My New iMac

I have no problem admitting that I have been absorbed into the Cult of Mac. It started with the iPod. I, as did many of my coworkers, received a 30GB iPod as a sort of bonus for a significant product release a couple of years ago. As a result, I started to use iTunes and paid more attention in general to Apple's products. A few months later I found myself picking up a used 12" PowerBook G4. I was impressed with how small, yet functional the device was. No Windows laptop I had ever used came close. I was pretty much hooked. Even though I had a Windows PC that was superior, in terms of speed, to the PowerBook, I used the Mac almost exclusively. I've long been a fan of BSD UNIX and fundamentally that is what OS X is... but with a much nicer GUI than anything else out there. As I've previously documented, I then took the plunge and purchased an iPhone earlier this summer. And now, my conversion is complete; I bought a new 24" iMac. I decided to go all out and purchase the model with a 2.8 GHz Core 2 Duo processor. I then upgraded the memory to 4GB after receiving it (memory upgrades are generally a rip-off from the manufacturer, whether it be Apple or Dell).

The screen is BEAUTIFUL and the machine is very, very fast. Unfortunately, I haven't found CD ripping and transcoding software for OS X that I like as much as EAC and foobar2000, so I use VMware Fusion to run Windows XP in a VM when I need to rip a CD. Even running in a VM (and only allowing the VM to use a single core), the process of transcoding from FLAC to AAC is roughly 10 - 15% faster than it was when running XP natively on my Windows machine that had an Athlon 64 3200 and 1 GB of memory. I no longer have any computers natively running Windows at my house and I doubt I ever will again.

How To Rip A CD

This might seem like one of the most mundane and obvious tasks, right? You just stick the disc in your computer and let iTunes or Windows Media Player do the rest. Sure, you can do that... if you don't care at all about the quality of what you put into your ears. I don't consider myself to be an audiophile, but I am very concerned about making sure the song I'm listening to via my iPhone, iPod or computer is indistinguishable (to me) from the way it was intended to be heard directly from the CD. This is not as simple of a goal as it may seem.

Here is a nice description of the problem. If you want a bit perfect copy of a track (meaning, exactly the same data that makes up the song on the disc) as starting material for whatever compression format you choose, you have to use software like CD Paranoia or EAC to rip the track to a file. I use EAC v0.95 beta 4 as my ripping application of choice. It, when combined with AccurateRip, virtually guarantees an exact duplication of the audio data. Basically, EAC reads the data from the disc as reliably as possible and then compares the result on a track-by-track basis with the version obtained from other AccurateRip users. If the version of the file you obtain compares exactly to the version obtained by someone else using a different computer and different disc, it is safe to say that file truly is an exact duplication of the data from the disc.

Okay, so now that I have an application to use to rip the data, what do I do with it? I rip the tracks from the CD to FLAC files. If you think about it, ripping the track is the most important part of the process. Once you've extracted the song from the CD and are confident it is a perfect version of the source material, you can convert it in any way you want later on. If you rip directly to a lossy format, like AAC or MP3, you are counting on the fact that you never damage or lose your original CD. I prefer to have the FLAC files as a backup. It also makes it MUCH easier if I should decide to re-encode to a different lossy format or better version of the same lossy format down the road.

I don't just encode directly to a lossy format from the FLAC source. This article summarizes the problem nicely. First, I use foobar2000 to perform a ReplayGain analysis of the files. It stores both track and album gain adjustments to the metadata in each of the FLAC files. I then apply the album gain adjustment to each track when finally encoding it to a lossy format. The reason for applying the album gain is that some tracks are meant to be quieter or louder in relation to the other tracks from the same album.

I have tried both MP3 and AAC compression. I originally decided upon MP3 since that format is virtually universally playable and if you use LAME as the encoder at one of its transparent settings, the result is virtually indistinguishable from the original recording. However, I have found problems with MP3 concerning the way various applications (Windows Media Player) can mess with the tags in the file. The problem stems from the fact that the tag format has multiple versions and not every application seems to play nicely when it comes to using them. Furthermore, MP3 is an aging format. Even with an encoder as good as LAME, there are technical limitations to the standard. I performed my own ABX listening test using a variety of source material with my Shure E2c earphones (the best "speakers" I have). I have found, for my own purposes, that I cannot tell the difference among the original FLAC file, a 160 kbps VBR AAC version of the file or a 225 kbps VBR MP3 version of the file. What does that mean? I now use AAC since it sounds identical to the original recording and doesn't take up much space. Again, not just any old AAC encoder will do. I have done some research on the topic and it seems that the free Nero Digital Audio Codec does the best job of producing high quality AAC tracks.

