Monthly Archive for January, 2009

Cowon D2

Published on January 28, 2009 in gadgets and music. 2 Comments Tags: , , , .

My MP3-Player (or rather Portable Media Player, as it plays not only MP3, but also videos, and more importantly FLAC and ogg vorbis) the Cowon D2 has had some problems with playing tracks in the right order.

It worked fine when opening the files via the file browser, but when browsing them via tags the playing order was… well, out of order. It wasn’t random though, on the iAudiophile forums I read something about it being a typically Korean bug, because the track numbers were read from right to left or something.

Anyways, the latest firmware update, 2.59, finally fixed that bug. Or so I thought. All my mp3s are now playing in the correct order, which is really great. The problem is: The FLACs are still playing out of order.

So now I’m converting all my FLACs to mp3s. With LAME and the -V0 setting, which schould produce really good quality mp3s. I probably won’t hear the difference, but it still makes me sad that Cowon didn’t manage to fix that bug once and for all.

So right now I cannot recommend buying a Cowon D2, though it is really an awesome device!

I’ll file this under “lesson learned”: Check the web for bug reports before you buy something.

Peggle on the PSP

Published on January 14, 2009 in gadgets and games. 8 Comments Tags: , , , .

I managed to bring one of my favourite games, Peggle, onto one of my favourite gadgets, the Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP). If you don’t know Peggle, do yourself a favour and download the demo, it is an awesome little game!

But, Peggle was never released for the PSP!

There will be a release for the Nintendo DS (NDS, another of my favourite gadgets) later this year, but not everybody has a NDS, and it isn’t out yet. There are also releases for Windows, Mac OS, iPod, and mobile phones.

So, how did I manage to run Peggle on my PSP?

Continue reading ‘Peggle on the PSP’

+1

Published on January 6, 2009 in blog and music. 0 Comments

I just remembered that another of my favourite songs is Creative Commons licensed, so here is yet another update to my radio:

Re: Your Brains by the wonderful Jonathan Coulton.

Radioactive Materials

Published on January 1, 2009 in blog and music. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

I spent two nights sifting through CC-licensed music, and I uploaded two more songs to my radio. But I think I will stop this experiment here.

While there is indeed good, free (as in speech) music out there, I still can’t show you the music I really care about1, at least not legally. I could link to Youtube videos with horrible audio quality (and questionable legality), or I could post a playlist and send you to fetch it’s content at a certain Swedish bay.

But I don’t want this blog to be about music anyway; I just think it’s a great idea to let other people listen to a few samples of the music you like, so they might find something they like, discover new bands or even new genres for themselves. So I’d like to recommend a few songs and have people listen to them without any hassle. It’s what people have done with LPs, CDs, and MCs for decades. It’s the best advertisement any musician and their labels could hope for.

But not on the internet – not in the open. It’s too risky. They (the labels mostly, I guess) could sue me and they might even win. So this music sharing remains in a legal grey area; in the underground.

I’m afraid I can’t offer any insightful conclusion to this little rant. The situation is slowly changing – see Nine Inch Nails – but the big music labels will fight for their (hopefully) lost cause for a long time and do much harm to keep their obsolete business model alive. They not only harm their customers, but probably even more so the artists, who are exploited and chained to a merciless and greedy bureaucracy.

1: “Ode an die Freude”, the Presto from Beethoven’s Ninth, is actually one of my favourite pieces of music, ever. I was lucky to find a free recording of it.