ipods are gapless... - Riovolution

radish

2006-09-19, 14:16 #76

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In reply to post ID 2986

Artists who have full albums and who also have tracks on Compilation albums have entires for the Compilation albums under their Albums menu and if you go into those albums they only show the one artist's track(s).

To me that seems like a bug rather than intended behaviour. Why would you remove compilation-only artists from a list of artists but not remove compilation albums from the remaining artists, one menu level below?

Slimserver does pretty much the same thing (although many aspects are configurable and, of course, it's open source so you can fix it if you want!). My take on why it's done that way by design (rather than being a bug) is to assume the user is trying to find a specific song, but they only know a subset of it's attributes. If they know it's on Album X, they can go to that album and find the song from the list. If they know it's by Artist Y then they will go to the Artist and the figure out which album it's on (or look at "All Songs" if that's supported by the interface). If the track in question only appears on a compilation they're going to be stuck if compilations aren't listed there, hence they are listed.

Personally, I always listen an album at a time. In which case I either go by album name if it's a compilation or artist name if not. Works pretty well for me (although I haven't actually used an ipod yet...soon though).

nudel 2006-09-19, 15:17 #77

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That could be their reasoning but I don't think I agree with it. It annoys both types of people (people looking for albums have extra junk in the artists and people looking for songs can't find some artists at all).

I'd like an "Album" mode or for Compilation to have a 3rd option which worked how I want. I think then everyone would be happy, in terms of compilations and albums. How to fit random singles onto a device is another story, but I'm thinking either as a compilation or via genres...

Ideally we could just define our own views and either drag things in and out of them (with sensible defaults so people don't have to drag everything around) or, for more technical people, have them defined by a set of rules, much like the Smart Playlists in iTunes. (If those are deemed non-technical enough for iTunes then I think the same could be done for views in general.)

Bit the shed again. Typical.
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radish

2006-09-19, 16:16 #78

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Agreed - the best I ever used was in an HTPC app called Meedio. It let you define your own browse hierarchy from scratch based on arbitrary tags, kinda complex to setup but super powerful. J River has similar functionality though I haven't played much with it, and slimserver now has a plugin which does the same thing but it's _very_ technical. I'm sure the UI will get better though...

crunchyfrog (Moderator) 2006-09-19, 19:00 #79

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I could also abuse the Genre field (which I religiously keep blank) by setting things as Album, Compilation, Single, Comedy, Book etc. which would also solve my other problem of wanting to keep all those things separate. The Genre menu seems to drill down into Artist, Album then Track so, apart from the extra menu level at the top, it's perfect.

@nudel:

a quick threadjack: I'm intrigued by this "keeping genre blank" idea... what made you decide to do that? And what if you want to listen to all your "barnyard" albums, or all your pirate albums (arr)? Do you just make playlists for those? Does the lack of a genre tag hinder the creation of smart playlists? (All honest questions... I find the concept rather tempting, but I also fear a world in which I cannot seperate my rock from my alt rock from my hard rock from my folk rock. um, yeah.)

...because I am not a Special Snowflake.

nudel 2006-09-20, 00:36 #80

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Quote by crunchyfrog:
I'm intrigued by this "keeping genre blank" idea...

I very rarely select things by genre. Every so often I might think "Oh, I fancy some jazz" or "Dang, it's been a while since I listened to some thrash metal" but in those cases I'll still either look for particular artists or scan through the artists list looking for something that satisfies my desire, until I find John Coltrane or Slayer, for example, and I might get side-tracked by Radiohead in between.

I almost never use random play so I wouldn't use the ability to shuffle a load of music in a given genre.

That only explains why I don't use the genre field. I never use the date field either but I keep that populated as I think it's interesting information. Why do I keep the genre field blank? Because I've got no idea how to accurately and consistently populate it.

If you take what you're given by the tag databases (freedb etc.) then you end up with some wildly inaccurate (IMO) categorisations. You also end up with inconsistencies where two people might tag the same artist, or even the same version of the same song, as two different genres. Some people think Nine Inch Nails is an industrial band while others are offended by the suggestion.

Even if you decide to set all the genre fields by hand, how do you do it? You could set a band to be a given genre, but what if they do a lot of different styles of music? How on earth do you categorise David Bowie? Pick a genre per album? That's not always accurate. What about individual songs? Even then the genre could change in the middle of the track. And what happens when an artist from one genre covers one from another? I've got no idea how to tag Johnny Cash's cover of Hurt.

Even if you can decide on how to set the field, based on artist, album, original artist, number of cats (excluding lions and tigers) in the recording studio (if any) on the day that the vocal track was recorded, and so on, there's still the question of how specific you get. There are so many (IMO) pointless categories of music, trying to cover all the possible styles and crossovers and so on, that you might as well define a new genre for every single song and be done with it, at which point you've just duplicated the information in the Artist, Album and Title tags. :-)

Or you can keep things vague, like Jazz and Metal and Rock and Rap but, dang, where do you put things in between or that don't really fit in? And how do you use this extra information, once you've decided how to set it?

The only genres I think I can really deal with -- in terms of both being useful and not offending me by pigeon-holing or, at the other extreme, having uselessly specific genres -- is to have genres which describe why I would be listening to something. i.e. Music (I want to listen to music), Comedy (I want to listen to some comedy), Spoken Word (I want to listen to someone talking who isn't going to make me laugh. Argh, stuck again, because now I don't know where to put some Henry Rollins spoken word stuff as sometimes he makes you crack up laughing but another minute he'll turn all serious and have you thinking or crying. Oops, my brackets are unbalanced.)

