mp3 storage solutions
Discussion
Hi everyone,
some of you may know that i am in the process of moving up north.
my question is has anyone got any decent software for mp3 managment (currently using media player 9). The situation is that the house is being completely wired. and to cut a long story short a decent pc system will be in the living room with a touchscreen display.
The pc is linked to the Hifi, lighting controls, home network, heating controls, curtains and blinds, alarms. it nearly controls everything in the house, but i dont relly like media player and am looking for a decent alternative any suggestions.
Plus it records TV programs like TiVo and other Harddrive recorders. So i can put them on DVD if i need to.
Cheers
Steve
some of you may know that i am in the process of moving up north.
my question is has anyone got any decent software for mp3 managment (currently using media player 9). The situation is that the house is being completely wired. and to cut a long story short a decent pc system will be in the living room with a touchscreen display.
The pc is linked to the Hifi, lighting controls, home network, heating controls, curtains and blinds, alarms. it nearly controls everything in the house, but i dont relly like media player and am looking for a decent alternative any suggestions.
Plus it records TV programs like TiVo and other Harddrive recorders. So i can put them on DVD if i need to.
Cheers
Steve
You're absolutely mad to use Windows!!! I hate this devil worshiping software.
Forget winamp 3 AOL own the rights and though it now plays video forget it, it's gone downhill and doesn't have all the functionality.
I recommend good old Winamp2, and if you're after visuals you cannot beat a programme called Milkdrop. I have it replicated on my TV in my front room, the visuals move with the music and it's completely mind blowing. It's a DSP plug-in you can configure.
Do a search on the www.digitallyimported.com forums for "milkdrop" and there's a post with a link to the site. It's completely free and you have to give an email address but that's it.
Forget winamp 3 AOL own the rights and though it now plays video forget it, it's gone downhill and doesn't have all the functionality.
I recommend good old Winamp2, and if you're after visuals you cannot beat a programme called Milkdrop. I have it replicated on my TV in my front room, the visuals move with the music and it's completely mind blowing. It's a DSP plug-in you can configure.
Do a search on the www.digitallyimported.com forums for "milkdrop" and there's a post with a link to the site. It's completely free and you have to give an email address but that's it.
Hmm... never been a fan of the PC playing MP3's... perhaps a dedicated player might be a better solution - that way you'd get a neater interface... you could even go for a Pronto Pro to control the whole thing by... so it'll automatically select the track you want...
Since you seem to be into home automation stuff.. have a nose at www.letsautomate.com/ is you haven't already done so!
Since you seem to be into home automation stuff.. have a nose at www.letsautomate.com/ is you haven't already done so!
In defence of the good ol' pc there is the SB Audigy series with *proper audio control panel* AND a remote control. It includes optical, digital, firewire and conventional RCAs. Bung it all in a itx system with a fan free cooler and power supply and you can probably get it to fit into your hifi unit if you can find an old carcass to use. The Audigy 2 also includes such things as proper THX certified Dolby 6.1 surround sound as well. All you need is a fast (quiet) hard drive to store all your (soon to be banished by the RIAA - they wish) mp3s! If you want to use a standard box and completely hide it then you could try an SB Extigy box (external soundcard) with all the same features as the Audigy but it plugs into a USB socket...
Ben,
Back from that thread about CD Number 74 (or whatever it was) ISTR that you are a bit of a CD collector.
I was somewhat doubtful of MP3 quality over CD but now people seem to have cottoned onto this, and with the advent of DSL, the general encoding rates are much higher than they were.
Certaintly worth a look, I havent bought a CD for way over a year now, and I used to average about 30 a month...
Matt.
Back from that thread about CD Number 74 (or whatever it was) ISTR that you are a bit of a CD collector.
I was somewhat doubtful of MP3 quality over CD but now people seem to have cottoned onto this, and with the advent of DSL, the general encoding rates are much higher than they were.
Certaintly worth a look, I havent bought a CD for way over a year now, and I used to average about 30 a month...
Matt.
incorrigible said: Is your main music play back??
Hi no this isnt my main playback for music,
I got a denon av1SE and the matchin DVD player, Cyrus CD7Q cdplyer and the cyrus FM7 Tuner.
i already own a phillips pronto remote, but it doesnot cure the problem of which software to use when the mp3 are on the computer.
the whole point to the mp3 storage is to have background music with out the need to change CD's..
The computer that is in the living room has a capture card/matrox G450 dual head one to the touchscreen monitor and one to the TV. By using the touch screen i do not need to use a mouse or keyboard so its all hiddin away.
jimbro1000 said: In defence of the good ol' pc there is the SB Audigy series with *proper audio control panel* AND a remote control. It includes optical, digital, firewire and conventional RCAs. Bung it all in a itx system with a fan free cooler and power supply and you can probably get it to fit into your hifi unit if you can find an old carcass to use. The Audigy 2 also includes such things as proper THX certified Dolby 6.1 surround sound as well. All you need is a fast (quiet) hard drive to store all your (soon to be banished by the RIAA - they wish) mp3s! If you want to use a standard box and completely hide it then you could try an SB Extigy box (external soundcard) with all the same features as the Audigy but it plugs into a USB socket...
