Music

Mp3 player alternative

I said I would get Kristen a mp3 player for her birthday but we’ve been waiting until we’re in the states before we get it as they are about 33% cheaper. Looking at the players, there didn’t seem to be many that would use compact flash cards, which is a shame as our camera and pda uses this format. Whilst we were in compusa we looked at the Sony NetMD minidisk players which for $100 (same price in pounds in the uk) gives you a lot more playing time on a single disk and the advantage is that you can have multiple disks with music on instead of having to format the drive and reload all your music each time you want a new playlist….thats the goodnews. The bad news is that the software that enables you to load the music onto the netMD does not work with Windows98 first edition (guess what we are running here!) – that is one major disadvantage (along with the fact that you need to load any software in the first place – thumbdrive mp3 players just appear as another disk). So we have to wait a couple of weeks before we can use it 🙁

DigiAny *finally* working.

Finally got DigiAny working on a machine at home, no thanks to the publishers though! It seems that when I installed the trial version of 3.4 and wondered what would happen if I put rubbish into the serial number prompt, not only did the 15 day trial period expire immediately, it also stopped re-installs working despite the 15 day limit coming back again. However .net magazine had an older version on a coverdisk recently (which is what tipped me off to the software in the first place). I removed the newer version, installed the old version and my mp3’s are now streaming very nicely on my wireless lan and I think it also works from the office too!
UpdateDigiAny is *not* working afterall. It works to send the web page and stuff to the remote pc in the office, but it fails when it gets to download the playlist ready to stream to the pc…..a bit more digging later and I’m wondering if the playlist it is sending is not correct as if I download the playlist, open it up and then play the mp3 listed everything works ok.

Guster shows.

The bloke of Netbloke, mentioned the band Guster with a link to their site. Their site is pretty interactive with a lot of flash bits but using flash well rather than just because. The diary is annoying in that it opens each day in a new page, but the audio player is pretty good. You can listen to full tracks via the flash interface with a neat “birds eye” way of playing the tracks. The bird is also used for navigation a lot and just try clicking it on the main page. AND the best bit is for the short-of-cash people you can download live shows from Archive.org and live shows always make the best recordings of an album.