{"id":2356,"date":"2008-09-14T14:46:32","date_gmt":"2008-09-14T14:46:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/2008\/09\/sorting_out_you\/"},"modified":"2008-09-14T14:46:32","modified_gmt":"2008-09-14T14:46:32","slug":"sorting_out_you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/2008\/09\/sorting_out_you\/","title":{"rendered":"Sorting Out Your Music"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s come to my attention that over the last couple of years, although I still buy and listen to a lot of music, too much of it is through my iPod. Although I&#8217;ve got some half-decent Sennheiser earphones (i.e. not the ones that came with the device which are embarrassingly bad), that&#8217;s not really the best way to listen.<br \/>\nOn top of that, I actually have a quite decent stereo system at home, and when I do listen to CDs via that, the quality is astonishing.<br \/>\nSo yesterday I went out and bought an Airport Express. OK &#8211; my interest had been piqued by a conversation with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.absoluteradio.co.uk\/djs_shows\/shows\/geoff\/\">Geoff<\/a> a couple of weeks ago. But I now realised that this relatively inexpensive device is exactly what I needed.<br \/>\nSetting it up was OK, although installation on Windows wasn&#8217;t quite as simple and painless as Apple tried to claim it was. Indeed, on my Vista setup, I&#8217;d have been completely lost were it not for the fact that I&#8217;ve used WiFi for a few years now. Connecting to the Airport Express also meant losing my wireless router connection for a while until I could tie the two together into a single WiFi network.<br \/>\nEven that was a problem because the password I was using for my WEP-protected router wasn&#8217;t 13 characters precisely. I took the opportunity to upgrade from WEP in the protection stakes, and this also meant some fiddling on XP machines with a patch that mysteriously hadn&#8217;t been included on either of my machines (including my very recently flashed Asus Eee that now runs XP booting in under 30 seconds).<br \/>\nI got everything back on network with the exception of my PSP which refuses to work. No great loss as I rarely use it online these days.<br \/>\nAs for the Airport Express? Well it works very well indeed. I think that Apple might include at least a cable in the box, but I&#8217;d bought one knowing that they hadn&#8217;t.<br \/>\nAnd once installed, all the computers with iTunes on my network saw it, and gave me the option of streaming music to it rather than the tinny computer speakers.<br \/>\nNow I need to properly work out a single place for my iTunes library &#8211; preferably on a NAS drive. And finally I can start to comprehensively rip all my CDs in the same format. I have some as mp3s (and with an ongoing eMusic subscription, I&#8217;m likely to continue to do so for the foreseeable future). Others are in Windows Media format, while anything ripped more recently is in AAC &#8211; at 256k. That&#8217;s a particularly important detail, as I don&#8217;t want my stereo finding the encoding quality wanting.<br \/>\nAny recommendations of NAS devices or enclosures with good power management (I don&#8217;t want the drives continually spinning), would be more than welcome.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s come to my attention that over the last couple of years, although I still buy and listen to a lot of music, too much of it is through my iPod. Although I&#8217;ve got some half-decent Sennheiser earphones (i.e. not the ones that came with the device which are embarrassingly bad), that&#8217;s not really the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,9],"tags":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2356"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2356"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2356\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}