Ross Brown dot net

I finally got myself a decent MP3 player! I’ve been putting it off for years, mainly because none of them have been exactly what I want*.

It’s a 30Gb Creative Zen Vision:M (a black one) - it has pretty large capacity (but I’ve still filled it!), it’s technically superior and cheaper than the competition too. I’m not really interested in putting video on it, so I have just loaded it up with [tag]music[/tag] (for now, at least).

Unfortunately, my mp3 library was a mess and I needed to get it into shape before loading it onto the device. Luckily I don’t own any DRM-protected content, it’s MP3s all the way (so I don’t have any compatibility issues), but this may be an issue for you if you have purchased music from an online store. I can thoroughly recommend Allofmp3.com for buying music online, since they sell in non-DRM formats (and they are surprisingly cheap).

Here’s what I did:

• Sorted out the MP3 tags. This is so the player knows the artist, album, genre, year etc. This helps with finding and selecting music to play. There are any number of ways of bulk-editing MP3 tags, I used Musikcube, but I know Musicmatch and others have a similar function.
• Sorted out the folder structure. My songs are now organised in folders based on artist and album name. Again, use your favourite software to do this automatically (based on the file tags)
• Split my mp3s into albums I wanted to sync, and those I didn’t. Because I have a large collection, my whole library wouldn’t fit onto the device so I needed to split it. For this, I created a directory called #NOSYNC and moved all the artists and albums I wasn’t going to sync into that. This made it much easier when selecting which files were to be copied across.
• Downloaded the album art. The Creative Zen Vision:M displays the album art when playing a track, if it is available. With everything correctly tagged, I downloaded Album Cover Art Downloader and let it loose on my collection. It worked well for most album tracks (except obscure / out of print ones)

After that, it was just a case of syncing the music library with the device. Lovely.

Now I hit ‘random’ on the way to work and there’s always something to listen to. I think it will take a while for me to get bored of 30Gb of music, but there’s always the FM radio if I do!

[edit] Creative have released a new firmware version for the Zen Vision:M - version 1.30.02. You can download it from the Creative support site

* And no, especially not iPods, because I buy a gadget for the technology, not because I want to be part of some stupid fashion trend. Besides, any techie knows iPods suck.

My first post of 2006! Happy New Year!

We had a great Xmas down with my parents, it was good to see all the family again. During the time off I managed to take some more pictures with my new camera, like the one above. I’m still learning how to use it but it’s cool. I’m also going to get a polarising filter this week.

In an unrelated newsflash, it seems that the long-anticipated Video On Demand (VOD) revolution has finally arrived here in the UK…Well, almost. I remember doing a paper on VOD back in college many years ago and we were definitely expecting it to have arrived sooner than 2006…So anyway I found out that Sky TV have recently launched Sky By Broadband and gave it a go. They’re offering a fairly good selection of sports clips and movies and the best bit is, all of this is available for no extra charge (if you are a subscriber to all Sky Movies / Sports channels. Incidentally, they are currently doing a 1/2 price offer, see sky.com).

Picture quality is pretty good, although I ended up using Windows Media Player to play the downloaded files because for some bizarre reason the Sky player won’t let you watch in fullscreen mode. So, it’s not a perfect viewing experience and the selection could be better but overall it’s not bad and I’m glad Sky are doing it.