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For a couple weeks now I’ve been wanting to create a Pandora station specifically for Bartók’s String Quartet No. 4 in C Major. I want to find more classical music that sounds like this. Now that Pandora supports classical music, I would try typing in “Bartok” into the search function, but I would get Bartok’s symphonies. I tried typing in “String Quartet bartok” but got no results because that is neither just a name of a song nor just an artist. “String Quartet No” got me intresting results, but the autosuggest listings did not give me Bartok.
Finally I figured it out: While listening to the Bartók station, I clicked on “about this artist” to go to Bartók’s page. From there I could navigate to the specific album and track I wanted, and then do “Create a Station” based on that track. Now I’m finding all sorts of cool string quartets.

Try it, it’s awesome.

This weekend I freed up 30 GB of mp3 duplicates using a handy program called iDupe. I’d tried several programs before, including an early version of Corral all Duplicates without much luck, but iDupe was able to process songs via ID3 tags, file size, date modified, and some fuzzy logic I don’t totally understand. I don’t know how it works, but it did.

iDupe is $8 and has a simple 3 step process - selecting, analyzing and deleting. It will optionally remove items from your library and delete them, letting you review them first. Warning - it is only for OS X and windows users who accidentally buy it will not be refunded. My only complaint would be that it can only handle a maximum of 2000 files at a time, meaning even when I subselected iTunes’ ’show duplicates’ view, I still had to manually process chunks of my library at a time. It would be nice if it selected 2000 songs for you at a time, or even automated the processing in 2000 song chunks. But I trust the decisions it made and it worked great. Oh, and it removed all my dead tracks too.

For competition’s sake, Doug’s Scripts has evolved Corral All Duplicates into Dupin, but I haven’t tried it.

Great for when you don’t have any CD cases but have access to a recycle bin.

http://www.athensmusician.net/archive/2005-02-13_oragamicdholder.php

So you’re like me and love Trillian Basic and all the goofy noises it makes. All of them except for the singing on and signing off noises that it makes for all of your contacts. I have all of my coworkers on chat and I’m hearing those noises constantly. When I’m on the phone, my friends ask, “Is that a doorbell?” No…
If you look in Trillian preferences, the only options you have are to turn off sound effects all together or to mute notifications when you’re away. Neither of those are what I’m looking for. I’d turn everything off but I like to have an audio notification when my boss IM’s me.
Well, I found the .wav files of those two notification sounds and just replaced them with silence. You can back yours up and then replace the old ones with these in your program files\trillian\stixe\plugins\Tonal-Sounds\ folder:
contacts-offline.wav
contacts-online.wav
After you’ve replaced the files, restart Trillian. No more annoying doorbell.

I went over to my friend’s house to play our first guitar hero 3 battle for wii, mode only to start sucking immediately even though I play on expert and my friend plays on medium. “WTF?” I said. My friend was like “well I think you were sucking is all” but I thought I was going crazy. Was my wiimote malfunctioning?

Then I noticed the notes were coming down later than the music and started playing early and got a little better, but the lag was horrible. I asked him if he’d ever calibrated the game and he said no, so I calibrated it and the delay changed from 0 ms to a whopping 115 ms. Then I was able to play perfectly if I payed more attention to the music than the screen, but my friend had gotten used to playing before the notes hit so it messed him up to play on the beat. He tried calibrating again, but he hit the notes before the downbeat like he was used to playing, so the game recalibrated to 0 ms. We kept trying to recalibrate, but guitar hero must quantize the delay to either to 0 or to 115 because that’s what we kept getting. We compromised and set the calibration manually to 75 ms, which was manageable for both of us, but I had to play a little earlier than I was used to.

My friend has an LG HTDV. I’m not sure what model it is. I have an infocus SP5000 projector. When I play at home, there is 0 latency, though fast moving notes motion blur a little. His LG though has a very noticeable delay.

