Links to those still going:
Monday, 21 August 2017
Magazines You Can Only Buy In Soho Bookshops (1)
There are a handful of newsagents in Soho that stock all sorts of offbeat magazines. For quite a while back before everything was on the net, I would buy one or two just because. The only magazine I buy and read regularly now is Art Monthly. I kept many of these offbeats for quite a while, and recently decided to clear them out. But first I took photographs of the front covers. This is the first batch.
Thursday, 17 August 2017
Nice People Play The National Lottery
Single Mum of Colour? Check.
Gay Latin Male? Check.
Sturdy White Working Mother of Two? Check
Daddy of Colour with Princess Daughter? Check.
White Diamond Geezer Family Man? Check.
Athletic Single Middle-Aged White Devoted Daughter? Check.
Gay White Social Worker? Check.
Retired White Devoted Daughter? Check.
The Missing Demographics?
1) Straight Professional White Men
2) Twenty-Something Girls
This feels research-driven. The National Lottery asked people who they had helped, or thought they would help, with the money they won or might win. The research subjects duly gave Right Answers, and the agency devised this campaign, as much as an attempt to position the Lottery as for Nice People who will spend the money on Good Causes, and not just for people desperate to get out of debt, and who shouldn’t be gambling in the first place. The people in this poster are all nice. Nice people play the Lottery. Well, that's what they want you to believe.
The Devoted Daughters are a surprise. I wouldn’t have guessed they were a sizeable segment.
Why no Straight White Men? One theory is that the Liberal Elites who run advertising are part of a plot to marginalise Straight White Men and to privilege women and minorities. The real reason is the research says middle-class white men don’t go near the Lottery. That’s why there are no white professional men in the picture: wasted communication resource.
Here's another reading. Straight White Men can provide for their families without the Lottery. The Lottery is for women and minorities who are underpaid: because gender pay gap and discrimination. So maybe in a way this poster is affirming the Liberal Elite frame after all.
Why no 20-something girls? Because 20-something girls are not about family, and the Liberal Elites don't want them to be about family. That's one suggestion, but the real reason is, I bet, that 20-something girls don't play the lottery either. Because deep down, 20-something girls know that the Lottery is for women and minorities who can't command a decent salary.
Monday, 14 August 2017
Goals and Systems
Scott Adams, who is way richer and smarter than me, has a saying: goals are for losers, systems are for winners. It's been taken up by a few folk recently. It sounds plausible, especially when Adams explains it, but there's another half to the story.
Goals and systems go together. The goal gives the system a purpose, the system makes the goal achievable. Goals without systems are fantasies; systems without goals are futile. Olympic competitors have a goal (“do my best in the race on the day”) which is carefully not about winning medals, and a system of training, dieting, sleeping, and for all anyone knows, motivational movies, to help them achieve that goal. Oh. The medal thing? Well, if their best gets them one, with the accompanying sponsorship and advertising deals, that’s a bonus. It’s not what they are doing it for.
At the very top levels, as I’ve written before, it’s all about the process, not about the prizes.
Someone who says they have a goal, but doesn’t work a system to get there, doesn’t have a goal. They have an idle dream. Someone who says “My goal is to run the London Marathon in under three hours next year” when they can barely run for the bus now, is not “setting themselves a goal”. They are fantasising. Or just being silly. We nod along with it because we’re polite. We don’t really think they have a goal.
There are three kinds of goals: goals that bring prizes, like winning an award, getting a promotion or a raise, or bedding the blonde; goals that don't have prizes, like benching 100kg, visiting Paris, or bedding the blonde; and states, like being fit and healthy, being informed about the arts, or writing for a living. And let’s distinguish these from tasks which are closed-end activities with a well-defined result that you wouldn't do unless you had to.
Being an author is a state-goal; writing a best-seller is a prize-goal, and cleaning the shed to write in, is a task.
A state-goal needs maintenance: after a while the maintenance becomes the goal. I “go to the gym”, I don’t “aim to get muscled-up”.
We can win prizes by sheer dumb luck alone, as in a Lottery, but mostly prizes are won by talent and effort, and the sheer dumb luck of someone deciding to award you a prize. You’re not in control of whether you win a prize. You are, mostly, in control of whether you can work at something every day. At this exact moment of post-modern capitalism, winning any prize takes a lot of work, and hence requires the temperament, wider life-style and sacrifices to do that work. You want that promotion to the grade above the crab-basket? Put in the hours, put in the work, learn the self-management, self-presentation and social skills. As for what you have to do to win an Olympic Gold… Prizes worth having require a lot of work.
