Friday, August 5, 2005

Of media players and personal responsibility

Comment Commentary

satan665- A lot of my rediscovered obsession with Japanese stuff has come from this dream I had the other night depicting my subconscious's idea of what Shibuya must be like.. But it was more like an area from Nocturne mixed with that scene from Ghost in the Shell 2 with the street festival and drowned in pink.. God, it was weird.

Sara- Fully gone: N, M, and "
Almost gone: E, S, D, C, V, <, >, ?, K, I. I'm afraid I can't spell anything out of those.

Shin- I've sped up the process on mine by eating greasy foods such as popcorn at the computer.

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I've been trying to escape the hellish control Apple has placed over my computer with iTunes. Normally it wouldn't be much of a problem, but when I started buying music on iTunes they dragged me into their crazy little AAC-encoded scheme.

Plus, once I put Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon (How posery of me, I don't have anything else of theirs- And I only have this because I found it in my dad's CD case) and these Pixies Live albums onto my computer, I knew I had to move to a different media player. The little split-second gaps between songs is completely intolerable with those kinds of songs.

So after consulting the Media Players thread in the OtakuBoards PC/Mac forum, I decided to download Foobar 2000 ( recommendation by Tony).

The difference in sound quality was definitely noticeable, at least on a couple of albums. The thing definitely isn't that aesthetically pleasing by default.. But that doesn't really matter.

And then I noticed problems. First off, it takes "the" into consideration when alphabetizing music.. As in, Pixies comes before The Amps because P comes before T. It just agitates me, I guess, since that was one of the things I liked about iTunes.

Another problem with organization: It messed up a lot of my song tags, which worked fine in other applications.

Some songs will end up just fine, such as my Pillows collection, which ends up like this:

0721. The Pillows- Smile [08] - Fun Fun Fun Ok!

And then other songs, such as a few of my Ted Leo, just end up with the file name. I could go in and synchronize everything if I just took the time to do it, but I don't feel like making the effort.

Then the thing doesn't play AAC-encoded files, which basically means half of my Pixies albums along with assorted songs from other bands do not work. I could have sworn the website said it supports AAC, but I guess not.

So at least for the moment, I'm back in Apple country, until I can get everything sorted out.

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Since my mom and brother are in Pittsburgh and my dad's at work all the time, I've been left here with very little do and nowhere else to go. So, out of boredom, I've been doing housekeeping things. I promised that I would water the plants and feed the animals, but on top of that I've been cleaning up messes that I did not create, doing dishes, getting the mail, and laundry (though I think I'll make my dad do that one. I hate laundry). It makes me feel rather independent, though I would feel a lot better about that if I could actually drive to places and do independent things there.

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I've been reading about the Windows Vista beta, and I'm pretty much unimpressed. A sleeker look that you could just download off of some website, virtual folders that are fundamentally the same thing as iTunes playlists, slightly improved file browsing.. None of it really gets me excited, except for maybe DirectX 10. The security improvements could be beneficial, though at the same time I imagine it could be rather frustrating. Maybe once I test it out I'll be more interested, but at the moment I'm pretty much meh.

Of course, I probably don't know what I'm talking about. They're probably going to throw in more interesting features later on.. After all, this is a beta, and they still have a good while to improve.

I'll probably be upgrading my computer a bit by then.. New video card (I'm two "generations" behind in the video card department now- GeForce 5700) and wireless internetty stuff, probably. If they give a good reason for changing to Vista, maybe I'll throw that in there as well when the time comes.
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