Archive for the ‘Music’ Category

Songs Of The Week #6

Wednesday, August 15th, 2007

The first two songs by Cary Brothers & Joshua Radin don’t have a music video, so the tracks linked to here are just someone’s visuals put to the song. They were the best encode of each track I could find on YouTube though. Newer tracks by both artists on YouTube have videos directed by Zach Braff, and their songs have been featured on a number of his projects including Scrubs and the film Garden State. Calexico are also pretty cool, lovin’ the whole Mexican band thing at the moment—I also have some Mexican hip-hop, but that’s another story ;-)


Cary Brothers
Honestly


Joshua Radin
Don’t Look Away


Calexico
Corona




LAME + EAC Settings

Tuesday, July 31st, 2007

UPDATED 2008-03-07: Removed genre from tagging since the one supplied by FreeDB is usually wrong anyway.

These are the LAME settings I’m using in EAC, configured to use LAME as a custom encoder. See this Hydrogenaudio Knowledgebase page for further info.

-V 0 –vbr-new –id3v2-only –pad-id3v2 –ta “%a” –tt “%t” –tl “%g” –ty “%y” –tn “%n” –ignore-tag-errors %s %d


Songs Of The Week #5

Monday, July 23rd, 2007

Loving the new Chemical Brothers album, below is the video for the first single. The U2 one reminds me of running around the lake near my house at sunrise—sun reflecting of the water, mist and that early morning chill in the air. Stay Positive also rates highly, a track I often listen to when I’m feeling a little too worn out by the world outside.


The Chemical Brothers
Do It Again


U2
Beautiful Day


The Streets
Stay Positive




eMusic & Spam

Wednesday, July 4th, 2007

Interesting this… when I signed up to eMusic I created an unique email address on one of my domains for the account. The only place I used this address was on the eMusic.com sign up form. Now I’m starting to receive spam on that address, and only on that address. After checking on the net, it appears they share their user database with anyone and everyone. Thank goodness I can just drop the address…

UPDATE: Oh and I just got another spam e-mail, and the To address just happened to contain the 2 unique addresses I had used to sign up to Emusic with (I cancelled and tried it again about 18 months later). Coincidence I think not!!

Songs Of The Week #4

Sunday, May 20th, 2007

My absolute favourite track at the moment is Franco Battiato’s cover of “Insieme A Te Non Ci Sto Più”. This song featured on the sound track to the film Manuale d’amore, and was originally released by Caterina Caselli in 1968. Also, in the playlist this week are two more tracks I really like from The Streets and The Shins.


Franco Battiato
Insieme A Te Non Ci Sto Più
(wma audio)


The Streets
When You Wasn’t Famous


The Shins
New Slang




Songs Of The Week #3

Tuesday, May 1st, 2007

I’m really lovin’ Sigur Rós right about now, it sounds soo much better on high definition headphones than the YouTube version though, but at least this clip gives you some idea. Fall Out Boy is also on heavy rotation on my iPod, as well as a few of my favourite Beatles tracks—the original simple stereo mixes, not that remastered bullshit.


Sigur Rós
Hoppípolla


Fall Out Boy
A Little Less Sixteen Candles


The Beatles
We Can Work It Out




iTunes Library Updater

Friday, March 9th, 2007

This utility solves one my biggest annoyances with iTunes, it can’t sync its library to a folder on my computer (like WinAmp does). I use external tools for tagging/organising my music, and hence things get renamed, added and moved around outside of iTunes causing it to lose the plot—not anymore ;-)

Songs Of The Week #2

Thursday, February 15th, 2007

Sorry I couldn’t find a better copy of “Magic Trick” on YouTube… here’s the two I did find, plus another M. Ward track:


M. Ward
Magic Trick

(from Microsoft Zune advert)


M. Ward
Magic Trick

(live)


M. Ward
Let’s Dance

(with original Bowie visuals)




Songs Of The Week #1

Saturday, January 20th, 2007


Muse
Starlight


Motion City Soundtrack
The Future Freaks Me Out


Gym Class Heroes
Cupid’s Chokehold




Step By Step Conversion Guide: Putting DVD's On To Your iPod (revised)

Wednesday, August 30th, 2006

UPDATED: 22nd September 2007.
(MP4 Scripts updated September 17th 2007)

These settings/scripts will generate files of pretty much transparent quality to the original DVD. I’m using these settings for archival purposes, so if you’re looking for really small files, these might not be for you.

While I have previously written about this topic, I never covered it in any depth or went into every step I follow. When I first got my G5 iPod it was a steep learning curve figuring out MPEG video; what tools to use, what settings to use, what version of each software app was best, etc. to get the best possible quality and file size.

This post should serve as a complete answer to the question of “How do I get DVD’s onto my iPod that look good on both the iPod Screen, a TV at the smallest possible file size”. Below is the step by step process complete with illustrations and links to the required software.

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