Intermission

Wow.  It's been over 3 months since my last blog post.  Time really flies sometimes.  But I've been busy.  I finally committed to the Zipit as my car MP3 player of choice, retiring the old Mattel JuiceBox to the junk bin.  That meant I had nearly 32 gigabytes of space on the SD card to fill up with my favorite music. And that's where all the time went.

You see, most of my music collection is still trapped on Vinyl, so I got busy converting the good stuff (mostly obscure funk from the 70s) to digital.  Sadly this is an extremely time intensive process.  I have to monitor it most of the time in order to catch and prevent skips, and to pause the recording and flip the records at the appropriate times.  It's even more of a hassle with 45s and singles.  And that's just half the process.  Once it's digital there's still a whole lotta work to be done.

I can't get this on CD, but I might have to see if the youtube audio is better than my scratchy record.

I've been using Audacity to do most of the conversion.  It's a bit quirky, but I've got a procedure now on paper that walks me through the basic steps.  Once the music is digital, I have to scan for gaps to break up the songs, usually with the song times from the record as a guide.  As you can imagine, this takes significantly longer when there's no gap because I have to listen (several times) and select a spot that makes me happy.  After that I'm still not finished.  I like my MP3 files with a reasonable set of tags describing the music, maybe even an album cover to make it pretty in rockbox.  However the MP3 tag creation function in Audacity must've been created by idiots.  I've tried to use it several times, but there's no way that I can find to streamline the process.  There's way too much mouse clicking on various data fields and redundant typing for me, so I just let it create numbered files that I post process later with a different program.  It all works, but it's really time consuming.

Interestingly, a google search for "emacs audacity mode" turns up some actual meaty looking links, but I don't think any of them are the streamlined, keyboard accelerator driven interface I want.  Oh well, I guess you can't do everything in emacs.

I have to admit that with a decent bit rate, the sound is better than it was in my collection of cassettes, even before they spent way too many summers baking in the hot car.  I really like recreating my old personalized "greatest hits" cassettes via rockbox playlists, which takes even more of my time.  I originally tried to make the playlists using rockbox itself, but it turns out to be easier for me to just use some shell scripts and a text editor on the computer, then move the playlists to the SD card where rockbox can find them.  They're simple .m3u files so it's not too difficult, just (you guessed it) time consuming.


Anyhow, in the meantime I've actually built a few more small Zipit goodies and posted links to them on the Zipit IRC channel.  I'll try and dig them up from the IRC logs and list them here before the links expire and I completely lose track.

I updated fceu with a fix for battery backed RAM saves.  Here's an ipk, just in case the "nightly build" package doesn't work:  fceu r67-1 pxa.ipk

Here's a dvtm executable for openwrt.  dvtm-zipit-wrt.tgz


I also recently attempted to close some old bug reports on ldglite, which stirred up some more comments in the bug tracker that I'll have to do something about, eventually.  Who knew anybody besides me was still using that old stuff?