Yep this soundcard series is amazing, I got it in my second PC that is basically used for back-ground music playing of mp3s. I just load folders into winamp, with about 1000 hours of music, and let it shuffle them with milkdrop rigged to the tv screen on the s-vhs socket.
I too am scepticle about the quality of mp3's. I still purchase everything I really want on vinyl (long story, I'm a DJ), never buy CD's never have. But even the quality of my vinyl far surpasses the mp3's.
couple of points
1. mp3's could be repleaced by the ogg format, though it's another case of betamax vs VHS. Even though it results in smaller files and better compression quality, who's heard of it?
2. The final mp3 qualtiy is a function of a number of things including the quality of the sound card used, mp3 encoding compressors (lame are the best), and the sample rate as well as the bitrate. Plus the source of course which should be wav where ever possible. It's no good upsampling, you're wasting your time unless you've got the raw wav file.
This is only stuff I've taught myself, lots of you people are IT bods so probably know a lot more than me.
As for Winamp3 it has no where near the plug ins available in 2, you can't use it to broadcast using the shoutcast plug in, I don't think you can creat m3u playlist files, and there aren't nearly as many skins. Plus not sure about CD ripping etc. There are a hell of a lot of gripes about it in the winamp forums.
My other major problem with mp3's is where to store them all. I'm buggered if I want to back them all up on CD rom at 800MB on each disc, it'll take me till I die. The best solution I've thought of is buying a DVD writer where one disc can hold 5GB of data, this is several hours of music.
Quite possibly, but if you're sampling at a greater rate then surely you're just getting larger MP3 files
One of my mates has an MP3 player (don't know the sample rate but he got 150 cds on about IIRC about 6gbyte) and the quality was way down
be interested to know more though ie how big a hard disc are you getting for your living room, how do you expand etc
My soundcard samples at 44.1Khz(CD quality) that gives a .wav file of about 45meg for a 3 minute song, anything less than half that becomes really noticable (prepared to be proved wrong) but I can see the advantage of having your music collection at your fingertips
One of my mates has an MP3 player (don't know the sample rate but he got 150 cds on about IIRC about 6gbyte) and the quality was way down
be interested to know more though ie how big a hard disc are you getting for your living room, how do you expand etc
My soundcard samples at 44.1Khz(CD quality) that gives a .wav file of about 45meg for a 3 minute song, anything less than half that becomes really noticable (prepared to be proved wrong) but I can see the advantage of having your music collection at your fingertips
david_h said:
jimbro1000 said: My other major problem with mp3's is where to store them all. I'm buggered if I want to back them all up on CD rom at 800MB on each disc, it'll take me till I die. The best solution I've thought of is buying a DVD writer where one disc can hold 5GB of data, this is several hours of music.
Why not just buy another hard drive and copy all your mp3s to it? It'll be cheaper and easier than DVD burning. It also depends how much space you need; I recently went skiing with a 20GB iPod and it performed flawlessly, and all the music is safe on my home system(s) as well as on the iPod.
A mate of mine DJs as well and he says he uses his iPod for some of it as well as cds. Since he rips his mp3s at higher quality (160 kbps or 192 kbps) the difference from original is not that noticeable. Maybe that's because he specialises in trashy disco and Eurodance
I am looking for a good soft ware mp3 player as well ass all of thoes that I have found have problems.
MS Media player well it is MS need I say more + slow and other faults
Win amp does not support lager playlists i.e. over couple of thousand tracks for those of use with large music collections this is a real bummer when trying to use a large play list and randomly play music from it.
My solution is that I am in the process of designing and building a network enabled player admittedly at the very early staged but there are lots of great web sites out there with ideas
MS Media player well it is MS need I say more + slow and other faults
Win amp does not support lager playlists i.e. over couple of thousand tracks for those of use with large music collections this is a real bummer when trying to use a large play list and randomly play music from it.
My solution is that I am in the process of designing and building a network enabled player admittedly at the very early staged but there are lots of great web sites out there with ideas
Ben - you're obviously like Smifffy - ears of a bat when it comes to audio quality...
Most of us can't tell the difference between a 192kbs MP3 and a CD unless we hear it on a high-end reference system.
Besides, or background music, MP3 is fine - I use it all the time for this very purpose.. when I want to crank it up and kick some ass I use a CD, though..
Most of us can't tell the difference between a 192kbs MP3 and a CD unless we hear it on a high-end reference system.