A handful of Prizes put one into a Pantheon: Nobel Prize winners, Fields Medallists, Wimbledon and Formula One champions, all have the same relaxed confidence that musicians who had played with Miles Davis had or have. The glow of the unquestionable elite.
At the other end are the non-prize goals: whether these are rewarding depends on your state of mind. One man might be thrilled with his trip up to the observation deck of the Shard, while another, in the middle of a potentially nasty re-organisation at work, might wonder what he is doing there. One man may bench 100kg and glow inwardly at having proved something to himself: another might add another 5kgs the next time.
Therapists and psychologists see a lot of people who don't get a feeling of satisfaction from whatever they do. Those therapists conclude that everyone feels that way, and pronounce goals of any kind to be inherently unsatisfying and meaningless. As opposed to True Love, and Family, and Intimacy, and Being Accepted, and all that stuff.
Someone who thinks that getting some gee-gaw, attaining some goal or winning some prize will change them are, of course, being silly. It’s not the prize that changes them: it’s the process of getting the prize. It’s the changes in character, confidence and emotional state needed to be at the prize-winning level, that are the real benefit of the prize. Not the money, celebrity and appearance in the Honours List. Although the money, celebrity and gong are worth having.
Regular people are puzzled by those of us who have state-goals. Why do I want to be fit and in shape? As if it must be for another purpose, such as impressing girls or playing a sport, the purpose of which is, of course, to win a prize. Regular people understand prizes, but not states. Unless that state is "happiness". Whatever that means to them.
Successful people, by contrast, have systems and goals, the goals are states of which the system is an important part, and the state offers a chance of winning prizes (promotions, investment returns, sex with pretty girls, money) as well. Elite athletics is an endless stream of competitions: competing is a state, and every now and then, they get to stand on the rostrum and bag some sponsorship or advertising. Writing is a state, and if the writer is lucky, he gets a best-seller.
The really unfortunate people are those who work systems that don't put them in a desired state and don't offer the chance of winning prizes.
They’re called “employees”.
Yep. That would be me.
Goals and systems go together. The goal gives the system a purpose, the system makes the goal achievable. Goals without systems are fantasies; systems without goals are futile. Olympic competitors have a goal (“do my best in the race on the day”) which is carefully not about winning medals, and a system of training, dieting, sleeping, and for all anyone knows, motivational movies, to help them achieve that goal. Oh. The medal thing? Well, if their best gets them one, with the accompanying sponsorship and advertising deals, that’s a bonus. It’s not what they are doing it for.
At the very top levels, as I’ve written before, it’s all about the process, not about the prizes.
Someone who says they have a goal, but doesn’t work a system to get there, doesn’t have a goal. They have an idle dream. Someone who says “My goal is to run the London Marathon in under three hours next year” when they can barely run for the bus now, is not “setting themselves a goal”. They are fantasising. Or just being silly. We nod along with it because we’re polite. We don’t really think they have a goal.
There are three kinds of goals: goals that bring prizes, like winning an award, getting a promotion or a raise, or bedding the blonde; goals that don't have prizes, like benching 100kg, visiting Paris, or bedding the blonde; and states, like being fit and healthy, being informed about the arts, or writing for a living. And let’s distinguish these from tasks which are closed-end activities with a well-defined result that you wouldn't do unless you had to.
Being an author is a state-goal; writing a best-seller is a prize-goal, and cleaning the shed to write in, is a task.
A state-goal needs maintenance: after a while the maintenance becomes the goal. I “go to the gym”, I don’t “aim to get muscled-up”.
We can win prizes by sheer dumb luck alone, as in a Lottery, but mostly prizes are won by talent and effort, and the sheer dumb luck of someone deciding to award you a prize. You’re not in control of whether you win a prize. You are, mostly, in control of whether you can work at something every day. At this exact moment of post-modern capitalism, winning any prize takes a lot of work, and hence requires the temperament, wider life-style and sacrifices to do that work. You want that promotion to the grade above the crab-basket? Put in the hours, put in the work, learn the self-management, self-presentation and social skills. As for what you have to do to win an Olympic Gold… Prizes worth having require a lot of work.
A handful of Prizes put one into a Pantheon: Nobel Prize winners, Fields Medallists, Wimbledon and Formula One champions, all have the same relaxed confidence that musicians who had played with Miles Davis had or have. The glow of the unquestionable elite.
At the other end are the non-prize goals: whether these are rewarding depends on your state of mind. One man might be thrilled with his trip up to the observation deck of the Shard, while another, in the middle of a potentially nasty re-organisation at work, might wonder what he is doing there. One man may bench 100kg and glow inwardly at having proved something to himself: another might add another 5kgs the next time.
