Morning / Afternoon / Evening.

This little introduction should serve more as a warning that there is nothing of much interest in this post. This entire post is primarily for my benefit by allowing me to record somewhere some ideas that came up in my head today.
Included are: Installing rockbox on my ipod; my desire to re-rip all my music to ogg; my current progress with ‘Operation Open Source Dave‘; how I organize my music collections; and not much else.

Read on if ye dare

So, let’s start with these in some sort of loose structrure, mainly so I can come back to finish this as and when I want during the day. I think the logical place to start is…. here:

1. My Music Collection

Those of you who know me personally will know that I have a slight weakness for music, as do a great many people, and have quite a few CDs, all of which are backed up, presently in MP3 format, on one or two computers along with a bunch of songs that arrived on my computer through means unknown.
You will also know that I am horribly disorganized, generally speaking of course.

Therefore, it may come as some surprise to you (or not) that possibly the only thing in my life that get hung up on being organized is my music collection. My CDs, when I get chance to go through them when I’m home are sorted alphabetically, and, in the case of individual artists (such as Bob Dylan or Jeff Buckley) with a changing back band they are sorted surname first (Dylan, Bob; Buckley, Jeff etc.). Of course, any band beginning with ‘The’ are not lumped into the ‘T’ section (ie, ‘The Band’ are filed under ‘B’).
Compilations are inserted wherever their title would fall (‘Strait Up’ is in ‘S’, ‘The White Box of Jazz’ in ‘W’ etc.). I did play with lumping all compilations in one section, but in practise found it messy and confusing when generally searching though, unlike my digital collection, see below.

So, the physical collection is sorted and doesn’t really require much expansion. My digital collection on the otherhand, requires certain tweaks and configuration to ensure that the files appear exactly how I want them. And, strange as it may sound, if they don’t appear as I like them to, it tends to irritate me, although it takes me a while to fix the problem.

Yes, the digital collection is indeed a problem all of its own. And it’s taken me a long time of going through and tweaking things to get them exactly how I wanted them. Here’s a brief history of the progress:

It all really started just before I came out to Egypt where I was sorting everything out so I could have as much music with me as was possible, so I bought an iPod and used iTunes for a while. I let iTunes do the sorting automatically and it didn’t do a bad job but after a while I found that it would sometimes screw up the compilations sections usually after being online (The Clash ended up having a couple of albums being continually placed in compilations, even after making sure they weren’t marked as compilations). This of course wasn’t a huge problem whilst I was just using iTunes or my iPod to listen to music, and indeed many of you who use iTunes may suffer the same problem and be fine. However the problem for me comes when I want to back my stuff up onto my external hard drive that I got a few months after I first came to Egypt. I got sick of having to re-order stuff every time I wanted to back up. So I told iTunes to stop aut-organizing my collection for me and, for a while, organized it manually but basically following the iTunes concept of:

Music Folder/[Artist Name]/ [Album Title]/[Track Number] [Track Title]

And for Compilations / Various Artists:

Music Folder/Compilations/[Album Title]/[Track Number] [Track Title]

Not an altogether bad way of organizing things, I’m sure you may agree. And, for the most part, its the same system I use today. Except for the compilations. That part annoyed me. Because by having the filename only contain the Track Title and Number, if I do a manual search through my collection through a file manager (Windows Explorer, Konqueror, Nautilus, Finder, whatever) for an artist name, not all their tracks will necessarily come up. It also stored the cover image in the file itself, as opposed to a separate image, meaning moving to another music player and still wanting images would require finding / scanning the images for everything from scratch. So I needed to find a better way of doing it.

