Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Portable aural joy
The last part of my holiday haul finally arrived on Monday: a set of Koss PortaPro headphones. If they look like something out of the '80s, that's because they are; they were introduced in 1984 and as I understand it have not been changed since. (Well, my pair actually come with a ridiculously small plug thanks to Apple's infamous flouting of the headphone jack standard, but that's really not here nor there.)The PortaPro has long been pretty high on, if not atop, the list of under-$50 headphones when it came to sound quality. These days, and perhaps at least in part due to the PortaPro's severely old-school looks, most people opt for the Sennheiser PX100 or something else, but since I am, after all, a child of those infamous '80s as well as notoriously unconcerned about being cool, I was in an ideal position to let two things swing my decision to the PortaPro: the into-a-ball folding design (perfect for my laptop bag) and most importantly, the Koss no-questions-asked lifetime warranty. When you've worn out as many headphone cords as I have, the notion of tossing these into an envelope and sending them off for a repair/replace is very attractive.
I've been 99% happy with these things since I got them Monday. They're a lot smaller than I expected; I have the headband set to almost full-open in order to get them on my large noggin—and that's without hair. The sound quality is an epiphany; hooked up to my Fuze and now going anywhere, I'm gaining new appreciation for stuff I grabbed from eMusic long ago and left off to the side because running it through inferior sound setups stripped it of the joy I am now feeling.
The "comfortZone" feature is where I have mixed feelings, though. The PortaPro has pads that sit on your temples, relieving ear pressure. I'd seen the little blue switch near those pads and figured it made the pads firmer or softer, somehow. But that's not exactly how they work; what they do is let the earpieces swing out to one of three angles. The switches aren't really so much switches as little spring-loaded tabs that permit the earpieces to swing out more if they're set all the way to "light", and if the earpiece isn't swung out, they'll snap right back to "firm". This means that if I'm not happy with "firm", I have to re-set the switches every time I unfold the headphones... and, annoyingly, if the earpieces are swung inward even slightly, the switches snap right back to "firm" again. If I'm wearing the things, this doesn't happen, but if I take them off, it can.
Despite that little annoyance, I can heartily recommend these babies, though. I just wore them tonight as I was scraping the day's snow off the driveway (in preparation for doing it again tomorrow morning, of course) and just basked in knowing how, for the first time, I was really appreciating The Rainmaker—which I downloaded so very, very many months ago.
posted by zigg 8:47 PM
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Monday, December 29, 2008
Sansa satisfaction
I think I've finally got my Sansa Fuze up and running to the point I'm happy with it. Here's a quick run-down of where I'm at:I'm exclusively using the Fuze under my main operating system, Ubuntu. Amusingly, I couldn't use it under my secondary Windows XP installation if I wanted to, because something on my old Presario R3000 laptop is not working quite right, and many USB devices—including the Fuze—won't work under Windows. They work slowly under Ubuntu (about 5 MB/sec transfer rate), but they do work.
The Fuze is operating in MSC mode, where it simply appears as a hard drive. If there's an advantage to using MTP mode, I'm not seeing it, and I'm not keen on moving away from my newfound love in Quod Libet. When I disconnect it, it reindexes my music and I'm ready to go.
Speaking of disconnecting, I'm sort of irritated that it goes into host mode every time I plug it into USB. USB is the only way you can charge it, so if I do find myself with a low battery sometime, I won't be able to play music while it charges... unless I get myself one of those dedicated USB power transformers. Ugh.
