found the time to set out a coherent thought on what can be a very controversial topic. So I was pleased to find this statement, which pretty much matches my thoughts:

Like Larry Lessig and his Creative Commons project, we believe in the value of protecting intellectual property rights, but we’re opposed to overzealous extensions and implementations of those protections. Copyright good; infinite copyright bad. Piracy bad; treating everyone like a pirate worse.

But equally, we believe in putting the consumer first. Consumers want more content, easier-to-use technology, and cheaper prices. If some form of DRM encourages publishers, consumer electronics makers and retailers to release more, better and cheaper digital media and devices, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. This is just being realistic: much as we might want it to be otherwise, content owners still call most of the shots. If a little protection allows them to throw their weight behind a lot of progress towards realizing the potential of digital media, consumers will see a net benefit.

The real question is this: how much DRM is too much? Clearly the marketplace thinks that the protections in the iPod and iTunes are acceptable, since they’re selling like mad. Likewise, the marketplace thought that the protections in Sony’s digital music players (until recently, they didn’t support MP3s natively) were excessive and they rejected them. Indeed, we were one of the first to criticize Sony in a big way for getting that balance wrong.

Let me put my biases right out front. I spent 20 years working for print magazines, and I’ve been writing books for more than a decade. In a sense, I am in the same business as musicians and movie makers, with a crucial difference: Anyone with the right software can make a perfect digital copy of a CS or DVD, cheaply and at essentially zero cost. You can’t make a perfect copy of a book or magazine unless you own your own printing press, and the cost is more than most people can bear. For now at least, it’s easier to buy a book than to print your own copy. And even though all the books I’ve written in recent years have also been available in electronic versions, I guess people still like to turn pages and scribble notes in the margins, which you can’t easily do with an e-book.

When perfect copies are easy and free, the temptation to make copies and pass them around is overwhelming, even for people who are basically honest. So, like Chris, I understand the need for protecting digital media. But as soon as any company decides to use DRM to protect their rights, they have a responsibility to make it not only possible but effortless for me to exercise the rights I buy from them. I should be able to make archival copies. I should be able to play music on a portable player and a car stereo and my home music system without paying for it three times, and the TV shows I record for personal convenience shouldn’t expire unwatched just because I’m on a vacation that lasts more than two weeks.

I think the Electronic Frontier Foundation is doing excellent work, but I don’t agree that all media should be free to copy by anyone, anywhere, at any time. Reasonable restrictions are just fine with me. It’s too bad the entertainment industry (movies and music) is run by people who don’t seem willing to be reasonable about much of anything. That’s one reason I listen to a lot of music by artists on independent labels. I’d love to see an equally healthy independent movie and video industry that could tell the big studios to shove it.

I’ve seen this several places, and it’s a cool idea:

1. Open up the music player on your computer.
2. Set it to play your entire music collection.
3. Turn on the “shuffle” option.
4. Tell us the title of the next ten songs that show up (with their musicians), no matter how embarrassing. That’s right, no skipping that Carpenters tune that will totally destroy your hip credibility. It’s time for total musical honesty.
5. Write it up in your blog or journal and link back to at least a couple of the other sites where you saw this.
6. If you get the same artist twice, you may skip the second (or third, or etc.) occurances. You don’t have to, but since randomness could mean you end up with a list of ten song with five artists, you can if you’d like.

Here’s my list (album names in parentheses). It could have been much stranger.

1. Dusk, Lara and Reyes (Two Guitars One Passion/Spain)
2. Green Onions, Booker T & The MGs (Elemental R&B/Shimmies and Shakes)
3. The Boy Feels Strange, Melissa Etheridge (Never Enough)
4. Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door, Bob Dylan (MTV Unplugged)
5. Ramblin’ On My Mind, Jesse Colin Young (Greatest Hits)
6. Seek Up, Dave Matthews Band (Remember Two Things)
7. Trip to Skye/Darach Debrun’s, Eileen Ivers and John Whelan (Celtic Odyssey)
8. Sun Risin’ Blues, Big Joe Turner (Big Bad & Blue: The Big Joe Turner Anthology Vol. 1)
9. Tangled Up in Blue, Bob Dylan (A Million Faces at My Feet, bootleg)
10. Allowa Kirk/Traditional Strathspey/Princess Royal/Douglas’ Favourite, Ashley MacIsaac (Fine Thank You Very Much)

Thanks to A View from the Classroom, The Hypothetical Wren, and 42 for the idea.

Thomas Hawk has a great Christmas wish list, with a lot of overlap to the things I’d like to see (I don’t need a Pogo stick with training wheels, though).

