iLounge

1

MM is good for NOTHING…..

Posted by bababooey on October 13, 2003 at 1:28 PM (PST)

2

It is true that MM supports the iPod, but I have had a terrible experience with it, and that is the reason why I just can’t wait for iTunes for PC to be released. I doubt that MM will have an edge in the PC market because of the fact that they “support” the iPod, as I just don’t see their application being good enough.

Posted by Sraphim on October 13, 2003 at 1:39 PM (PST)

3

So is iTunes for Windows going to support the iPod and act as it does on a Macintosh machine with seamless intergration, or is it going to just sell music, leaving iPod users with the horrible MusicMatch software and the buggy Ephpod? Personally, I have been awaiting iTunes for Windows since I bought my iPod, and if the program doesn’t allow me to sync with it, I think Apple has screwed up big time.

Posted by rsacer on October 13, 2003 at 2:14 PM (PST)

4

I cant believe musicmatch won awards.

Software is clunky, mem. hog and has a horrible gui.

Posted by fo_foo on October 13, 2003 at 2:47 PM (PST)

5

I hope MM crashes and burns in hell.  That program is evil.

Posted by Adam on October 13, 2003 at 3:39 PM (PST)

6

thanks goodness for ephpod.. it was the best option for the longest time for peecee users..

Posted by bababooey on October 13, 2003 at 4:36 PM (PST)

7

bababoey - its not THAT bad of a program.

Sraphim - Thats the one thing I fear of the upcoming thrusday even, will iTunes just be a way for PC users to download from the MS or will it be the full blown iturnes

fo_foo - You can’t believe music match *bought* awards. Better

Adam - see bababooeys comment above

bababooey again!? - ephpod is good, but after I got my gen3 pod I had to use MM for the alarm clock feature… and it stuck with me for some reaon. I don’t use it as a media player, but it does remind me of Real Player in many ways. It isn’t a good program, but it isn’t worthy of dieing in hell

Posted by Casual on October 13, 2003 at 4:47 PM (PST)

8

Of course Apple will ship the iPod with iTunes…It wouldn’t make sense for them to ship MM with the iPod.

Posted by Mongoos150 on October 13, 2003 at 4:47 PM (PST)

9

I have no doubt in my mind that Apple will do Windows iTunes right.  It will be very similar if not exactly like the Apple version.  I won’t say it will have EVERY feature, but it will have the same basic ease of use.  If you have never used iTunes, you are in for huge treat.  My windows friends mouths hit the floor when I showed it to them.  They are still envious.  I had to start using musicmatch at work and I couldn’t believe that piece of crap was even made.  Up against itunes its just embarassing.

I have no inside info, but it would not make any sense and even be poor PR to slap the iTunes name on the windows version and not have it very very similar.  If nothing else it would be one more selling point for iPods.

Posted by Cadilon on October 13, 2003 at 6:13 PM (PST)

10

I’ve read some of the articles about the launch of WinTunes. I don’t think Apple has anything to worry about. It seems as though all of the other sites,are almost willfully going out of their collective way to make it difficult to make it difficult to use Ipod with such sites as MM.You would have to download using WMA,and then re-rip everything to MP3. I could do it, but just thinking about having to do all that is makes me tired.
  Also, having used MM for almost three years before I got my Ipod, in comparison to some of the others,like RealPlayer,I can say that MM was the best one. It had its fair share of quirks,but it was the easiest to use-and that’s stretching it. What really irritated me about MM didn’t flair up until I started using my Ipod.It’s been a fast downward spiral from there. I didn’t like that it took two days before I could finally get MM to recognize the Ipod, I have to completely erase the Ipod’s hard disc if I want to add additional songs, and it takes three hours to transfer from MM to Ipod. I finally wound up trying the trial versions of other programmes. If I-Tunes weren’t coming out, I probably would have found up going with XPlay or MediaCentre 9.
  To add insult to injury, if I were to upgrade to MM 8.1,which has access to the MM download store, I couldn’t use my Ipod with MM at all. I would also have to pay additional money to get all the features that I have in 7.5,even though I had paid for lifetime upgrades in MM. And when you start factoring in the lousy customer service at MM… .I could go on and on… So maybe MM isn’t evil,but if the past four months are any indication, it comes pretty doggone close in my book.

Posted by Christianicononev.2 on October 13, 2003 at 6:19 PM (PST)

11

Just to let you know, the WMA’s on the other music sites are protected and cannot be converted to MP3’s.