Therapists and psychologists see a lot of people who don't get a feeling of satisfaction from whatever they do. Those therapists conclude that everyone feels that way, and pronounce goals of any kind to be inherently unsatisfying and meaningless. As opposed to True Love, and Family, and Intimacy, and Being Accepted, and all that stuff.
Someone who thinks that getting some gee-gaw, attaining some goal or winning some prize will change them are, of course, being silly. It’s not the prize that changes them: it’s the process of getting the prize. It’s the changes in character, confidence and emotional state needed to be at the prize-winning level, that are the real benefit of the prize. Not the money, celebrity and appearance in the Honours List. Although the money, celebrity and gong are worth having.
Regular people are puzzled by those of us who have state-goals. Why do I want to be fit and in shape? As if it must be for another purpose, such as impressing girls or playing a sport, the purpose of which is, of course, to win a prize. Regular people understand prizes, but not states. Unless that state is "happiness". Whatever that means to them.
Successful people, by contrast, have systems and goals, the goals are states of which the system is an important part, and the state offers a chance of winning prizes (promotions, investment returns, sex with pretty girls, money) as well. Elite athletics is an endless stream of competitions: competing is a state, and every now and then, they get to stand on the rostrum and bag some sponsorship or advertising. Writing is a state, and if the writer is lucky, he gets a best-seller.
The really unfortunate people are those who work systems that don't put them in a desired state and don't offer the chance of winning prizes.
They’re called “employees”.
Yep. That would be me.
Monday, 7 August 2017
TV and Movie Streaming
Moving on to TV and Movies, let’s talk about subscription services. The final post in this series is about that Prime and other subscription services work and why. Let’s just say that Prime Video looks like the bargain shelves in Blockbusters. I don’t get The Long Goodbye for free, and I have to stump up for MUBI to watch Two or Three Things I Know About Her. It looks like I can watch all the kids movies I want. So let’s just toss Amazon in the bin.
You know how Amazon is really J C Penny on steroids? The streaming services - Apple, Netflix, Amazon - are Blockbusters on steroids. That’s why looking at what they offer always reminds me of walking round Blockbusters, or Fopp in Covent Garden, with the difference that Fopp has, and Blockbusters had, art movies. Blockbusters worked because some people were prepared to wait a while to see the latest movies, but mostly because all of us would watch something that was cheap to rent and looked “okay” but that we would not splash out a full-price cinema visit to see. Streaming services make money because of those grim Sunday afternoons when you’re bored and will watch anything. Amazon’s in the bin because Prime doesn’t actually apply to any movies I want, and do you notice how hard it is to find out what Netflix actually has to offer, and if any of the films or programs have an additional charge? So did I. Let’s give Netflix a pass. If you like it, you pay for it.
I'm going to stick with cut-price box sets from Fopp.
It’s Curzon Home Cinema I really want. I’ve ranted about their crazy commercial decisions before, but hey, let’s rub it in. When it started, they used the browser and I could plug an HDMI cable to my laptop and watch on my TV. Then they revamped the service, and now the Curzon app does not support any form of output re-direction. No Air Play. No Lightning to HDMI for the TV. Who the heck wants to watch a film on an iPad? Even Amazon’s iOS app supports Air Play! Ah, but wait. Curzon has an app for the Apple TV. That’s £139. Since I’m a Curzon member, £139 is about 10-12 movies depending on when I go. And it costs to rent the movies, so breakeven is way down the line. And they all come out on DVD anyway, and eventually for about £5-£10. This is not looking good for Curzon Home Cinema. I’ll just watch the movies when they come out instead. (Note: this is only because I work in central London. If you’re outside the M25 in a town with no council-sponsored art house, then it’s a bargain.)
So if I'm going to get an art-movie subscription, I’ll get MUBI instead. Ya na na ya na. (In this case, it’s the commitment to watch at least one art movie a month that’s the stumbling-block.)
You know how Amazon is really J C Penny on steroids? The streaming services - Apple, Netflix, Amazon - are Blockbusters on steroids. That’s why looking at what they offer always reminds me of walking round Blockbusters, or Fopp in Covent Garden, with the difference that Fopp has, and Blockbusters had, art movies. Blockbusters worked because some people were prepared to wait a while to see the latest movies, but mostly because all of us would watch something that was cheap to rent and looked “okay” but that we would not splash out a full-price cinema visit to see. Streaming services make money because of those grim Sunday afternoons when you’re bored and will watch anything. Amazon’s in the bin because Prime doesn’t actually apply to any movies I want, and do you notice how hard it is to find out what Netflix actually has to offer, and if any of the films or programs have an additional charge? So did I. Let’s give Netflix a pass. If you like it, you pay for it.
I'm going to stick with cut-price box sets from Fopp.