Besides, or background music, MP3 is fine - I use it all the time for this very purpose.. when I want to crank it up and kick some ass I use a CD, though..
Yes the MP3 filesize will go up, but nowhere near as big as a CD. If you use variable rate encoding this helps too (so you only use more bits when you need to)
incorrigible said: Quite possibly, but if you're sampling at a greater rate then surely you're just getting larger MP3 files
One of my mates has an MP3 player (don't know the sample rate but he got 150 cds on about IIRC about 6gbyte) and the quality was way down
be interested to know more though ie how big a hard disc are you getting for your living room, how do you expand etc
My soundcard samples at 44.1Khz(CD quality) that gives a .wav file of about 45meg for a 3 minute song, anything less than half that becomes really noticable (prepared to be proved wrong) but I can see the advantage of having your music collection at your fingertips
You can easily get better quality than a CD at lower filesizes (if you have a high quality input in the first place)
My car mp3 player has 60Gb hard-drive & currently has about 5K tracks on it & is about half full.
There are various good rippers out there (I use Audiograbber, with LameEnc) - if you need more info, I can find the links for you....
Basically, you want to grab the CD at full quality, then do the mp3 compression.
Edited to add links to: Audiograbber and LameEnc
>> Edited by CraigAlsop on Thursday 16th January 16:48
Regarding the space thing, thats never really been a problem 
Just put a HA controller together with 4 123Gb disks.
250Gb have just been released so they should be at a competitive price point soon, so thats a Terabyte of HDD space for about £400 isnt that bad.
700Gb gives me about 700,000 minutes at normal rate and about 250,000 minutes at very high rate.
I am looking at a system that will autorip from CD in an automated manner to run as a bureau service so customer arrives, I load a load of HDD's into the machine, then add a load of CD and it autorips by cd and track title. He then leaves with HDD's full of MP3's...
Matt.
Just put a HA controller together with 4 123Gb disks.
250Gb have just been released so they should be at a competitive price point soon, so thats a Terabyte of HDD space for about £400 isnt that bad.
700Gb gives me about 700,000 minutes at normal rate and about 250,000 minutes at very high rate.
I am looking at a system that will autorip from CD in an automated manner to run as a bureau service so customer arrives, I load a load of HDD's into the machine, then add a load of CD and it autorips by cd and track title. He then leaves with HDD's full of MP3's...
Matt.
I have a Creative Labs Zen Jukebox for the train, its a 20gig little box, and the sound in those surrounds is great. I do however ever use varible rate MP3 coding at the highest level, so the files are biggish, but still smaller than CD. I have not tried it through the hifi yet, but I do believe the sound lose will be quite evident. Especially on cymbals and the like.
David
David
incorrigible said:
be interested to know more though ie how big a hard disc are you getting for your living room, how do you expand etc
I am currently storing the mp3's on a server with the space being no much of a problem. its currently got 10 x 80gb SCSI harddrives so storage isnt a problem.
but only half of the space is for music but its more than enough, 800 full CDs at 192kps on one 80gb harddrive. the other half is for me engineering Designs in ProE.
got the server second had from finance repo company (1k) same cost as some of the dedicated mp3 storage solutions with only 80gb harddrive.
The living room computer spec is an Abit motherboard AMD athlon XP2400 512 meg ram, 1 x 120gig harddrive partitioned, G450 dual head graphics, pinicle systems video capture card, DVD drive, floppy, bluetooth keyboard and mouse, SB audoligy (not Platinum)sound card), 100mbit network card.
When recording TV programs stored locally. Transfered on to server to be put on DVDR at later stage.
just dont ask what i use for my company work!!!
Steve
I Have a program called Sony Sonic Stage.
Plays Mp3s, and when ripping Cd's turns the files to ATRAC3 which is sonys own compression system. it takes a while to figure out but the quality is BRILLIANT. (used to use winamp) You can also Burn Cd's with it, and if you have a sony MP3 player the MGformat (ATRAC3) is perfect for it. (particularly usefull if you have a MG drive
)
HTH
Plays Mp3s, and when ripping Cd's turns the files to ATRAC3 which is sonys own compression system. it takes a while to figure out but the quality is BRILLIANT. (used to use winamp) You can also Burn Cd's with it, and if you have a sony MP3 player the MGformat (ATRAC3) is perfect for it. (particularly usefull if you have a MG drive
) HTH
I am using a mixture of Windows Media Player 9 and MusicMatch (which is really good). However, will be buying one of these shortly - much better than some duff old PC... take a look they are a really neat solution.
www.slimdevices.com/
$250 and thats it... ok so it isnt as neat as it could be but heard one and its really good.
Cheers,
Paul
www.slimdevices.com/
$250 and thats it... ok so it isnt as neat as it could be but heard one and its really good.
Cheers,
Paul
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