Penultimate Reality

With the rampant popularity of more mainstream players such as the iPod, some of the lesser known players can sometimes be lost in the shuffle. Going back to my previous portable music player, the iAudio X5L, I have been partial toward the players put out by Cowon. They support a wide variety of formats (including both FLAC and Vorbis) and present themselves as a simple USB mass storage device, which ensures compatibility with all operating systems, including Linux, without any cumbersome libraries.

So, when my trusty X5L recently suffered an unfortunate accident (in which the power button managed to break itself, perhaps from excessive use), I was tasked with finding a new player. After doing some quick research, I determined that support for the free formats was almost exclusively the domain of Cowon and iRiver. Being satisfied with my previous Cowon purchase, I went down that road again. The larger players were all out of my price range, but I eventually settled on the 8GB model of the Cowon D2, which has the following major features:

• Supports MP3, WMA, FLAC, WAV, APE, OGG Vorbis
• USB 2.0 mass storage device for high compatibility
• Comes in sizes ranging from 2GB to 16GB.

The Cowon D2 has an intuitive interface, and I was able to configure it the way I like it in almost no time at all. It operates on something of a dynamic playlist, where you can choose to limit its playlist to either one track, one folder, or everything. It can then play that playlist in order or shuffle it. It may support custom playlists, but I don’t use such a feature, so I don’t know.

Sound-wise, the quality is great. Music is clear, with no audible distortion. The equalizer performs well at enhancing the particular frequency ranges I like to listen to. In addition, it has the built-in ability to control playback speed, for listening to podcasts at a slightly faster clip (though I preprocess my podcasts, as the D2 doesn’t support my preferred 160% speed—it maxes out at 150%).

That said, the player isn’t perfect. Initially, I was getting atrocious transfer speeds, though I no longer have this problem, so it may have been a transient issue with my setup. It has no line out, but the headphone jack at volume level 40-45 seems to produce good results. Anything louder tends to cause clipping with my audio. I find podcasts do better at a slightly higher volume level than most music. Finally, the ability to queue a track would be nice, but is missing from the software.

The D2 also includes a built-in scientific calculator, can operate as a voice recorder, can view pictures and videos, and even purports to be able to play Flash media (though I’ve had limited success with that option).

In conclusion, the Cowon D2 is a nice player with enough space for most needs. The battery life is fairly long, and I find I need to charge it no more often than once a week (using it for at least two hours a day on average). It especially excels at podcast listening, though it’s no slouch when it comes to your favorite music. The ability to save presets makes switching between car mode and headphone mode quick and painless. If you or a family member are in the market for a great portable music player with an average amount of space, give the Cowon D2 a look.

Anyone who reads a lot of blogs needs a good way to keep track of it all. Back in the day, people (including me) would keep ridiculously long lists of bookmarks and meticulously check them one-by-one. Needless to say, this wasn’t exactly a recipe for extreme efficiency. Up until a few days ago, I’d used the excellent reader Liferea, which is available at least for Unix-like systems. Liferea had some bad interactions with Java on my system, causing it to crash on certain feeds unless I did some plugin shuffling to keep Liferea from using Firefox’s plugins.

When migrating my data from my desktop to my new machine, I decided to look at other solutions, and the one that came up was Google Reader. I’d briefly tried it before, but for whatever reason, didn’t get into it immediately. But after using it for a couple of days now, I can’t see what I ever didn’t like. I tend to skim certain feeds less than read them, and Google’s interface makes this incredibly easy, while allowing me to control exactly which entries are marked as read. In addition, by leveraging the power of an already functioning browser, instead of integrating Gecko (Firefox’s engine) into an application like Liferea does, it avoids some of the plugin troubles I’d been having.

I haven’t found much to complain about yet, though I do have a couple of wishlist features. First, I’d like to be able to set default sort options, so I don’t have to set it manually on every new feed. (I like to read from oldest to newest.) Maybe I just haven’t found the option, but I did look fairly exhaustively I thought. The second thing is that I’d like it to detect duplicate entries. For example, with many of the “Planet” aggregators, like Planet GNOME, it actually aggregates a number of these feeds. If you also read one of them separately, you’ll be subjected to the same entries twice. Liferea did this detection to a certain degree, and it’d be nice to see the same feature in Google Reader. It doesn’t come up too often with my feed set, but it’d be a nice addition.