It’s Curzon Home Cinema I really want. I’ve ranted about their crazy commercial decisions before, but hey, let’s rub it in. When it started, they used the browser and I could plug an HDMI cable to my laptop and watch on my TV. Then they revamped the service, and now the Curzon app does not support any form of output re-direction. No Air Play. No Lightning to HDMI for the TV. Who the heck wants to watch a film on an iPad? Even Amazon’s iOS app supports Air Play! Ah, but wait. Curzon has an app for the Apple TV. That’s £139. Since I’m a Curzon member, £139 is about 10-12 movies depending on when I go. And it costs to rent the movies, so breakeven is way down the line. And they all come out on DVD anyway, and eventually for about £5-£10. This is not looking good for Curzon Home Cinema. I’ll just watch the movies when they come out instead. (Note: this is only because I work in central London. If you’re outside the M25 in a town with no council-sponsored art house, then it’s a bargain.)
So if I'm going to get an art-movie subscription, I’ll get MUBI instead. Ya na na ya na. (In this case, it’s the commitment to watch at least one art movie a month that’s the stumbling-block.)
Thursday, 3 August 2017
Music Streaming for Cheapies
Enough about hardware and software. Onto music streaming.
The cheapie option would be to use a free service. I did that for about twenty minutes a couple of years ago when I tried Spotify or Rdio or one of those. Ads are annoying on actual radio, which is why I listen to the BBC and Chill, and no less annoying on a streaming service. So I’m paying.
I really liked 8Tracks. I can still use it, though since they went public and got copyright religion, in the UK it plays via You Tube. And only when I’m running the You Tube site on my Mac. I like it because I could click in a random playlist that suited my mood and hear music from acts I would never otherwise hear about. Most of the time it was pleasant wallpaper, which was exactly what I wanted, and every now and then something would jump out at me, and I would buy the CD. That’s what I want. So I’ll listen to that over the Dragonfly and headphones now and then.
And before we talk about sound quality, can I just say “Royal Albert Hall”? Possibly the most famous music venue in the world, because of the Proms, and its acoustics are, well, blurry is a good word. Nearly all the Prom concerts are pretty much sold out.
Pricing. For all the providers, the basic service, at 320 kps, is £9.99 / month. CD-quality streaming is £19.99 / month. You don’t decide of a price is low or high by looking at the competition. You decide by looking at the generic alternatives. Radio, for instance, is free but has irritating ads and talking heads. Not a good comparison. I buy about 3-4 CDs a month, usually classical, not usually new releases, sometimes a box set of (say) Mozart symphonies. Let’s say I spend £40 a month on CDs. Not all of those will get played a lot afterwards. Some are purely experimental - what does this modern composer sound like? Very occasionally I will hear something in Fopp and be immediately stricken - SOHN’s first CD was like that. A new full-price classical CD is about £15. I very rarely buy those. To look at £20 / month as “twice the price of Spotify” is to miss the point. It’s “two spec CD’s I may never play again”. It’s also about the price of a ticket in the stalls of St John’s Smith Square to hear the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. Tidal and Qozum’s £19.99 / month for CD-quality is a well-judged price. I suspect that I will buy fewer, or better targeted, classical and / or jazz CD’s, because I’ll be experimenting over the streaming service. I’ll happily stream 320 kps at £9.99 / month over my home broadband connection.
So now, which service? I want one with good playlists. And a decent list. And I’d prefer to avoid the reputational issues of Spotify. Also, the cool kids at work voted 2:1 in favour of Spotify over Apple Music. So. That's Millennials. This leaves leaves Apple Music, Tidal and Qozum.
The audiophile subscription service of choice, so good that it’s integrated into Roon, is Tidal. I’m tempted to say that if it’s good enough for Roon, it’s probably good enough for me. It pays artists more, and I doubt it’s making Jay-Z richer right now. So that’s my choice. Tidal Premium. Via the iDevice and the Dragonfly. I’ll let you know how that goes.
The cheapie option would be to use a free service. I did that for about twenty minutes a couple of years ago when I tried Spotify or Rdio or one of those. Ads are annoying on actual radio, which is why I listen to the BBC and Chill, and no less annoying on a streaming service. So I’m paying.
I really liked 8Tracks. I can still use it, though since they went public and got copyright religion, in the UK it plays via You Tube. And only when I’m running the You Tube site on my Mac. I like it because I could click in a random playlist that suited my mood and hear music from acts I would never otherwise hear about. Most of the time it was pleasant wallpaper, which was exactly what I wanted, and every now and then something would jump out at me, and I would buy the CD. That’s what I want. So I’ll listen to that over the Dragonfly and headphones now and then.
