January 2004 – LonelyMachines

Music

:zovietfrance: The Decriminalisation of Country Music*

Some great records just slip through the cracks. It can happen for any number of reasons, but the most common comes down to marketing, or the lack thereof. Often, labels blanch at something that can’t be easily categorized and targeted at a specific audience, and as a result, the music ends up on an excruciatingly limited press-run, or it gets delegated to a tiny label with little or no distribution reach.

Other times, it’s the fault of the artist, who for one reason or another, chooses to release a record in relative obscurity. Gescom and alot of the other folks on Skam are notorious for this, and the side-effect (intentional or not) is that these records become immensely valuable in their scarcity.

Common sense would dictate that if they were the least bit proud of their work, then the artist would seek wider distribution for it, but that’s not always the case.

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Audio Technology

iRiver ihp-120: Recant and Retreat

I’ve been using the ihp-120 for a month now, and enough is enough.For such a great piece of hardware, the firmware is just abysmal. I’d stick with it if I thought that some of its issues would be fixed, but in the last six months, iRiver has issued one major firmware fix, and that was only to add one insignificant feature (study mode) and slightly improve another (shuffle play). The major problems still persist, and no end seems to be in sight.

The excessive gaps in playback have become very distracting, and their root cause, constant hard-drive spin-up, continues to eat battery life. As I’ve found, this renders live recording on the unit virtually useless. As the hard drive caches to memory, it causes audible pops and “hitches” in the signal. What’s more, the microphone input is woefully under-powered, and without on-the-fly recording level adjustments, you’re stuck with distortion during sudden dynamic changes.

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Code

New Themes

Well, it’s been awhile, but here are two new WindowMaker themes. Winter-Xfce is based off the default color scheme for Xfce, and Windspan2 is a rework with better background art.

Winter-Xfce

Windspan2

NP: Sleeping Bear, Sault Saint Marie, Sufjan Stevens

Audio Technology

iRiver ihp-120: A wishlist of features

As much as I love the ihp-120, it’s not without fault. On the hardware front, I’ve certainly got no complaints, but the firmware certainly needs work. The following is a list of fixable features that I’d petition iRiver to add to their product.

1) On-the-fly playlists. I’ll get alot of “amens” on this one. iPod does them. Creative’s players do them. Even Samsung’s Yepp flash players do them. So why is the ihp, which is the most advanced player on the market, the only one that doesn’t? The player already has a “track reserve” feature, so this shouldn’t be such a big deal. Even the ability to cue up and save a single “Now Playing” list would be welcome.

2) Better navigation. I currently have 323 albums on my player, totaling some 2800 songs. It’s a pain to have to navigate through all that using an alphabetical drill-down method. The DB should have some sort of “jump-to-letter” function at the very least.

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Audio Technology

iRiver ihp-120: Linux Usage and Notes

This player runs easily enough with no software. Provided you’re running a somewhat recent kernel with USB support compiled in, the device should be recognized as soon as you plug it in.The first step is to find out where your system thinks it is. Right after plugging in the unit, open a terminal and type dmesg. The output should say something like this:

hub.c: new USB device 00:0b.2-5, assigned address 2
usb.c: USB device 2 (vend/prod 0x1006/0x3002) is not claimed by any active driver.
Initializing USB Mass Storage driver...
usb.c: registered new driver usb-storage
scsi2 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
Vendor: TOSHIBA   Model: MK2004GAL         Rev: JA02
Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 02
Attached scsi disk sdb at scsi2, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
SCSI device sdb: 39063024 512-byte hdwr sectors (20000 MB)
sdb: sdb1

This tells you that the device lives at /dev/sdb1. Next step is to give it a mount point.

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Audio Technology

iRiver ihp-120: Initial Impressions

After my many tribulations with the Nomad Jukebox 3, I’ve thrown in the towel. The new firmware allows the player to boot, however the volume has the annoying tendency to jump to 17 every time the player changes tracks. In a player like the NJB3, that’s alot of sound, and it’s quite jarring. On top of that, the player seems to be over-heating on me, which is certainly not an encouraging sign. Sending it back to Creative to wait three months and pay $200US for an unguaranteed repair just isn’t an option, so come New Year, I decided to jump ship to the competition.After doing alot of research, I narrowed my choices down to two players: the Rio Karma and the iRiver ihp-120. Both support Ogg Vorbis, which is a big plus, and the Karma has the nifty capability to function as a network device, but it doesn’t have any recording capability and lacks a remote.

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