mp3 player
Jul. 1st, 2005 01:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
swehSo I decided to get the Creative Zen Touch. 40Gb disk. It can't be used as a generic hard disk (boo!) but there are Linux programs for it (yay!).
So... just about light enough for shirt pocket; comes with its own belt clip case for days when I don't have a shirt pocket! Sound is pretty good. Navigation will take some getting used to (I keep scrolling past the album I want). Battery life is wonderful :-)
The big problem I had is probably the same problem I'll have on all modern mp3 players; the songs are stored in a database type system, which allows you to search by artist or by album. I have over 450 albums... that can take some time to scroll through. And some albums have the same name (eg "Singles" is an album by Alison Moyet and The Specials) so they end up colliding. Not good. If I try to find the album I want by artist... yuck; I have a lot of compilation albums, and so the artist list is over 1400 entries long! Not exactly a nice list for browsing. My old Archos used a real file system and so I had the stuff organised by artist ("Various" was used for compilation albums) and then album name and then the songs (filename had the track number in it, so it was always in order).
Fortunately I seem to have worked out a solution. Since I have a database of all my CDs, I recoded the ID3 tages so that the "Genre" field has the value I normally browse by (artist or "Various"). At the same time I added the "track number" entry so that songs play in the right order. Previously I had an id3v1 tag, but I removed those and used id3v2, which doesn't truncate fields to 30 characters. (Whee; Unix scripting - automate the tagging of 6700 files all with a couple of shell scripts :-))
Now I can browse by genre, find the artist I want, select 'view albums' and then pick the album I want. Queuing up multiple albums (or even all albums by an artist) is pretty simple.
I'm guessing I would have similar issues with ipods or other recent "clever" mp3 players.
Probably the worse part of the Touch player is the "random" button. It's too easy to press by mistake and this feature (it's promoted as being clever!) will queue up all the songs on the machine in random order. With 6700 songs that takes a few seconds - but to turn this off involves going through a few menus to change the play mode back to "repeat all", otherwise selecting any album will cause that to play in random order.
Of course, maybe 40Gb isn't enough... I only have around 3.5Gb of free space on this machine now!
So... just about light enough for shirt pocket; comes with its own belt clip case for days when I don't have a shirt pocket! Sound is pretty good. Navigation will take some getting used to (I keep scrolling past the album I want). Battery life is wonderful :-)
The big problem I had is probably the same problem I'll have on all modern mp3 players; the songs are stored in a database type system, which allows you to search by artist or by album. I have over 450 albums... that can take some time to scroll through. And some albums have the same name (eg "Singles" is an album by Alison Moyet and The Specials) so they end up colliding. Not good. If I try to find the album I want by artist... yuck; I have a lot of compilation albums, and so the artist list is over 1400 entries long! Not exactly a nice list for browsing. My old Archos used a real file system and so I had the stuff organised by artist ("Various" was used for compilation albums) and then album name and then the songs (filename had the track number in it, so it was always in order).
Fortunately I seem to have worked out a solution. Since I have a database of all my CDs, I recoded the ID3 tages so that the "Genre" field has the value I normally browse by (artist or "Various"). At the same time I added the "track number" entry so that songs play in the right order. Previously I had an id3v1 tag, but I removed those and used id3v2, which doesn't truncate fields to 30 characters. (Whee; Unix scripting - automate the tagging of 6700 files all with a couple of shell scripts :-))
Now I can browse by genre, find the artist I want, select 'view albums' and then pick the album I want. Queuing up multiple albums (or even all albums by an artist) is pretty simple.
I'm guessing I would have similar issues with ipods or other recent "clever" mp3 players.
Probably the worse part of the Touch player is the "random" button. It's too easy to press by mistake and this feature (it's promoted as being clever!) will queue up all the songs on the machine in random order. With 6700 songs that takes a few seconds - but to turn this off involves going through a few menus to change the play mode back to "repeat all", otherwise selecting any album will cause that to play in random order.
Of course, maybe 40Gb isn't enough... I only have around 3.5Gb of free space on this machine now!