And before we talk about sound quality, can I just say “Royal Albert Hall”? Possibly the most famous music venue in the world, because of the Proms, and its acoustics are, well, blurry is a good word. Nearly all the Prom concerts are pretty much sold out.
Radio One streams over DAB at 128 kps, and the World Service at 64 kps. Your telephone land-line gives you 64 kps (56 kps in the USA). Radio Three is broadcast between 160-192 kps. So anyone offering 320 kps is offering twice the quality of radio. Next up is streaming CD-quality FLAC files, and that’s going make you glad you have unlimited downloads. A WAV file at 1411 kps takes about 11 MB/min and FLAC compresses between 50%-60%, so Beethoven’s Ninth, which is around 75 minutes long, is around 412 MB of music data. Signalling overhead and some re-transmission may add up to 30%, so allow another 125MB for a total of 637MB. At 320kps for the music, that’s 178MB, and at 96kps for the music, it’s 53MB. Watch the quality setting when you’re streaming on your mobile data plan.
Pricing. For all the providers, the basic service, at 320 kps, is £9.99 / month. CD-quality streaming is £19.99 / month. You don’t decide of a price is low or high by looking at the competition. You decide by looking at the generic alternatives. Radio, for instance, is free but has irritating ads and talking heads. Not a good comparison. I buy about 3-4 CDs a month, usually classical, not usually new releases, sometimes a box set of (say) Mozart symphonies. Let’s say I spend £40 a month on CDs. Not all of those will get played a lot afterwards. Some are purely experimental - what does this modern composer sound like? Very occasionally I will hear something in Fopp and be immediately stricken - SOHN’s first CD was like that. A new full-price classical CD is about £15. I very rarely buy those. To look at £20 / month as “twice the price of Spotify” is to miss the point. It’s “two spec CD’s I may never play again”. It’s also about the price of a ticket in the stalls of St John’s Smith Square to hear the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. Tidal and Qozum’s £19.99 / month for CD-quality is a well-judged price. I suspect that I will buy fewer, or better targeted, classical and / or jazz CD’s, because I’ll be experimenting over the streaming service. I’ll happily stream 320 kps at £9.99 / month over my home broadband connection.
So now, which service? I want one with good playlists. And a decent list. And I’d prefer to avoid the reputational issues of Spotify. Also, the cool kids at work voted 2:1 in favour of Spotify over Apple Music. So. That's Millennials. This leaves leaves Apple Music, Tidal and Qozum.
The audiophile subscription service of choice, so good that it’s integrated into Roon, is Tidal. I’m tempted to say that if it’s good enough for Roon, it’s probably good enough for me. It pays artists more, and I doubt it’s making Jay-Z richer right now. So that’s my choice. Tidal Premium. Via the iDevice and the Dragonfly. I’ll let you know how that goes.
Monday, 31 July 2017
Cataloguing Your Music For Cheapies
Why did I go through all this? I listen to music in two circumstances: when travelling, and at home. At home, I have a Marantz 6003 amplifier and CD6005 CD player with B&W 686’s - and that sounds as good as my ears can hear in my far-from-perfect listening circumstances. I buy and play CDs, and I'm happy doing that.
When travelling I play “train music” over the iPhone through Bose QC20’s. I rarely listen to train music in the house. Train music gets downloaded into iTunes where it rotates through a playlist called ‘iPhone’, which is updated every time I plug the phone into the computer. Train music has a finite life, and I have backups of it on a NAS. That’s why I looked for a way of streaming NAS files: it was a completeness thing.
Occasionally I want some random variety in my listening. So I was interested in streaming from You Tube / 8Tracks with decent quality but without a lot of cost. That’s an added-value thing. That lead me down the rabbit-hole. And it is.
I found out that a lot of serious audiophiles have all their music ripped to a NAS and play it back through a library + music catalogue program running on a computer attached to a high-quality DAC hooked into the hi-fi amplifier. I know: you can feel a flow chart coming on. A suitable authority in this is Hans Beekhuyzen.
Summarising his excellent videos… The preferred audiophile hardware set-up is a Mac Mini - and not the cheap one - and an iDevice to run the library’s remote-control app. Audiophiles are likely to have an iDevice or two already, so this set-up is a lot cheaper than buying a MacBook Pro. (Beekhuyzen makes a good point about the volatility from time to time and market to market of the actual boards and chips used in Wintel computers of the same name. Only Apple are consistent.)
The top-end library- players are JRiver, Audirvana 3 and Roon. These have remote control apps for iDevices, and there are generic remote control apps for OS X (the Mac Mini) if you want to stream from Spotify, Tidal and other services.