I had brought over donkey konga as well to show him the game, and plugged it in, but it was unplayable. I could compensate on the easy (monkey) songs if I played an eighth note ahead of the beat, but on the harder (gorilla) songs it was impossible. Unfortunately, donkey konga is an older game and there was no option to calibrate. My friend said it was fun and played it like he played guitar hero, but I feel bad for him, because he can’t play any of his music games on the beat with his TV. He says he thinks of it like conducting, where you make the motion ahead of the music, but as a drummer it makes me insane trying to play ahead of the notes.

After we were done playing games, we watched a movie, and I noticed that the movie sync was off with the sound as well. I didn’t bother mentioning it to him - he probably has never noticed and I didn’t want him to feel any worse about his expensive equipment.

I did find a website here about HTDV Lag - although after his tests, the author actually recommends a LG model. It must be a different one than my friend had.

Anyway, buyer beware, an HTDV may look great but you may not notice until after your warranty has expired that the display can have a huge lag. You’re not going crazy and that might be the reason you suck at guitar hero.

Leaving this as unsolved unless someone can tell me how to fix my friend’s LG HDTV.

-update-
Too bad you’re here probably because you’ve already bought a laggy HDTV and are searching for a solution.

I did find more info on AVS forum about the problem, which suggests to try to send signal to the HDTV that is in its native resolution so that it doesn’t have to rescale. I will ask my friend if he’s using the wii component cables and 480p which might help a little, but wii owners may be particularly out of luck as the wii does not produce full HD signal.

The article also suggests this device that will solve the problem, but at $2000 you’re better off selling your TV and buying a new one, unless your crazy TV cost way more than that.

So your friend makes you a CD mix, and it’s great, but when you want to import the CD it’s a pain in the ass because the mix doesn’t exist in the CDDB database, so Itunes can’t automatically label your songs.

I try and make people make me data MP3 mixes or at least CD mixes with CD text for this reason.

Nonetheless, you probablly still have CD mixes that don’t have the artist, album or song data on them that you want to import.

As far as I know there’s still no automatic way to do track-by-track detection on MP3s.

Here’s a tip though - before you import, click on the CD, select all, get info, and fill out the mix name in the album field. Then hit save and then import. Now at least you can group those tracks by album in your library, and you have half a chance of finding that track later and asking your friend what the heck it is. Better than a million TRACK 01 TRACK 02 files in your library that you don’t know where they came from.

I thought you wouldn’t be able to label the tracks since CDs are read only and won’t save an ID3 tag on the CD, but here’s where Itunes’ use of its library XML file comes in handy. If you know the artist and album info for some of the tracks, go for it, it is possible to label the artist, title, and other fields of the tracks before you import them.

Switching to a PC for my new job, I miss the volume keys on the mac for when I’m listening to music with headphones. “I bet I can find a utility that assigns a shortcut key to the plus and minus keys on the number pad,” I thought. I tried one utility, but the beep it made was deafening, and editing the wav file that came with the application didn’t help. Time to do more googling.

Enter Volumouse. Holy crap, this thing’s better than a shortcut key. You control the volume with a modifyer key (or click) and the scroll wheel. I have it (default) assigned to control the system volume when I hold down alt and scroll or hold down left click and scroll. This thing is awesome!
via Lifehacker (which is also awesome).

Reinstalling Flash twice didn’t help…How am I going to watch my dailymotion, youtube and milkandcookies videos??

This person had the answer:

http://fredericiana.com/2006/06/14/flash-video-and-no-sound-on-osx/

Some app is switching the audio Khz to 96, which flash just doesn’t even attempt to play. I think it might be Audacity that does it. Change it back to 44 Khz.

Digital performer won’t recognize the MMC messages coming from the MPD 24’s transport. Anyone know how to get it to work? It’s not listed as a control surface option and doesn’t seem to listen to it via any MIDI inputs.

On the plus side, I got the MPD remote functionality working with Reason, the problem was I had to upgrade to Reason 3.0.5 for the luacodec to work. If I launch reason after DP then Reason can listen to the MPD via transport and control DP’s transport via rewire. Sweet.