The last step in this process is to obtain high quality album art and embed it in each file. I have found that the iTunes store is generally one of the best places to get art. Most of the art obtained from there is 600x600 pixels in size and suffers from very few compression artifacts. The problem with iTunes, however, is that it doesn't actually embed the image in the file. This is fine if you only use Apple software or hardware to listen to the music since it will move a copy of the image with the songs for you, but I tend to prefer to have the art actually contained within the metadata of each track. I use iTunes to retrieve the art; then I extract the art from iTunes and save it off as a separate image file. I then use iTunes to embed the art directly into the metadata. If iTunes doesn't have the art, I have found that Amazon is the next best place to look. They offer 500x500 size images at the highest resolution, but they can still be of very good quality.

The end result is a portable, album gain adjusted, virtually indistinguishable from the original version of each track from a given album that contains the highest possible quality album art I could find. Here is a summary of the process in stepwise form:

Using EAC with AccurateRip:

1) Rip CD to a collection of FLAC files.

Using foobar2000:

2) Perform ReplayGain analysis of FLAC files.

3) Apply album gain and encode to AAC using the Nero Digital Audio encoder.

Using iTunes:

4) Find the album art and embed the art in each file.

5) Enjoy the music.

If you want to know more about any of the settings you should use for EAC, foobar2000, Nero, LAME, etc. I suggest first reading the forums at Hydrogenaudio. It is an excellent source of information and many of the developers that work on this software actively participate in discussions there.

Coffee Time

I bought a French press when I was in Germany. I have considered buying one for a while and noticed this one in a window while walking to dinner. This one liter model was less expensive than I was able to find similar, smaller presses for on Amazon. The press is just one piece of the coffee making puzzle. I didn't have a coffee grinder or a thermal carafe to hold the coffee after brewing, so I went out yesterday on a hunt for the appropriate equipment. I wanted a red coffee grinder since I use red as the primary accent color in my kitchen. Yes, it's all about the color. I found this KitchenAid model at BrandsMart USA. While there I also picked up this black thermal carafe. They only had black, white and steel carafes, but I'll keep an eye out for a decent red one at a good price.

This morning was my first occasion to put all of the equipment to use. I don't doubt that the placebo effect had something to do with it, but I found the coffee I brewed to taste much better than the coffee produced with my automatic drip coffee maker. I enjoyed several cups along with my breakfast of multi-grain bread and butter, and a bowl of mixed fruit. While dining I listened to Fiona Apple's Extraordinary Machine. I picked it up yesterday along with a few other discs from Rowan's while I was on my expedition for equipment.

Whirly Ball

We had a company outing of sorts yesterday evening. Several of us from work went to play Whirly Ball. I didn't really have high expectations; in fact, I thought it wouldn't be much fun at all, but I went along anyway since I didn't have anything else particularly interesting to do. It turns out that Whirly Ball can be a lot of fun, but the game is more difficult than one may at first think. I was pleased to be the first person in the group to actually score a goal, but my athletic performance really only had nowhere but down to go from there. Near the end of the evening we were forced to change courts due to a technical difficulty concerning a broken floor. We took a vote and decided that Squeak probably did it.

Pictures From Karlsruhe And Athens

After working through two days of Comcast cable modem problems, I was finally able to post some pictures to my Flickr account. Curtis has some photos of me taking some of these photos. Namely, this one and that one.

Athens - Day 2

I woke up this morning to see that they seem to have the fire mostly under control now. The helicopters are still dropping water on it, but I think that may just be cleanup work to keep it from flaring up again. Yay!

Athens - Day 1 (Update)

Aside from the burning mountain, all is well at the end of Day 1 in Athens. As you can see from the picture above, I was able to visit the Acropolis before dinner. I think the site seeing helped to lift my colleague's spirits as well. It was very, very hot walking amongst the ruins, but it was worth the effort.

On a more serious note, at dinner we learned that our Greek host actually lives on the burning mountain. She had to evacuate her family this afternoon, but she still found the time to meet with us. We are very grateful for her generosity as I think it would be difficult for anyone to entertain guests when their home may be at risk for a disaster. We also learned from our hosts that there was another large fire a few weeks ago on a different mountain. These fires have been consuming large portions of the forest land remaining in Greece. Let's all try to pitch in a few prayers (or thoughts, if prayers aren't your thing) that the fire is contained soon.