All this will cost around £1,000 including the software, and more for Roon. Roon is for the 1% of music freaks. The annual subscription is £120. It looks fabulous. It has the names of all the sound engineers who worked on the record, and the names of the receptionists on duty at the studio during the recordings. If, like the Hans Beekhuyzen, you too have 500 SACDs, this is what you want, and you won't bat an eyelid at the cost.
I like music, but I'm not nerdy about it. I can recognise most major 1950's jazz musicians by ear, and identify the major composers by style within five bars, and of course my head is full of pop-culture junk from my youth, but I'm not a music nerd. I don't have four different versions of The Planets - because I have the best one, which is by Von Karajan and the Berlin Phil. I have two versions of the Bach Cello suites: Tortellier and Yo-Yo Ma. That's it. For me, the additional spending on a fancy library isn't worth it. And I need to be careful of the bottomless pit that is getting all the catalogue details right.
I have a Mac, and Apple want you to use iTunes, and iTunes really, really wants to store all the music in the Media folder next to the library.itl file. So much so that the default setting when you do File-> Add to Library is to copy all the files to that Media folder. It really is inexcusable of Apple to make wasteful copying the default. I use iTunes to manage the travelling music and the iPhone: those files live on the laptop because iTunes is happy that way.
There are not many free / cheap music cataloguing (1) programs for OS X, and a fair few of those come from Linux. This is what Clementine looks like:
Not as pretty as iTunes. Let alone the Top Three. And I couldn't find any setting to increase the size of those thumbnails.
So I created a second iTunes “library” using alt-Click-on-iTunes-Icon, turned off the “use up lots of valuable SSD space with duplicate copies of stuff on you NAS” option, and then File-> Added To Library. iTunes created a nice catalogue of what’s on my NAS for me. However…
iTunes seems to have limited write permissions for files on a NAS. OS X defaults to a protocol called AFP to connect to a NAS, and AFP seems to limit your ability to do even simple file management operations. Connect to the same NAS as an SMB (Samba) server and you get the permissions you need. I suspect iTunes uses the AFP protocol. So it won’t modify file metadata and album art if the file is on a NAS. Yep, this was one of those I-learned-more-than-I-ever-wanted-know exercises.
There’s a free program called Kid3 that will handle metadata editing of file on a NAS. It looks basic, but it does the business. Once you’ve edited the metadata in Kid3, you have to close Kid3 to release the files, delete the original entry in the iTunes catalogue and repeat File->Add to Library. The new metadata and album art will appear in iTunes.
However, in a fine demonstration of the utter irrationality of consumer thinking, since I've just avoided spending up to £1,000 on kit I don't need, I can treat myself to some kit I might want. Or some more CDs. Or a music subscription. Cue next post.
(1) Libraries have books. Catalogues are databases that provide details of a book and a pointer to its location in the library. What we really want is a music catalogue program, which is what the Big 3 seem to be. If you don’t want iTunes to make space-hogging copies, turn off the “copy music into the iTunes Media folder when adding to library” option. It’s hidden on the Advanced Tab in options.
When travelling I play “train music” over the iPhone through Bose QC20’s. I rarely listen to train music in the house. Train music gets downloaded into iTunes where it rotates through a playlist called ‘iPhone’, which is updated every time I plug the phone into the computer. Train music has a finite life, and I have backups of it on a NAS. That’s why I looked for a way of streaming NAS files: it was a completeness thing.
Occasionally I want some random variety in my listening. So I was interested in streaming from You Tube / 8Tracks with decent quality but without a lot of cost. That’s an added-value thing. That lead me down the rabbit-hole. And it is.
I found out that a lot of serious audiophiles have all their music ripped to a NAS and play it back through a library + music catalogue program running on a computer attached to a high-quality DAC hooked into the hi-fi amplifier. I know: you can feel a flow chart coming on. A suitable authority in this is Hans Beekhuyzen.
Summarising his excellent videos… The preferred audiophile hardware set-up is a Mac Mini - and not the cheap one - and an iDevice to run the library’s remote-control app. Audiophiles are likely to have an iDevice or two already, so this set-up is a lot cheaper than buying a MacBook Pro. (Beekhuyzen makes a good point about the volatility from time to time and market to market of the actual boards and chips used in Wintel computers of the same name. Only Apple are consistent.)
The top-end library- players are JRiver, Audirvana 3 and Roon. These have remote control apps for iDevices, and there are generic remote control apps for OS X (the Mac Mini) if you want to stream from Spotify, Tidal and other services.
All this will cost around £1,000 including the software, and more for Roon. Roon is for the 1% of music freaks. The annual subscription is £120. It looks fabulous. It has the names of all the sound engineers who worked on the record, and the names of the receptionists on duty at the studio during the recordings. If, like the Hans Beekhuyzen, you too have 500 SACDs, this is what you want, and you won't bat an eyelid at the cost.