I can’t remember when it was exactly when I started to reorganize this but my guess is it probably only happened in the last year, when I started using CDex to re-rip all my CDs to high-quality MP3, so they would play on my iPod with ease [I know, I wanted to use ogg but at the time didn't see anyway I could play oggs on my iPod and wanted my music in a higher bitrate (those unaware of ogg - wait, we're getting top that). I also know that CDex is a windows app - I had limited time at home with my CDs and needed to play EvE-Online whilst ripping... ].
Anyway, during the ripping I of course ripped some of my compilation albums. I was in a rush and so didn’t quite familiarise myself fully with CDex so shoot me down if what I say here is incorrect but it didn’t seem that it supported individual artist names within a compilation album and so that information would have to be added manually, which was easy to do because I got inspiration from the freedb CDDB lookup feature, which dealt with such albums by lumping the general artist name as ‘Various Artists’ and the tracks as ‘Number – Artist _ Title’ which led to the layout being something like this:

Music Folder/Various Artists/[Album Title]/[Track Number] – [Artist Name] _ [Track Title]

Which, to my eye anyway, is a really nice way of structuring it. Also the addition of the ‘-’ after the track number is a bonus as I’ve got a few tracks that start with, or are entirely, numbers, so a small separation is useful, so it got applied to all the other CDs as well, along with the tracks that appeared on my hard drive through means unknown. To edit that information on the tracks I couldn’t re-rip I used the application EasyTag (http://easytag.sourceforge.org) under Linux which is just another music management program that can bulk-write tags and restructure directories and filenames with a few clicks – very slick.

And that’s pretty much the formation I stuck with, without really thinking about it for a while. Until recently when I sat going through my music collection on the hard drive and realized just how much I’ve got, and how much I’ve added (thanks to places like jamendo.com and opsound.org) and how badly I really needed to come up with some sort of simple, laid out standard as to how I’m going to organize my music that I can refer to easily, like I have for my CDs.
And here it is:

Standard Artists / Albums:
Music Folder/[Artist Name]/[Album Title] [Disc Number*]/[Track Number] – [Track Title]

Non-album Tracks:
Music Folder/[Artist Name]/[Track Title]
NOTE: All non-album tracks have the tags stripped to remove album info

Compilations / Various Artists:
Music Folder/Various Artists/[Album Title] [Disc Number*]/[Track Number] – [Artist Name] _ [Track Title]

* Where appropriate
All Album Folders contain an extra file name ‘cover.jpg‘ which is a scanned / downloaded image of the CD cover.

And that, my friends, is that. That’s the stage I’m at. I still need to fetch a lot of cover images, and reorganize some portions, but most of it is there.
2. Converting Music to Open Standard Formats

Now, some of you will no doubt be aware of my fascination / obsession with the ideas of free and open source software. Whilst I am far too lazy and disconnected to serve as a true advocate and really get involved with certain aspects, I am still extremely keen to support such projects through the use of them and dealing with the occassional small problems that may be encountered on the way (particularly as a PPC Mac user…). After actually devoting real time to it (mainly over the last year) I’ve been as surprised as anyone to find less problems overall than previously, and my knowledge of how the system actually works has come on in leaps and bounds, even if it still rests at a lowly level. The progress being made in Open Source projects everywhere is dramatic (look at Firefox…) and stands for some extremely good principles [Operation: Open Source Dave deals with that a bit more...] and, I believe, is an important step in more than just a computing sense – it’s getting to the point of being about civil rights more than ever. Sounds dramatic I know, but I’ll come to it later…

And the time has finally arrived for me to apply that to my music collection. For a long time I’ve sort of dodged around the issue of converting my music to a free (in terms of both beer and speech) and Open Source standard (with a few exceptions) and have instead defaulted to MP3, primarily because it meant that I could play them on the old iPod (no ogg vorbis support by the Apple firmware and I couldn’t find a decent open source alternative… until now – Point 3 – Rockbox). Playing them in Mac OS X or on my Windows machine weren’t as much of a concern as I knew I could get decent free players that would play oggs no problem. That has since changed. Since I am now using Linux for nearly all my computing, using an open standard makes more sense for a number of reasons:

1. An Open Standard ensures that the developers of various programs and tools have full access to how something works, which in my mind would help ensure a higher standard. Of course, MP3 is pretty well understood, but all the same, it is still ultimately proprietary.
2. An Open Standard ensures that anybody can include the capability to play it in their software. By comparison, things like wma and sometimes m4a can be a bitch to play in non-specific applications / platforms. Therefore, it follows that Open Standards are for life – even if the shit completely hit the fan the original code is licensed to allow you to access it so you could build your own player for it if you had to, license free.
3. Proprietary software is ultimately detrimental to the community, even if it’s as widespread as MP3. This is where the whole free as in beer / free as in speech argument comes into play.