Posted by eclecticchickie on October 13, 2003 at 9:42 PM (PST)

12

“Just to let you know, the WMA’s on the other music sites are protected and cannot be converted to MP3’s.”

What? You mean I can’t make a CD and re-rip into mp3s? please explain more…

Posted by voodoo on October 13, 2003 at 11:39 PM (PST)

13

> What? You mean I can’t make a CD and re-rip into mp3s? please explain more…

Of course you can use many programs that support multi-channel sound to transcode on the fly from protected WMAs into MP3s on any Windows machine (without bothering to burn a CD as an intermediate step). I use Media Center 9 for this. But borrowing from another post I made, there is a problem with lossy->lossy conversion, the noise from the lousy DACs on most sound cards, and issues about digital->analog stepping for lower frequencis (such as 44KHz or 48 KHz).

My solution is to upsample and use some 24 bit 192 KHz processing to smooth out the sound ladder…

——————-

I output as SPDIF from a 24-bit 96KHz using an Envy24HT board, input to a 24-bit 192KHz Onkyo using its better, noise-free DACs, output the new SPDIF back into another 24-bit 96KHz Envy245, then convert into Media Center LAME VBR MP3 using this string:

“—nspsytune—vbr-mtrh -V1 -mj -h -b96—lowpass 19.5—athtype 3—ns-sfb21 2 -Z—scale 0.98 -X0”

(I considered FLAC but considering that the “originals” are already lossy, I wouldn’t gain anything).

http://www.musicex.com/mediacenter/

Posted by MC9 on October 14, 2003 at 5:19 AM (PST)

14

musicmatch is excellent software, its very useful and has many unique features

Posted by ti on October 14, 2003 at 5:57 AM (PST)

15

MC9-I realize that I’m going to sound like an idiot… I think I understand what you’re saying,but is there any possibility you could explain your conversion process in plain English?

Posted by Christianicononev.2 on October 14, 2003 at 7:37 AM (PST)

16

>>musicmatch is excellent software, its very useful and has many unique features

Please name one feature that is unique to MusicMatch.

Posted by Danny on October 14, 2003 at 8:01 AM (PST)

17

<Please name one feature that is unique to MusicMatch.>

super tagging - theres one

Posted by ti on October 14, 2003 at 8:56 AM (PST)

18

Christianicononev.2: it’s very straightforward.

Envy24 is a modern sound chip that offers the highest fidelity “prosumer” sound reproduction now available. It’s found on everything from $50 entry level cards to $700 multitrack recording cards.

Whereas boards based on Creative’s “Audigy” platform use pseudo-24-bit processing (they internally upsample, then downsample for output), the Envy245 is 24-bit throughout.

24-bit (versus standard 16-bit) sound processing enables greater resolution of sound data.

It is possibly with software such as Media Center to simultaneously play the protected WMP files and record them on the same PC, converting them on-the-fly into MP3. But this solution, while convenient and turn-key, has one main disadvantage: quality.

Because sound cards function within an electromagnetically noisy environment (inside a PC/Mac case), when they convert digital audio into analog audio and push it to speakers the signal picks up noise. So what I do is to output the signal in a digital format (SPDIF) to an external, reasonably high-end amplifier for some massaging.

Then I take that signal and send it back in digital format to the PC for re-encoding. The long gobbledeygook string happens to be a magic initialization string that instructs the open-source MP3 encoder called LAME to encode using variable bitrate and some clever optimization and sound enhancement algorithms. This produces MP3s that sound superior to most other lossy formats at comparable bitrates.

It should be noted that outputting digitally is always a good thing. Apple still has not provided a digital jack on the iPod, which baffles me. I’d love to use mine for output, but since it’s signal to noise quality is quite poor (cheap internal DACs in a noisy, cramped environment), I use an Archos, which features digital input and output.

I understand the new iRiver iHP also has digital ports, so I look forward to auditioning that soon.

Posted by MC9 on October 14, 2003 at 9:01 AM (PST)

19

“super tagging - theres one”

You’ve obviously never used the tags in this program:

http://www.musicex.com/mediacenter/

Posted by mad_clown on October 14, 2003 at 9:04 AM (PST)

20

MC9-Thanks,that helped a bit-I’m now going to do some research. It kinda reminds me of burning MP3’s to CD,and then re-recording using my digital audio deck.

Posted by Christianicononev.2 on October 14, 2003 at 6:10 PM (PST)