I like music, but I'm not nerdy about it. I can recognise most major 1950's jazz musicians by ear, and identify the major composers by style within five bars, and of course my head is full of pop-culture junk from my youth, but I'm not a music nerd. I don't have four different versions of The Planets - because I have the best one, which is by Von Karajan and the Berlin Phil. I have two versions of the Bach Cello suites: Tortellier and Yo-Yo Ma. That's it. For me, the additional spending on a fancy library isn't worth it. And I need to be careful of the bottomless pit that is getting all the catalogue details right.
I have a Mac, and Apple want you to use iTunes, and iTunes really, really wants to store all the music in the Media folder next to the library.itl file. So much so that the default setting when you do File-> Add to Library is to copy all the files to that Media folder. It really is inexcusable of Apple to make wasteful copying the default. I use iTunes to manage the travelling music and the iPhone: those files live on the laptop because iTunes is happy that way.
There are not many free / cheap music cataloguing (1) programs for OS X, and a fair few of those come from Linux. This is what Clementine looks like:
Not as pretty as iTunes. Let alone the Top Three. And I couldn't find any setting to increase the size of those thumbnails.
So I created a second iTunes “library” using alt-Click-on-iTunes-Icon, turned off the “use up lots of valuable SSD space with duplicate copies of stuff on you NAS” option, and then File-> Added To Library. iTunes created a nice catalogue of what’s on my NAS for me. However…
iTunes seems to have limited write permissions for files on a NAS. OS X defaults to a protocol called AFP to connect to a NAS, and AFP seems to limit your ability to do even simple file management operations. Connect to the same NAS as an SMB (Samba) server and you get the permissions you need. I suspect iTunes uses the AFP protocol. So it won’t modify file metadata and album art if the file is on a NAS. Yep, this was one of those I-learned-more-than-I-ever-wanted-know exercises.
There’s a free program called Kid3 that will handle metadata editing of file on a NAS. It looks basic, but it does the business. Once you’ve edited the metadata in Kid3, you have to close Kid3 to release the files, delete the original entry in the iTunes catalogue and repeat File->Add to Library. The new metadata and album art will appear in iTunes.
However, in a fine demonstration of the utter irrationality of consumer thinking, since I've just avoided spending up to £1,000 on kit I don't need, I can treat myself to some kit I might want. Or some more CDs. Or a music subscription. Cue next post.
(1) Libraries have books. Catalogues are databases that provide details of a book and a pointer to its location in the library. What we really want is a music catalogue program, which is what the Big 3 seem to be. If you don’t want iTunes to make space-hogging copies, turn off the “copy music into the iTunes Media folder when adding to library” option. It’s hidden on the Advanced Tab in options.
Thursday, 27 July 2017
Streaming Near CD-Quality Internet and NAS Music for Cheapies
I have streamed music on You Tube to my hi-fi via the headphone socket of my ASUS netbook (which I have now retired) but never really liked the sound, and the ASUS was horribly slow loading You Tube pages. I started to look at various options to improve this, and then it hit me. Because, you know, I’m really smart and quick and down with modern technology.
I already have a high-quality device that will stream music from all sorts of sources. In fact I have two. The iPhone and iPad. All the streaming services have apps: Netflix, Amazon, You Tube, Google Play, Spotify, Beats, Apple Music… And there's an app called File Manager to play music stored on a NAS or a computer.
There’s only one upgrade I need, which is to put a decent DAC between the iDevice and the amplifier. The entry-level hi-fi DAC seems to be the £89 Dragonfly Black, attached via the £40 Apple Lightning Camera Adapter, which lets you power the phone and DAC from the transformer. I ordered those from Amazon, collected it from Doddle, took it home, plugged it all in, and…. instant hi-fi happiness.
As far as my slightly tired ears are concerned.
The final piece of the cheapie jigsaw is an app that streams music from a NAS or other computers. That’s File Manager Pro for iOS: the Pro upgrade gives you access to more than one device. File Manager Pro lets your iDevice access NAS and computers (it spotted my NAS, but you may need to set up others devices by IP address), and it gives you a simple Explorer interface to navigate round the files. Click the first music file in a directory and it will be cached and start playing. File Manager is smart enough to recognise that you probably want to play the other music files it can find in that directory and carries on caching and playing. Viola! NAS streaming.
You can now stream anything an iDevice can play from any computer on your network, plus music from any music streaming service that provides an iDevice app. You’re getting close-to-CD quality via the Dragonfly.