By the way, I haven’t said specifically yet, but the format I am planning to (immediately) rip my music into is the ogg vorbis format (http://www.vorbis.com) although, ultimately when I have a bigger enough hard drive, a sweet speaker setup and more time at home, I will also have my CD collection in FLAC (http://flac.sourceforge.net) which is an open source lossless format (as opposed to ogg which like MP3 is compressed, and therefore ‘lossy’ – you lose quality) for a superior listening experience.

Of course, there other reasons for choosing OGG over MP3 – mainly that as a general rule, the quality is better over a simialr filesize. Not hugely important in msot listening situations, but something some people are interested in. Equally, it’s really easy to adjust the quality of OGG encoding – simply choose a value, 10 being the maximum, and including decimal places. Obviously, file size increases with quality, nothing new there.

And so it is, for the reasons listed above, why I will once more go through the laborious process of ripping my CD collection into ogg format, probably at q8 (quality – maybe a touch excessive but good nonetheless.

Equally, I have put an end to downloading files with proprietary formats (particularly DRM-protected files, such as from iTunes music store). Previously I had downloaded free downloads of the week from there, but not any more, for the same reason that I don’t own, and won’t buy any copy-protected CDs. Personally I believe it violates a fundamental right of being able to make backups of the things I’ve paid for. As many of you know, I presently live a long way from my CD collection. I also have around 400 CDs at present. Am I meant to take them all with me, with all the risks involved in breaking them, losing them, ruining them? Or should I be able to back them up and put them on my iPod or similar device, or even a backup hard drive? Thankfully, the British equivalent of the RIAA announced that they do not consider making such backups in violation of copyright and so you can do it. But copy-protected CDs are another thing. Most copy-protected CDs at the minute are only capable of playing on limited platforms (often ONLY Windows-machines or normal CD players) and are designed to prevent the ripping of tracks and / or copying the CD. Personally, I’d rather not pay the same amount of money for something I consider both an inferior product and an attack on liberty. Similarly I wouldn’t attempt to download the track(s) legally or illegally that I know are from copy-controlled media – why give the record companies / musicians that satisfaction?

But I’ve started to digress, the next question is if my earlier reason for not turning to ogg was iPod-specific, what’s changed? Well, this:

3. Rockbox

A few months back I found word – via LinuxFormat magazine I believe – of a project called Rockbox (http://www.rockbox.org).

This project, whilst not being Linux-based, is an open source and free alternative firmware that ahs been written from the ground up and is now available for a number of different music players including, luckily for me, the iPod – both the 4th Gen model I have broken at home and the new 5g Video pod I have with me here.
Whilst I believe the project originally started for the Archos Jukeboxes (and hence iPod support is still growing in terms of features etc), what is available already is exciting. Full ogg support (not available on iPod or iPodLinux yet), mp3 support and a number of other formats (no DRM); true file-based system (drag and drop, none of this dumb-ass “let’s see where we can hide the files today” approach taken by the Apple firmware) allowing you to connect your music player to any computer and quickly and easily drag your new files over to it, particularly useful to me seeing as, whilst I’m out in Egypt I need to use my laptop to update things and when at home I’ll generally use one of the desktop machines; and a highly configurable user-interface that will only get better and better with time (it’s themeable so as soon as people produce more themes, or I try my own – unlikely).

The install procedure wasn’t the easiest, but then I did have to convert my iPod to FAT32 the long way around, and the instructions were extremely simple to follow, to the point that all of today has been spent listening to a few of the tracks I had lying around (mixture of ogg and mp3) and getting used to the interface. After a while it becomes second nature, and its much more powerful (if not quite as tidy yet) as the Apple interface. Lots of plugins as well.

Again, one of the nicest features of having an application like this out there is, for me, the knowledge that in the future, no matter what jukebox I buy (within reason at the moment, granted) I will be able to run the same software in more or less the same way on it. It’s called standardization Just the same as how I can run a Linux distribution with all the same applications (give or take one or two of the more obscure or proprietary apps) in the same way on my PPC Powerbook G4 as I run on my home x86 machine or the dual-processor (x86) [real:ppl] server that resides in my loft.
4. Operation: Open Source Dave

As you may have spotted by this point in this longer-than-expected ramble, the Open Source side of things seems quite high on my agenda at the minute which, seeing as I have no work to distract me otherwise, is pretty much true.