Maybe Music and Other. Or Album, Single and Other, so I can have my random singles without them polluting the album views. That's sort of where I'm heading. Not really genre but type but, since there isn't a type field and I don't use the genre field, I'll pretend it's genre.

There is one exception to all of this! I grabbed the Futuristic Sex Robotz album from their site and the files were tagged as Gangster Nerd Rap. I thought that was such a cool, and accurate, genre that I allowed it to stay. If you went to the genre menu on my iPod right now you might think it was the only style of music I listened to. :-)

Anyway, I'm off to listen to some ethereal new wave gothic-rock synthpop neofolk electrogoth neo-classical post-industrial darkwave black-death-speed-groove thrashcore hyper metal with a cherry on top. (That'd be the genre of the 53rd millisecond of Marilyn Manson's seminal classic, Fuck Frankie, from 1995's not-that-great Smells Like Children. Say 'Fuck Frankie'. Ffffuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck ffrraaaaaaaaaaaaaannnnnnnnkkkiieeeeeeee. Say it. Ffaa-Ffuuuuuuucccck frrraaaaaaaaannnnnnnnnkkieieeee.)

Bit the shed again. Typical.
[Image: http://www.pretentiousname.com/images/mindthegap.jpg]

This post was edited on 2006-09-20, 00:42 by nudel.

crunchyfrog (Moderator) 2006-09-20, 05:57 #81

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interesting... thanks for the explanation - definitely food for thought. I'm going to have to ponder this a little more before I nuke the genre tags of 17,000 songs.

...because I am not a Special Snowflake.

RubenNYC 2006-09-20, 06:20 #82

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I've started using multiple genres for tracks where appropriate, then using jEmplode to build playlists based on genre searches. This allows me to build playlists for all tracks that contain "Rock" to get all my "Hard Rock", "Alternative Rock" and "Big Dogs Landing On My Face Rock" in one list. This also makes sure that my "Alternative Rock" tracks also show up in my list of tracks containing "Alt" in the genre tag.

This doesn't address all of the nudel scenarios, but it's good enough for me.

Einkoro (Administrator) 2006-09-20, 15:06 #83

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Luckily I just listen to metal so I can deal with genres anally with ease. I just tag everything applicable to an album, for example: Avantgarde Atmopsheric/Progressive Sludge/Doom Metal. Simple! :-p

"There is no avoiding war; it can only be postponed to the advantage of others," - Niccolo Machiavelli

radish

2006-09-20, 19:30 #84

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Hate to get back on topic, but my shiny new 80gb ipod just arrived. After some fiddling, cursing and general *grrrring* at Apple, I can confirm that it's gapless. Most of the time. Just like the karma it seems to screw up every so often, particularly if you FF to the end of a track to test the gaplessness

I'm guessing it's because the FF screws up attempts to prebuffer. But in the general case it's a perfectly smooth transition.

FYI - this is using mp3's transcoded from flac with the latest version of lame. No special parameters, tags or anything else.

RubenNYC 2006-09-20, 20:05 #85

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Could you do me a favor and test this out with "Chump" and "Longview" from Dookie? The Karma never gets this transition quite right with mp3, only Vorbis and FLAC work perfectly. I'm wondering if Apple was able to improve on this.

Thanks.

radish

2006-09-20, 20:11 #86

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Quote by RubenNYC:
Could you do me a favor and test this out with "Chump" and "Longview" from Dookie?

Would be happy to if I had the album

I'll ask around see if I can borrow a copy.

gorman 2006-09-21, 01:50 #87

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Maybe a sign of changing times for our community but... I can't fail to notice that this thread has considerably more messages than the one where we discussed the first Chroma-derivative coming...

RubenNYC 2006-09-21, 02:49 #88

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If the Vibez were available for purchase, I bet you'd see a hell of a lot more posts in that thread, too. Even more if it had a decent amount of disk space.

nudel 2006-09-21, 05:12 #89

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I'm guessing it's because the FF screws up attempts to prebuffer. But in the general case it's a perfectly smooth transition.

I think that's fair enough. It's got to have some warning that the next track is about to start so it can start setting things up, so if that warning is removed by a sudden jump to the end of the track and it doesn't work then that's fine. You've already created a gap yourself by fast forwarding.

Also, if you FF to around 10 seconds before the end of the track it seems to play gaplessly fine.

I haven't tried any really evil tests yet, like a long series of 4-second (the shorted time allowed for a CD track, I think) tracks with music in them.

Regarding the Vibez, it doesn't really interest me. The chipset and firmware interests me but everything else about the player is a turn off to me. The ratio of form factor to storage size is wrong. A gapless 15GB player the size of a Sony NW-E507 or iPod Nano would interest me, as a nice fallback player when I want something ultraportable. A 15GB player that big seems like an anachronism, to be honest. (Although it is hard to judge exactly how big it is from the photos since they have no reference objects.)

Bit the shed again. Typical.
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theRover 2006-09-21, 11:09 #90

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Quote by nudel:
(Although it is hard to judge exactly how big it is from the photos since they have no reference objects.)

Just saw this site on Boing Boing. It "lets you enter the dimensions of the gadget you're interested in and compare it to other common objects (a deck of cards, a box of matches, a CD case, etc.) so you can see how big it really is."

The Vibez is 105 x 50 x 18 mm according to dapreview.net.