Overall, if you’ve got a performant machine that can handle JavaScript-based web applications, look into Google Reader. One of the biggest advantages (as I’ve written about before) is to be able to recall your data from any machine in the world. On the other hand, if your machine’s old and can barely run a web browser without running out of RAM or something, you might want to stick with your current reader application.

Yes, folks, I’ve finally had the opportunity to use Windows Vista. Of course, since there are several different editions, it may help to know that in particular, I used Windows Vista Business. In the grand scheme of things, Business seems to be the best version for power users who don’t want to shell out the extra cash for Ultimate. I assume that’s most people, unless you’re just that in love with Windows. Anyway, I do have a few impressions of the whole thing right now, though it may take a few weeks of use before I know lots of details.

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Recently I’ve been playing with Ruby for my simpler programming needs, and have been considering using the popular framework Ruby on Rails. In the process of looking for interesting documentation, I came across Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby, perhaps one of the most interesting books on programming I’ve ever read.

Now, it’s merely a guide to Ruby, and not Rails in particular, but it remains interesting just the same. The content is available online, which makes it really easy to get started. I was impressed by the first chapter, which managed to mix strange humor, talking foxes, chunky bacon, and a good dose of actual Ruby programming lessons all into a neat little package.

The next few chapters start to get a little more abstract, perhaps, and by the fifth chapter, I was left wondering whether or not I was still learning any Ruby. Each chapter essentially has a different story used to explain the chapter’s concepts, but when it comes to the fifth chapter, all I can remember is the exploits of Paij-ree and Dr. Cham. I have no idea what (if any) actual Ruby I learned, and by then, the book started to seem more rambling than insightful. I’m not sure I’ll read any additional available chapters, but I’m open to good reasons why I should, keeping in mind that at this point, it would be entirely for entertainment value, as I’m pretty well-set Ruby-wise.

As any music fan with a large collection knows, managing that collection can be somewhat difficult. Inevitably, the user who wants to listen to his entire collection ends up using a generic shuffle method in his media player of choice. This isn’t too bad, but let’s face it, you like some tracks far more than others and would like to hear them relatively more often. A brain-dead completely random shuffle system simply doesn’t cut it.

That’s where IMMS steps in. Originally developed as a plugin for XMMS, it has now developed into a more general system for various media players (though as of this writing, the only provided plugins are for XMMS, the now-defunct BMP, and Audacious).

IMMS does a few things for your listening experience:

• Based on whether or not you skip a song, whether or not you manually choose a song (as opposed to it being automatically selected), and some potentially more esoteric data like X idleness, it over time automatically calculates ratings for your music. It’ll take a long time to get any useful data, but it works reasonably well.
• Using these ratings along with other information like song similarity and correlation (how often two songs are played together), it automatically chooses songs that you’re more likely to want to listen to. It also has other heuristics to ensure that new songs are more likely to be played and that songs that haven’t been played in a while also get a fair shake.

There are still a couple of disadvantages. First, if you skip a song before the system selects the next song (which takes about ten seconds on my machine), it’ll think you manually jumped to whatever’s next, so you better take it slowly. Second, the number of media players is limited. There has been some murmurs of plugins for XMMS2, Rhythmbox, but nothing’s come of it yet. (Technically, I’ve written a very buggy interface to XMMS2, but it was pre-collections and tends to need to be restarted often. I’m not even sure it still works with current releases of XMMS2, but I’ll provide it upon request.)

Note to media player authors: manual ratings aren’t cool. If I have thousands of tracks, I really don’t want to spend the time rating them manually. Even if I did, this information should be able to be deduced, and they’ll end up being far more accurate than any manual rating I do. Though comparing every pair of tracks and determining which I prefer might provide an interesting statistical exercise…