As far as the plan goes to ‘Open Source Me’ goes though, I think I’m doing pretty well. I pretty much never use OS X, although the partition remains on here for those times I ‘may’ need it, mainly for teaching purposes mentioned earlier.

For all my needs, my current distro of choice – Kubuntu 6.06 – works exceptionally well, I recently started using Kontact as my Personal Information Manager over Evolution that I was using before and find its interface much more friendly, although Evolution is still nice. OpenOffice.org has come on in leaps and bounds to the point that for the presentations I need to run that are in .ppt format it works great. All my own work is kept in OpenDocument Formats but of course opening the occassional Excel or Word file proves no problem at all – given that I’m working with simpler files though I presume.
I’m still using a PCMCIA wireless network card (Netgear WG511T) which as before works out of the box. I could go through and setup the Airport Extreme but so far I’ve been too lazy. Maybe I’ll do it tomorrow.
Of course, Firefox is still my browser of choice, although I will use Konqueror from time to time.
Bluetooth works great within KDE and recognition of all devices I’ve plugged in so far has been very impressive. I haven’t had opportunity to try and get the Canon Pixma printer we have at work yet, but will do soon. Kopete again works just as well as GAIM as an IM and performs admirably.
Adpet works well as a fairly powerful package manager, although I still find the interface slightly alien having used Synaptic for so long.
Of course, given my migration to Rockbox, I no longer really have a need for something like gtkPod, but have it on there just in case. Equally, amarok works superbly as my music player, packed full of features both useful and non, although it seems to be on the edge of becoming too much of a bloat. Still, it looks nice…
I finally installed Beagle the other day, giving me the powerful desktop search functions – a very clever piece of kit, and I configured Mac-on-Linux, which works a charm. Again, I ahven’t setup the networking for it yet as I’ve been a bit slack with it, but most probably I’ll have a play with that tomorrow as well to see what I can do. My suspicion is that if I get that working then I’ll never have to actually boot up into OS X again, but just used mol to jump into it when I need it.

Of course, this being me playing around with things to see what happens before actually thinking about what will happen (and having the application problems associated with being on PPC as opposed to x86) I have encounter a few small problems / strange activity, but these have been thankfully few and far between and, as per usual with Unix-based things, usually only result in one app closing, as opposed to the whole system – which is nice. Just how nice it was was brought home to me yesterday when I tried to boot into OS X only for a greay screen coming up telling me to restart the computer in a few different languages – no explanation of the problem. Restarting gave the same problem. Tried again this morning and it did the same thing about 10 minutes into operation. Gave it another try now and it seems okay – my suspicion is it seems to have some sort of new-found trouble with the PCMCIA network card that it never had before, as the errors occurred when that was plugged in.

At home, well, I don’t know how things are there as last time I was back my desktop was fucked and I never got around to seeing what was up with it, but I remain hopeful. Apparently EvE is now playable via WineX / Cedega which was my previous major barrier, as you may remember. Like with the laptop I will probably always keep a small Windows partition on there anyway (at least for the immediate future) but the plan for the next time I’m back is not to really use it at all and ween it out to the point of no return. I also really want to give Gentoo another try, along with configuring some of the neat new features like iFolder (similar to Mac’s iDisk feature, but free in both ways – beer and speech) which would allow me to keep essential backups on the server from wherever – my only limitation is my bandwidth… and hard disk space.

I’m starting to spend more time playing with the localhost Apache2 server on the laptop and hopefully I’ll get chance to get a bit more proficient at understanding how it works as opposed to just what it does. But we’ll see how all that goes in good time.

And, I believe, that pretty much wraps up most of what I had to blabber on about. like I said, its of little interest to most but never mind that.

I’ve been using jamendo.com recently for a lot of cool music downloads, all available in ogg format. It’s a free website where artists submit whole albums for download, mostly under Creative Commons licenses of one flavour or another. Worth a look either way as there is a wide range of pretty decent music on there.

Anyway, enjoy, I’m going to go before I ramble more.