So, in late 1999 I started to rip my CDs onto my computer, because I just hated to always search an album, put the case somewhere, find it back later etc. I just hated handling the hardware.
Having just migrated that time to GNU/Linux, I payed attention to the different licence issues and patents, and decided to use the Ogg/Vorbis format for my music instead of MP3.
In the following years, it was no issue at all to find a player that could handle that format on PCs, regardless of the operating system. However, for portables it was much more hard to find. Especially as I did not want an extra gear but wanted to use my mobile phone as a player.
I tried several software on Windows CE and Symbian and to some degree I got it working, but often the players being capable of supporting Ogg/Vorbis were not so good in regards of ergonomics.
Later, I purchased a Cowon D2 dedicated player, along with fine Sure (and later Klipsch) in-ear phones. It was great quality and a very well player, the audio quality was just superb.
But then came streaming...
I got interested in that UPnP/DLNA stuff and then the mess really began. On the server-side (PC/NAS), it went fine for the most part, except that some UPnP servers just filtered Ogg/Vorbis as it is just not part of the specs... so my music was just not offered for streaming in my network.
Even worse it was on the player front. On a laptop no issues with that, everything that was accessible just played - but other mobile clients just failed to know the codecs - video and audio was just bad and it was not really a matter which platform it was - neither iOS (on the iPhone 3GS that time) nor Android really supported it very fine (depends on the device and Android flavour - with Cyanogenmod 7.1 I got it though later on).
I tried with server-side transcoding, but it turned out that it really took too long and most of the UPnP/D
LNA servers that provided transcoding on the fly to the format the client supported failed in other disciplines or were just too complicated to set up.
By the way, the most annoying thing is that many UPnP servers just do not offer to specify separate locations for music, video and fotos, they just scan the HDD or a base folder and categorised it. Problem is with that, that all my albums also contain the cover art as a picture file (e.g. cover.jpeg) - which polluted my fotos folder then when viewed per UPnP... As it turned out, I now use XBMC for being UPnP server and renderer. The reason is: XBMC is one of the greatest media centers with great music/video database support (including artworks, bio, critics etc.) and knows many formats through the usage of libraries such as ffmpeg.
Additionally, it is one of the rare solutions offering to be UPnP/DLNA renderer and source at the same time. Bt the biggest advantage is that, once you configured your media to use the database mode, it is offered in the same great way via streaming. So, when accessing the XBMC via UPnP on, say, via my mobile, I have the same good separation and navigation as on XBMC locally - just great!
However, transcoding is still hard and also not really suitable on my Atom-powered HTPC. So, for my music, I decided to convert all my stuff from Ogg/Vorbis to MP3 with quite high quality settings.
To my regret, it turned out later on, that now streaming went just well with all my clients, but for some music the audio quality just dropped clearly - having undergone a double encoding (first, from CD to Ogg, then from Ogg to MP3).
Problem!
What to do now? Leave streaming and revert to my Ogg/Vorbis collection? Rip all my CDs again? Spent the money and buy everything again from Amazon or whatever MP3 store?
No, too expensive, too time consuming.
Using a Music streaming service? Possible, but the problem is that I often have no internet access (e.g. at work where I use music most) and thus cannot use streaming.
Okay, some of the services offer also conditional downloading similar to podcasting, but... I want to hear music that I already "own" and do not want to pay a monthly fee of about EUR 10 and handle the downloads between devices. Which is really inexpensive if you use it like most of the people do... ;) But for me, as said, paying that much money per month was just too expensive for just listening to my existing and old collection.
Especially, as in Europe we really are in stone-age with those services - no big competition like in the USA (not to mention video and TV offers... no Hulu, no Netflix, no Amazon whatever).
So, then there was iTunes Match! Great! A service offering to replace existing music on my HDD with the DRM-free and high quality AAC version!
It works that way, that you pay Apple (and GEMA) almost 25 bucks a year (that is much less per year than I would pay for the others). In turn, iTunes tries to match my local music with the iTunes Store music and replaces it as if I would have bought it via iTunes. For all music that cannot be found, it just uploads these files to the iCloud as if it was there as well.
If I now loose my music due to a HDD crash and loss of backups, I still have my music downloadable from the cloud.
I just tried it today, but so far most from my 24 GB music was found on iTunes and was replaced. I can also now "sync" my music with my iPhone 4S and other boxes - much simler than with the previous wired and wireless iTunes sync options - which were (from my point of view) horrible.
On the Mac/PC, I can now decide whether to stream or download parts of the collection or everything. That way, XBMC still can access my music even without an iTunes plugin.
Let us see how it works in the long term, I will report if there is something notable!
Thursday, 12 January 2012
Friday, 5 August 2011
Euroflugtag (4-7. August 2011) in Niederkassel-Rheidt bei Bonn
Jetzt am Wochenende ist in Rheidt der Euroflugtag 2011. Weitere Infos gibt es auf der Euroflugtag-Website des Aero Club Rheidt.
Saturday, 9 July 2011
Tuesday, 26 October 2010
Thursday, 5 August 2010
Saturday, 17 July 2010
Moon
http://www.gamona.de/kino-dvd/moon,filmkritik-pc:article,1724435.html
Ui, mal wieder ein "Raumschiff-Film" ;-)
Ui, mal wieder ein "Raumschiff-Film" ;-)
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