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April 7, 2007

Upgrade Your iPod's Drive and Firmware for FLAC Playback

Rockbox is an alternative (open source) firmware that will run on many iPods. One of its cooler features is that it supports several audio codecs such as OGG, AC3 and everyone's favorite lossless codec, FLAC.

What's also interesting about Rockbox--and this is slightly less talked about--is that it handles gapless playback really nicely. Instead of pausing or fading between songs, Rockbox will start the next song immediately after the previous one ended. This is great for playing back audio taken from electronica and live/concert CDs that blend one track straight into the next.

My friend Justin went about upgrading his 4th gen iPod to use Rockbox the other day and he ended up upgrading his iPod's hard disk and battery as well, in order to accommodate playback for all the larger FLAC files he's been encoding. Thankfully, he put together a nice little howto which documents the whole process, including the tinfoiling of his new drive (above photo), which eliminated an EMI issue that he encountered with the new disk.

Resources:

April 4, 2007

Ripping Vinyl with GNU/Linux

It's time consuming, but with the right process you can transform your vinyl collection into digital audio for archiving, sharing and playing on portable devices.

To make the most of your ripped analogs, you'll need to go a little further than just recording the audio with your sound card. There's the whole process of normalizing and splitting tracks into seperate files, of course, but it's also not a bad idea to make multiple encodings so you can have both mp3 playback and a lossless archival copy. Then there's file naming and ID3 tags to think about...

Luckily, you can do all of the above with free software. There are even tools to make the tagging and naming step as simple as possible. Now, there's still work involved, but think how slick you'll look when you're lugging an iPod instead of that other portable audio device.

Ripping Vinyl with GNU/Linux -Link.

March 24, 2007

Control Your Applications With a Wiimote

Chris Brentano sent us a tip for the Wii Loop Machine, a wickedly awesome music loop playing application that uses the Wii Remote as it's interface. As Chris puts it, "This looks like it could take laptop music battles to another level, or just make people look funny doing it. Either way, it looks super fun."

There are a couple of libraries available that will allow you to incorporate the Wiimote into your application. The Wii Loop Machine uses the Max/MSP plugin aka.wiiremote. If you're building some sort of music composing or performance system, it's worth a look.

Or you can read in the Wii Remote's raw sensor data and do whatever you like with it in your own applications. For general Wii input in OS X, Windows and Linux, check out the Wii Remote drivers list on the WiiLi Wiki. DarwiinRemote seems to be the predominant driver for OS X and GlovePIE offers similar functionality for Windows . There are a number of drivers for Linux, including a Perl driver!

It's really impressive, the cool things hackers are putting together with this device. If you've got a cool homebrew Wii project you'd like to share, just send us a tip or tell us about it in the comments!

March 23, 2007

iConcertCal - Track Upcoming Concerts in iTunes

iConcertCal is an iTunes plugin that pulls concert data for artists that you have in your music library and it will automatically generate a personal calendar of upcoming shows in your city.

We wrote this plug-in in our spare time because we were tired of missing concerts for our favorite bands and we figured other people probably are too.

If you ever needed a good example for how the Internet, digital media and Web 2.0 are working in concert to build a richer landscape for musicians and audiences, this is it.

iConcertCal: A Personalized Concert Calendar Built For iTunes -Link.

March 14, 2007

Google for Music

Google Napster DJ Danger Mouse

The Amazon Web Services Blog reveals a simple search syntax to turn Google into your own personal (free) Napster:

-inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:"index of" +"last modified" +"parent directory" +description +size +(wma|mp3) "Nirvana"

Just replace Nirvana with a song or artist of your choice to display a results page of indexes that contain downloadable MP3s.

P.S. Don't steal music.

Update:

In the comments, JLOCK84 adds:

The folks from I-hacked made a little site that does this for you, G2P.org. Finds music files, as well as ebooks, and can also work as a proxy.

Related:

Google Hacks, 2E

January 23, 2007

Stream Music to Airport Express Without iTunes

You don't need to use iTunes to stream audio to an Aiport Express. You can use the Windows Media Player, WinAmp, Rhapsody, etc...

oAEP - Stands for ovesen.NET Airport Express Player. This small application records the music and sound played by your pc and streams it to an Airtunes enabled Airport Express. It has never been this easy streaming music and sound to your Airport Express without using ITunes.

Yes, you red correctly. You can use Media Player, WinAmp or another music player with your Airport Express.

Source included. Neat, this means you can also stream formats iTunes doesn't, like Ogg Vorbis (well, with a plug-in you can).

Related: