-
Convert your old Cassettes to MP3
Part 1 If you are like me who grew up in the 1980s, you will no-doubt have a huge collection of old Audio cassettes (Tapes) that contains your childhood favourites but now lying somewhere collecting dust. Today you should be lucky to be having a cassette player in working condition to play them. A decade back I started hunting for my favourite albums/movies and managed to buy most of them as Audio CDs or MP3 CDs, but I still long for digitising my old tapes so that I can listen to them where-ever I want. So a few years back I bought an inexpensive cassette player which has a stereo…
-
Music downloads – a new business model
Necessity is the mother of invention they say. How true is this statement!. When you thought the Music Industry is doomed because of piracy from free MP3 downloads, someone out there comes with a new model. In the above chart from Economist you can see that the falling sales of physical (Audio CD) media is not being compensated by the rise in Digital sales. The Digital sales comes predominantly from iTunes (and other similar pay per download services) and from subscription services (like Rhapsody) which offer a flat fee per month for unlimited songs. Both the models have produced mixed results and are expected to continue with no clear winner…
-
Digital Media in your house – Part 2
Read the earlier part of this project here where I talked about the Digital Conversion of VCD/DVD and sharing in Xbox. After all the Proof of Concept, I decided it was time to go full-time Digital. Bought new hardware for my house. One was a high-end desktop where I plan to do the conversions and regular PC usage. The second was for the server role, where I had two 500GB HDD Mirrored for storing all my Digital Media files and sharing them. I then converted a few dozen of VCD and DVDs into Nero AVC (MPEG4) format with the new desktop in a few days. I tried in the server…
-
Ireland – The greatest songs ever
As I have written in the past I like Irish Folk songs. So the other day while at Crosswords I saw & picked up the CD “Ireland – The greatest songs ever“. One song among the 12 songs in the album impressed me a lot and in the last few days I have listened to it several times. The song was Four Pence a Day by Tola Custy & Cyril O’Donoghue. Surprisingly my 4 year old son has taken a liking to it and he demanded I play it twice today!.The song talks about the hard working conditions for Four Pence a day as salary. You can sample the songs…
-
Digital Home – Squeeze Box
I have started on a journey to centralize all my digital assets in a central computer (a.k.a server) in my house. The server will have all my digital photographs, music & video. The easiest of the three is to move my photos from my desktop to this server. The current plan is to stream audio to the music systems in the house, and use Xbox 360 Media Extender to stream video (DVDs) to the TVs in the house. I am considering using Windows Home Server for the central server. Though I planned it a long time back only today have I finally started it, will keep you posted on how…
-
Indian Music Online – Lack of choices?
Before I continue, let me say I am a novice to finding music online, so if there are more options than I list here, please leave a comment about them. I normally just buy CDs from shops and on coming home rip them immediately to my laptop. Then I burn MP3/WMA versions for listening in my car for personal hearing. When it comes to genuinely buying Indian Music online (Tamil film and Carnatic Music in particular) there are few choices available. Most of the sites sell CDs and since they are in physical format their catalog is very limited. Even those whose catalog is sizable, the site design and the search features are pathetic. Most…
-
Loud Music in Marriage Receptions
In every Indian Marriage (especially Tamil Marriages) in the evening, there is an event called “Reception” where you have friends and relatives gathering and wishing the newlywed. In the event you have something named appropriately as “Loud Music” which is a performance by a local orchestra singing popular film songs, wishing the newlywed and to entertain the audience – so that there is festivity in the air. A decade or so back, it used to be primarily classical / Carnatic music that will be played which makes it enjoyable especially by the elders, but nowadays it is only Film Music and “Kutthu” songs. With the advent of portable electronics and powerful…
-
I love my Zune
Here is the scoope on I got my free Zune Player from Microsoft. I never owned an iPod and my last brush with a MP3 player was about 6 to 7 years back with now ancient Creative Nomad II Player. Nomad had an extremely limited space even after adding 64MB Smart Media Card (which at that time costed me a fortune). I found limited use for the device, as anywhere I went I had my laptop – whether the trip was for business or vacation. So Music and Video was always there. I considered this as the perfect Digital Media Nirvana – with no need to buy myself an iPod or…