To get album art all working happily, I dug around in the official Fuze boards and found out while the Fuze can read embedded album art in MP3s, it seems to prefer a file called Album Art.jpg in each folder. This enabled art in the album browser as well as added art to my previously art-less Ogg Vorbis files. So, now in addition to vorbissort, I have another quickie script that walks my Music folder and uses ImageMagick to convert Picard's cover.jpg files into 120×120 Album Art.jpg files. It literally is a single line of shell:
#!/bin/shIn addition to writing vorbissort to deal with the Vorbis album art so it didn't get in the Fuze's way, I also had to re-run all my MP3s through Picard and make the ID3v2 tags version 2.3 (which they already were) and ISO-8859-1 (which they were not). No more foreign languages in my MP3 tags, but it's no real big loss.
find . -name cover.jpg \
-execdir convert -verbose cover.jpg -resize 120x120 Album\ Art.jpg \;
Finally, and perhaps most irritatingly, I've resigned myself to the knowledge that I will probably never be able to watch videos on this thing. Sansa includes a Windows program (that I can't run) to convert videos, but I hear it does a crappy job, and nobody has yet discovered how to make ffmpeg encode for the Fuze. Watching the sample video that came on my Fuze as shipped, I'm not so sure it's a loss, though... it's pretty poor.
Now that I've got this perfect setup, the Fuze is pretty much perfect. My wife joked a few days ago that its primary purpose is to put me to sleep, since I used it on Christmas Day with some random new agey songs I had from eMusic to relax and get over an excruciating sinus headache, ending up sleeping in the chair... then back at home, fell asleep again in my recliner doing the same relaxation routine to get over some stress. I laughed at the time, but then one morning when I was merely in my recliner listening to some rather un-relaxing Transatlantic, I fell asleep again. Maybe there's something to this...
posted by zigg 10:37 PM
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Saturday, December 27, 2008
vorbissort: Reorganizing Vorbis comments for the Sansa Fuze
Part of my holiday haul included a 8 GB Sansa Fuze, something I didn't even really know I wanted till I saw it in the Costco Black Friday flyer for $50. My beloved in-laws honored me with this particular gift, which I've been really enjoying over my trusty but aging LifeDrive with TCPMP.One of the key features I demand from a portable music player is, of course, that it play Ogg Vorbis files. The Fuze recently gained this capability via a firmware update, but it is just a teensy bit rough around the edges yet. Notably, album art, which MusicBrainz Picard will put into the Vorbis comments (if you add the coverart plugin, at least), causes problems.
It's not just that the Fuze doesn't display the album art (which is forgivable, but I hope that gets fixed in a future update; MP3 album art displays just fine), but I found out that where the album art is located within the Vorbis comment stream may break tag parsing—and as the Fuze's library is navigated entirely based on tags, this meant that some music was coming across with unknown artists or missing track numbers... making navigating said music a chore.
Thankfully, it's easy to fix. I found that if I move the album art to the end of the Vorbis comment stream, the Fuze seems to be able to handle everything else. The vorbiscomment utility (part of vorbis-tools, for you Ubuntu/Debianites) can be used to edit the Vorbis comments on your typical Ogg Vorbis file. I automate this process with the following script, vorbissort:
#!/bin/shTypically, you'd cd to the directory containing the Ogg Vorbis files you want to re-sort and type vorbissort *.ogg. (If you're feeling particularly brave, find . -name \*.ogg -print0 | xargs -0 vorbissort can do all your Oggs in one go—but don't you dare try it unless you understand what that entire command line is doing.) I used this on probably a good dozen albums and all came across flawlessly. Once I re-ran my MP3s through Picard, giving them id3v2.3 tags encoded in ISO-8859-1 instead of UTF, the Fuze displayed all my music flawlessly.
#
# Reorganize Vorbis comments for the Sansa Fuze, putting album art last in
# the stream, so that other comments don't get ignored.
#
# Public domain by Matt Behrens <matt@zigg.com> with NO WARRANTY. Back up
# your music first.
#
# Usage: vorbissort <filename> [<filename>...]
#
while [ "x$1" != "x" ]
do
tempfile=`mktemp`
echo $1
vorbiscomment "$1" | grep -v ^coverart >> $tempfile
vorbiscomment "$1" | grep ^coverart >> $tempfile
vorbiscomment -w "$1" < $tempfile
rm -f $tempfile
shift
done
Great little player, when it's all said and done. I hope that future firmware versions solve the tag-reading problems.
posted by zigg 7:08 PM
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