Having to go over hundreds of CDs each time I want to listen to a specific album can really take its toll on your music listening experience, so making all your music available at your fingertips anywhere in the house is great. Beyond that, the sound quality playing well-ripped lossless sound files with good equipment should be better than with any CD player. Basically, playing music with a CD player often introduces various artifacts (such as jitter etc.) – due to mechanical moving parts and lack of good error correction. On the other hand, because while ripping the CD the software can “double-check” that it’s getting a good copy, and re-read the original CD several times if needed, the end result is often better quality music playback.

My CD ripping setup:

1. Plextor Premium U external CD drive – this is an excellent drive for ripping music, especially because you can only use the Plextools (see below) with Plextor drives. These drives have long been discontinued, but you can still try and get one on eBay etc.
2. Plextools software – excellent for ripping, if you have a Plextor drive. Similarly to EAC, this program allows you to rip your CDs without worrying that CD scratches or defects will produce a bad file. Basically, these programs perform some advanced verification and error correction algorithms to make sure the ripped data is exactly the same as the original one present on the disk. Make sure that you setup Plextools correctly so all of the advanced ripping algorithms I mentioned are turned on. Plextoor is reportedly faster than EAC, but both are really considered the industry standards for this sort of thing.
3. FLAC – the lossless music format of choice, especially if you want bit-perfect copies of your music and widest possible support across various platforms. Plextools can rip to FLACs out of the box, which is great.
4. Freedb – this service allows you to automatically get metadata about your CDs, so you don’t have to manually enter the names of your album, artist and the tracks for each ripped CD. Again, Plextool works with Freedb out of the box.
5. MediaMonkey – an excellent media player, great for managing big music libraries. MediaMonkey has many useful features, but automatic tagging is probably one of the most useful ones. This allows you to automatically fix or complete the metadata of your songs and even find album covers.
6. Sonos – multi-room digital music system. Basically, you setup all your music on one of your computers or a network storage device and then add a small box to any place in your home you’d like to have music at. Then you can have Sonos wirelessly play any music in your library at any location in your home, or have it synchronize all locations to play the same music. Sonos also comes with a very nice remote control to wirelessly drive the whole thing.

So, my ripping flow is as follows:

1. Insert a CD, have Plextools pick it up and get the metadata from freedb
2. Rip the CD, my file naming convention is “Artist\Album\Track # – Track name.flac”
3. Use MediaMonkey to fix the metadata if needed, add album cover etc.
4. Play the music on my machine with MediaMonkey, or throughout my home with Sonos
5. Enjoy!

Sounds simple and easy, right? Not always. There are several problems you might encounter, some of them are:

• Unicode problems, especially with non-English CDs
• Damaged or scratched CDs
• Missing or bad metadata, especially with classical CDs

I will post my solutions to these problems in the following posts.

For now, I’m off to listen to some music

A short search revealed Mika – a young British artist with a pretty impressive voice

Mika

Mica Penniman (born 18 August 1983), also known as Mika (IPA [ˈmikə]), is a Lebanon-born, London-based singer who has a recording contract with Casablanca Records and Universal Music. Some sources note his birth name as Michael Holbrook Penniman. more…

Mika – Grace Kelly

[via FoxyTunes / Mika]

From their FAQ:

Twitter is a community of friends and strangers from around the world sending updates about moments in their lives. Friends near or far can use Twitter to remain somewhat close while far away. Curious people can make friends. Bloggers can use it as a mini-blogging tool. Developers can use the API to make Twitter tools of their own. Possibilities are endless!

Without even noticing, I kinda did what the FAQ says:

• I started posting moments of my day to Twitter
• Connected to some of my friends and made a few new friends
• Posted several mini blog posts
• Last but not least – used the Twitter API to create TwittyTunes with the guys here in FoxyTunes. TwittyTunes allows me to post my currently playing song to Twitter with a click.

I think that posting music to Twitter makes a lot of sense. After all, for me at least, many of the “interesting moments” I have during each day are songs playing on my computer. And what can be better than sharing those musical moments with my Twitter friends…

And the great thing is that some of my friends have started to Twit music too! So, for example, I now know that Kfir likes Korn, Nine Inch Nails and Iron Maiden. Through Kfir, I discovered a project called Peace Orchestra by the great Peter Kruder from Kruder & Dorfmeister. Also, by following one of Kfir’s Korn posts, clicking on the FoxyTunes Planet link and going through some of their YouTube videos, I discovered their excellent Pink Floyd cover, which I’m including here with one click, courtesy of FoxyTunes Planet:

Another Brick in the Wall – Korn

[via FoxyTunes / Korn]

I’m really excited to see all the different pieces of FoxyTunes starting to come together, and Twitter support is only one step in this direction. Now, if only I had a bit more time to listen to all the great new music I discover, life would be perfect

Anyway, here’s one of my favorite songs by Hooverphonic:

Hooverphonic – Mad about you

[via FoxyTunes / Hooverphonic]

I’m really excited to see all the great feedback we are getting from the community – on people’s blogs, in their comments, forum posts and emails to us. Also, the Planet has already been reviewed by popular blogs such as Mashable and Lifehacker.

I must say that creating something that is loved and appreciated by so many people is truly amazing, and this along is enough to keep us working those long long hours on FoxyTunes!

We have a huge list of cool things we’re planning for FoxyTunes soon – the browser extension, FoxyTunes Planet site and the integration of the two. So, stay tuned – more exciting stuff ahead!

While this is good news for Last.fm users, it’s interesting to see that some people actually discovered Last.fm through this latest FoxyTunes update – see this Blog post for an example.

We’ll definitely explore this direction more in the near future – introducing and promoting music products and services by supporting them in FoxyTunes. It’s a triple-win situation IMHO – users get to discover and play with cool new music stuff, the service gets new users, and FoxyTunes becomes even more universal

By the way, FoxyTunes Planet was also built with this in mind – to be not only a cool place to discover new music, but also a place to discover new music services.

Basically, he believes that the labels should drop their demands that their music be sold protected by DRM, and if that happens he promises that Apple will embrace DRM-free music and support ‘a truly interoperable music marketplace’.

Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. That’s right! No DRM system was ever developed for the CD, so all the music distributed on CDs can be easily uploaded to the Internet, then (illegally) downloaded and played on any computer or player.

I couldn’t agree more. I believe that dumping the DRM will be good for everyone – consumers will be able to play their legally purchased music on any device and with any media player, and the increased interoperability and freedom will surely stir up more music discovery, recommendations and, eventually, legal music purchasing. Will 2007 be the year the DRM died?

via Paul Lamere