Oh Creative.
I got all excited because I received a Creative Inspire P7800 set of 7.1 surround speakers as a gift yesterday. However when I got everything plugged in, two of the speakers wouldn’t work even though my sound card was 7.1 and the speakers were 7.1 and have a ‘direct 7.1′ setting. My sound card has four outs and the subwoofer has 4 ins, but the cable that comes with the speakers, it turns out, is a proprietary cable designed for Creative sound cards such as the Audigy2. It has four 1/8th inch minijack plugs that go into the subwoofer, and three combined minijack plugs that go into your computer.

Here is a diagram of the cable that comes with the speakers:

It’s not even accurate though; it’s drawn with each plug having three poles (two lines), when really two of them have four poles. Here is what the cable really looks like:

“All I need is a fourth connection,” I thought, and tried hooking up a line-to-line stereo audio cable for the side speakers into the subwoofer. A line-to-line cable is a standard audio cable with a 1/8th inch minijack plug on each end:

But no luck, the side speakers apparently needed a 4-pole connector (three lines on it) and the stereo audio cable didn’t do it.

I sent my poor girlfriend on a trip to best buy looking for “7.1 surround sound cables”, telling her “don’t let them sell you stereo minijack or RCA cables”. She called with a befuddled best buy employee next to her, and neither of them could find one.

A trip to radio shack was also in vein. “That’s a proprietary connector. Try Best Buy,” they suggested. “I just did.” (Well, my girlfriend just did.)

A call to creative sales was useless. I had a part number for another creative cable, hoping that would help, but they said the cable I needed didn’t exist. Doesn’t exist?? In the setup guide that comes with the speakers, there’s a diagram with such a cable, and no one would sell it but Creative!

That’s sure a tease to have a mythical cable in your setup guide instructions!

“Well what if I just bought another one of these cables, and only used one of them?” I asked. I knew one of the plugs was 4-pole and even though it would be ugly and a waste of most of the cable, at least I could get it to work. “I don’t know,” he said, unhelpfully. They must get asked this question a lot — marketing wants you to think the speakers will work with any system, and design created the cable so it wouldn’t. They must leave it up to their lower-paid support staff to deal with the backlash.

An internet search was more infuriating. Not only does creative offer no help on this issue, other people have run into the same problem—they want to use this speaker system without having to buy a creative sound card! We have perfectly capable 7.1 sound cards; mine has SP/DIF and optical as well. It’s a realtek sound card that came with my MSI Neo3 PE motherboard. “I guess I’ll just go buy another sound card,” wrote one frustrated customer. “That is one of the reasons that I do not like Creative that much anymore. They sell sound cards with weird non-standard outputs so that you buy their speaker systems that have the appropriate cables included with them,” wrote another. What a racket!

Well, by experimenting, I figured it out. The standard line-to-line miniplug audio cable didn’t work for the side speakers, but it did work for the rear speakers. So I unplugged the grey rear speaker plug on both ends, and replaced it with the audio cable, leaving the grey plug on the subwoofer just hanging. Then I used the rear speaker cable for the side speaker channel. It worked! 7.1 8 channel audio without having to buy anything more from Creative!

Here is a thumbnail diagram of my solution, click on it for a larger version:

It’s such a racket that companies these days try to make their products proprietary but market them as otherwise. On the creative product web page the only requirements say “PC or Mac (desktop or notebook) with 5.1, 6.1 or 7.1 audio outputs”. Then they pretend there’s no solution when in fact there is one with a standard audio cable!

For those of you with a similar MSI mobo, here’s how to set up your software:

It’s a good idea to set your speaker setup in XP’s sounds and audio devices control panel to 8 speakers, 7.1 sound, but the real MSI configuration utility is a control panel called “Sound Effect Manager.”

I know, it’s not the best name for it. I set my motherboard to “8CH + S/PDIF (Optical & Coaxial), and the speaker dropdown to “8CH Speaker”. For SPDIF, I set it to No output. The diagram on the speaker configuration page is helpful, but on my actual computer it is ROTATED CLOCKWISE 90°, so bear that in mind when you’re connecting.

Lastly, set the speaker setting on the p7800 to “7.1 direct” and you should be good to go! Try the “3D audio demo” for full surround effect bliss!