But in this post, once again, Thomas takes a shot at what he considers the miserable performance of Windows Media Player. I first read this complaint in a post by Thomas from last September, when he wrote an otherwise glowing review of Windows Media Player 10:

The single largest problem with Microsoft Media Player 10 remains the poor performance you have with large digital libraries. If you have 5,000 mp3s or less, this is not an issue. On the other hand if you are a hardcore, diehard, digital music enthusiast like I am then this simply will not cut it. I did notice a speed improvement between the WMP 9, WMP 10 Technical Beta and the final release of WMP 10 but it still can take about 1 minute and 30 seconds to move between playlists, libraries, etc. for my collection. Microsoft needs to continue to work on indexing and possibly allowing users to run the application in RAM to improve performance.

My digital music collection currently consists of 1,280 files in MP3 format and 10,488 files in WMA format, for a total of 11,768 tunes, which is well over the 5000-song limit where Thomas says he sees performance problems. In Windows Media Library and in Windows Media Center Edition, performance is essentially instantaneous for everything. When I click an album, a playlist, or an artist in the Media Player tree list, its contents appear without any hesitation. In Windows Media Center Edition, I notice a delay of approximately five seconds when I first view the list of albums, but after that, performance is lightning-fast.

The biggest difference between Thomas’s setup and mine is one he calls out explicitly: He’s a diehard supporter of the MP3 format, whereas nearly 90% of my collection is in WMA format. Every device I use supports WMA format (no iPod here), so this is simply not an issue for me. Anyone else see this issue?

I’m a member of a Yahoo group devoted to the Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8300 personal video recorder. It’s been enlightening, to say the least, to read about the experiences of others who are stuck with this woeful piece of consumer electronics gear. Now, a software engineer who is also a part of that group has started MyPVRSucks.com:

When I upgraded my TV to an HD compatible set, I decided to get a Rogers Cablevision HD set-top box – and decided to get the PVR model at the same time. I envisioned a beautiful utopia where I could simply click the “Record” button while viewing the guide, and all my shows would be recorded in HD digital splendor, for my viewing enjoyment.

I picked the PVR up at my local Rogers store. Easy. As the transaction completed, the sales lady told me “Remember to power it off every night. You have to turn it off.” This is slightly alarming, but, what the heck… and I head for home with my nice new PVR.

Unfortunately, everything was not quite as smooth as I had hoped.

Because…

The Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8000 HD sucks!

The Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8300 HD sucks too!

And here’s why…

After having used a TiVo for nearly five years and spending the last month with Microsoft’s new Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005, I have to agree. I use the SA box because it is the only way I can record HDTV. But the software is dreadful. For instance, if you sit down to watch a show that is currently being recorded, you have to manually (and slowly) reverse your way through the current recording to get to the beginning. If you’re 20 minutes into a show, that can take two minutes. There is no way to start at the beginning. As you’re watching, the progress bar (which appears when you hit the Play button) doesn’t show you any indication of how much time has elapsed or how much remains. It’s a graphical display only.

Oh, and here’s my favorite: When the currently recording program reaches the end, the recorder automatically dumps you out of the program you’re watching and to whatever happens to be on live TV at that moment. To get back to where you were, you have to visit the list of recorded programs again, start at the beginning, and then fast-forward through the program. How lame is that?

Let’s not discuss the video artifacts, the sound that drops out mysteriously, or the dancing green bars that took over the screen for about five minutes during last night’s episode of Lost.

Judy and I have learned to resist the urge to watch a program on the Cox/SA box until it’s done recording. We’re also using the Media Center PC to record as much as possible, reserving the Cox box strictly for HD programming and for times when the single tuner in the MCE machine is otherwise busy.

Thanks to the mysterious software engineer who started MyPVRSucks.com, at least I know I’m not alone.

Update: For a more detailed look at the 8300HD and its alternatives, see TiVo versus MCE versus my cable company.

Years ago, I worked with John Montgomery at Ziff-Davis’s PC Computing. Now, he’s a mucky-muck at Microsoft. And he has a very entertaining blog, in a geeky sort of way. I liked his comparo on the new Comcast DVR. I’m still deciding whether I like the Cox/Scientific Atlanta combo. The HD is awesome, the DVR software is, well, frustrating. Most importantly, it is in imminent danger of failing the WA (Wife Acceptance) test.

The Media Center PC continues to impress. It is on the verge of moving into the den, to take over standard-definition TV recording duties from the Tivo. Although I would be much happier if I could get a Media Center Extender instead.

Lost Remote has some screenshots of the new Microsoft TV software found on Comcast boxes in Seattle. (Elsewhere? who knows…)

My cable company, Cox, is using a competing software design called SARA, designed by Scientific Atlanta. You can see it at PVR Comparisons. Confusingly, their review is filed under the Comcast DVR heading and the screen shots are on a separate page.

I like the look of the Microsoft software a lot more, but without trying it I can’t tell whether it’s really more usable. For most people, the question is academic anyway, as you’re stuck with whatever box your cable company decides to go with.

Oh, and one of the first things I did was to ditch the hideous purple and pale yellow color scheme on the Scientific Atlanta box. Yeccch.

Thanks to Thomas Hawk for the pointers.