Is that it? This is where it gets embarrassing. My CD player has a USB port on the front. I’ve always thought it was for USB drives, and would be looking for files, and go off in a huff when it couldn’t find any. But hey, try anything once. I plugged in the Lightning-to-USB cable, navigated to a music folder with File Explorer and pressed play. Guess what? it works. My CD player is even better than the Dragonfly. As, to be fair, I would expect from the mid-range Marantz CD 6005. However, the Dragonfly is going to improve my listening when I’m streaming but not using the hi-fi. Like when I’m sitting in the garden. And you may not have a CD player with streaming USB input, so you should still get the Dragonfly.
For £130 if you have a recent generation smartphone, or £309 if you don't, you can stream near-CD quality music to your hi-fi from all those internet services, and you can stream any music you have on NAS or computers as well.
Yes. Almost. And certainly for less than £130, assuming you have an iDevice.
What’s missing is the library-style interface. That's for the next post.
PS: In case you have been rolling your eyes and being like "Dude, just use iTunes on your computer", here's why you're missing the point. The quality of output signal from a Mac headphone socket is not good enough: it's muffled and you will quite quickly get tired hearing it over a hi-fi. You still need the hi-fi DAC. Second, who said you had a computer? Third, even if you do, do you really want five or ten metres of USB 3 cable between you using your computer on the sofa and the DAC on a shelf? Also, that's about £60 of cable. That you are never going to use for anything else.
There are no high-quality DACs that can be streamed to from a computer over wif-if or ethernet. What does are media devices like the Apple TV or the WD TV. Take one look at the price and you know the DAC isn't going to be hi-if quality.
I know there are Internet Radios. The user interface is horrible. The upgrade path is, what upgrade path? Be serious.
I already have a high-quality device that will stream music from all sorts of sources. In fact I have two. The iPhone and iPad. All the streaming services have apps: Netflix, Amazon, You Tube, Google Play, Spotify, Beats, Apple Music… And there's an app called File Manager to play music stored on a NAS or a computer.
There’s only one upgrade I need, which is to put a decent DAC between the iDevice and the amplifier. The entry-level hi-fi DAC seems to be the £89 Dragonfly Black, attached via the £40 Apple Lightning Camera Adapter, which lets you power the phone and DAC from the transformer. I ordered those from Amazon, collected it from Doddle, took it home, plugged it all in, and…. instant hi-fi happiness.
As far as my slightly tired ears are concerned.
The final piece of the cheapie jigsaw is an app that streams music from a NAS or other computers. That’s File Manager Pro for iOS: the Pro upgrade gives you access to more than one device. File Manager Pro lets your iDevice access NAS and computers (it spotted my NAS, but you may need to set up others devices by IP address), and it gives you a simple Explorer interface to navigate round the files. Click the first music file in a directory and it will be cached and start playing. File Manager is smart enough to recognise that you probably want to play the other music files it can find in that directory and carries on caching and playing. Viola! NAS streaming.
You can now stream anything an iDevice can play from any computer on your network, plus music from any music streaming service that provides an iDevice app. You’re getting close-to-CD quality via the Dragonfly.
Is that it? This is where it gets embarrassing. My CD player has a USB port on the front. I’ve always thought it was for USB drives, and would be looking for files, and go off in a huff when it couldn’t find any. But hey, try anything once. I plugged in the Lightning-to-USB cable, navigated to a music folder with File Explorer and pressed play. Guess what? it works. My CD player is even better than the Dragonfly. As, to be fair, I would expect from the mid-range Marantz CD 6005. However, the Dragonfly is going to improve my listening when I’m streaming but not using the hi-fi. Like when I’m sitting in the garden. And you may not have a CD player with streaming USB input, so you should still get the Dragonfly.
For £130 if you have a recent generation smartphone, or £309 if you don't, you can stream near-CD quality music to your hi-fi from all those internet services, and you can stream any music you have on NAS or computers as well.
Yes. Almost. And certainly for less than £130, assuming you have an iDevice.
What’s missing is the library-style interface. That's for the next post.
PS: In case you have been rolling your eyes and being like "Dude, just use iTunes on your computer", here's why you're missing the point. The quality of output signal from a Mac headphone socket is not good enough: it's muffled and you will quite quickly get tired hearing it over a hi-fi. You still need the hi-fi DAC. Second, who said you had a computer? Third, even if you do, do you really want five or ten metres of USB 3 cable between you using your computer on the sofa and the DAC on a shelf? Also, that's about £60 of cable. That you are never going to use for anything else.
There are no high-quality DACs that can be streamed to from a computer over wif-if or ethernet. What does are media devices like the Apple TV or the WD TV. Take one look at the price and you know the DAC isn't going to be hi-if quality.
I know there are Internet Radios. The user interface is horrible. The upgrade path is, what upgrade path? Be serious.
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