Techno Chaos
Aug. 27th, 2005 02:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
drscottA few years ago I bought a Kenwood 200-CD changer. It was large enough for my entire CD collection, and had the nifty advanced feature that you could hook it up to a PC to download title and 
track data from CDDB. At the time I bought it, it was apparent that the media-PC solution was not quite ready for prime time -- lossy compression schemes, crashing servers, and having to have a big box to go with the other big boxes in the living room. Now it is feasible (though there are still many irritants) to get a Mac Mini as your music server, at least.
Friday I tackled integrating![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
excessor's CD collection with mine. We went over his CDs and weeded out duplicates, then made him prioritize. I was left with about 60 of his CDs to add to my almost-200, which meant finding 50 of mine I could remove, then resorting by type and reinserting into the jukebox, a tricky procedure requiring nimble fingerwork. A front panel wheel controls the stepper motor that moves the turntable, and a front panel opens to let you reach in to get at the CDs.
Once I had put the CDs back in, it was off to the office to hook it to my PC by serial cable. Kenwood's crufty software hasn't been updated in years and has an awkward interface; I had to manually delete all the CD info files from a deeply-hidden directory on the PC to get it to download all new information, and dozens of CDs were skipped with errors of some sort, so I had to manually do them over. Finally a few CDs couldn't be read at all, either having no CDDB info (like the album of Bouzouki music we bought in Greece) or mysteriously missing their CD IDs, and these I keyed in manually, though I didn't bother with track names.
Which suggests some griping. Who were the idiots who didn't write into the original CD specification a small space for the text data for the CD's name and track titles, much less the album covers and info?
And who knows how long it will be until you have a single pizza box that decodes ALL incoming signals, stores ALL forms of media, and outputs in ANY format to monitors, speakers, and household appliances? There's no technical reason why a $400 box can't handle all your telephone, television, music, email, browsing, and home control needs; the "house server" is being worked on as we speak. Yet it seems that even people who know how to do a good UI for parts of this (e.g., Tivo) can't progress very rapidly because there are too many players and too much politics involved. Tivo itself is threatened because the intermediaries (cable and satellite companies) are afraid of losing control of their streams. Sony, who can be expected to try for this via their Cell processor in the upcoming Playstation 3, has never shown any ability to integrate their own devices, much less anyone else's. Apple? If Apple wrote the software and designed the UI for the hardware, a combination with Sony would be unbeatable.
track data from CDDB. At the time I bought it, it was apparent that the media-PC solution was not quite ready for prime time -- lossy compression schemes, crashing servers, and having to have a big box to go with the other big boxes in the living room. Now it is feasible (though there are still many irritants) to get a Mac Mini as your music server, at least.Friday I tackled integrating
excessor's CD collection with mine. We went over his CDs and weeded out duplicates, then made him prioritize. I was left with about 60 of his CDs to add to my almost-200, which meant finding 50 of mine I could remove, then resorting by type and reinserting into the jukebox, a tricky procedure requiring nimble fingerwork. A front panel wheel controls the stepper motor that moves the turntable, and a front panel opens to let you reach in to get at the CDs.Once I had put the CDs back in, it was off to the office to hook it to my PC by serial cable. Kenwood's crufty software hasn't been updated in years and has an awkward interface; I had to manually delete all the CD info files from a deeply-hidden directory on the PC to get it to download all new information, and dozens of CDs were skipped with errors of some sort, so I had to manually do them over. Finally a few CDs couldn't be read at all, either having no CDDB info (like the album of Bouzouki music we bought in Greece) or mysteriously missing their CD IDs, and these I keyed in manually, though I didn't bother with track names.
Which suggests some griping. Who were the idiots who didn't write into the original CD specification a small space for the text data for the CD's name and track titles, much less the album covers and info?
And who knows how long it will be until you have a single pizza box that decodes ALL incoming signals, stores ALL forms of media, and outputs in ANY format to monitors, speakers, and household appliances? There's no technical reason why a $400 box can't handle all your telephone, television, music, email, browsing, and home control needs; the "house server" is being worked on as we speak. Yet it seems that even people who know how to do a good UI for parts of this (e.g., Tivo) can't progress very rapidly because there are too many players and too much politics involved. Tivo itself is threatened because the intermediaries (cable and satellite companies) are afraid of losing control of their streams. Sony, who can be expected to try for this via their Cell processor in the upcoming Playstation 3, has never shown any ability to integrate their own devices, much less anyone else's. Apple? If Apple wrote the software and designed the UI for the hardware, a combination with Sony would be unbeatable.
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Go iPod
Date: 2005-08-27 10:22 pm (UTC)Re: Go iPod
Date: 2005-08-27 10:24 pm (UTC)Re: Go iPod
Date: 2005-08-27 10:29 pm (UTC)Re: Go iPod
Date: 2005-08-27 11:14 pm (UTC)