A Little Ludwig Goes A Long Way » Music

Playing Zune tunes in the car

john — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 20:24:52 +0000

I like the all-you-can-eat economics of my Zune player, it has allowed me to try a lot of music that I would not otherwise have heard. A problem for me tho is — I do most my music consumption in the car while driving. I have the Zune car pack and it is fine for what it is — an FM transmitter. But I hate the experience — dynamic range compression (and this seems to be a particularly bad unit for that), difficulty in finding an unallocated slot in an urban area, interference, etc.

I wish my car had an AUX in jack but alas that slot is already consumed by an iPod interface which works great but of course is unusable by the Zune. Some guys claim they are building an adapter but nothing exists. And I don’t have the time to hack one up myself.

So the other alternative is to somehow get Zune songs into MP3 format so that they can be on my iPod or burned on data CDs and thence playable in the car. I don’t really care about stripping off DRM, I want to be legal, but I want to listen to the songs easily in the car with greater fidelity than the FM path allows.

I’ve been trying TuneBite which as I understand it, pretends to be a sound card, captures a playback, and encodes into MP3 using LAME. It also grabs all the tags from the source song and whacks them onto the MP3. It works but is funky. Very sensitive to task load on the PC, any other task will interfere with the encoding. And it just misses some songs from my collection for some reason.

I’d prefer a less Rube-Goldbergian software solution, but for now this is kind of working.

Microsoft Service Week — Part 1

john — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 21:45:37 +0000

Doing my part to help Microsoft avoid more layoffs this week. Firstly, been working thru zune error code C00D12F5 - Google Search. Some DRM config problem and all the published KB articles and forum pointers failed. Finally contacted the Zune guys directly and they were super helpful, even took my machine into their labs for a while. Turns out that somehow I had mismatched DRM components, they aren’t sure why, but forcing them all to the same version worked. Hopefully they will write up a KB article on. Zune guys were great to work with, here’s hoping they have future success.

I'm a sucker for musical instruments

john — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 20:24:15 +0000

C-Thru Music home page — an interesting midi keyboard. way more natural key arrangement.

Yamaha Tenori-ON

john — Mon, 26 May 2008 18:41:26 +0000

TENORI-ON – DIGITAL MUSICAL INSTRUMENT- EACH — love interesting musical instruments, this one looks way cool. Pricey tho

beats per minute tagging

john — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 16:48:52 +0000

nytimes article today mentioned beatunes at www.beatines.com, and also a roundup at snipurl.com/228ai.

MIDI drumpads and other stuff

john — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 21:56:45 +0000

Midi Madness — some wildly cool devices here that I would never use.

Stuff I want but don't need — musical instrument edition

john — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 14:45:29 +0000

Q-Chord — looks like a blast
Self-tuning guitar — I think I actually need a self-playing guitar

New Zunes

john — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 18:01:46 +0000

Microsoft One-Ups Apple’s IPod Engraving — oh well that will hurt Apple share big time.

I don’t really understand what MSFT is doing. Anyone who gets a Zune instead of an iPod under the tree is going to be sad. The consumer asset MSFT has is in the gaming space, people love their XBOXes, I don’t get why MSFT isn’t starting with a mobile game device and growing from that.

Eagles album available in FLAC

john — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 16:39:17 +0000

The Big Picture | The Eagles Disintermediate Major Labels — one of the buying options at EaglesBand.com is flac, awesome.

Good Press for Lala

john — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 09:02:34 +0000

Free Music Now! Lala.com’s Plan to Give Songs Away Could Upend the Industry