Or perhaps, I should say, I'm being converted.
Several years ago when my PC was young, I decided to rip my music collection to it. After all, I reasoned, I spent many of my waking hours in front of the PC, we have no means of playing music in the living room, and the "media centre" idea was beginning to be established as the way to go. Intoxicated by the vastness of the space available to me (I had an almost-empty 250GB disk - luxury!) I chose to rip my collection to the superior, but slightly more space hungry, Windows Media Audio (wma) format, rather than the, perhaps more traditional, MP3.
The more tech-savvy of you will have predicted what comes next, and long-standing readers of this blog will already know.
I bought an iPod.
iPods don't play WMA format music files.
The frustrations of grappling with iTunes, expressed in that blog post linked above, have stayed with me for so long that I've only ever synced it once. That first time. You might even say I'd been traumatised. It did change my behaviour though. As soon as I discovered the WMA restriction I changed my rip options, and have been ripping in MP3 ever since. But still, more than half of my original music collection remained inaccessible, and none of my newer albums, despite having been ripped in the right format, have been synced.
This has long been a source of disappointment to regular travellers, as they discover nothing new on the iPod, but recently came to a head with my purchase of the Best of Nightwish, which both Natalie and Blythe wanted to listen to almost continuously. We even had to resort to the CD player!
Finally reaching the end of Procrastination Road, I sought out a file converter and pointed it at my music collection early this morning. It initially found almost 6,000 files, but after running it for an hour or so I realised it was wasting time analysing the MP3 files to detect that they didn't need converting, so I stopped it and removed everything from the list except WMAs, thereby reducing the number to 2,670 files. A few minutes progress monitoring suggested the conversion process would take almost 48 hours to complete, and when I checked a few minutes ago, this was still true.
You'd have thought with all my experience I'd know better than to use proprietary formats for *anything*. Maybe this will be the final lesson on that subject.
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5 comments:
And Ipod is proprietary too isn't it? Doesn't the mp3 have to be converted to an ipod format or can it be left as is?
ogg-vorbis works better than mp3 in my opinion, and is open source, but I don't know how popular it is. I believe it's less "lossy".
Teev: iPods will play MP3s natively, along with a slew of other formats. It's just WMAs they object to. On religious grounds, presumably ;o) Interestingly, when I did that first sync, iTunes converted a load of my WMAs to AAC/M4A files on the fly, so having done this conversion I'll be able to get rid of all those too. That'll free up another 7.5GB.
Don: I checked and iPods will play ogg-vorbis. I was amazed. But you have to load up some custom firmware (like Rockbox) to do it. Don't think I'll be going there somehow. With the kind of listening device I'm using and the state of my ears, I don't think I'd appreciate the difference in lossyness.
Ah yes, M4A is what i was thinking of. Do you have to use iTunes to load anything onto the iPod?
iTunes is the "official" sync tool and comes free with the iPod. There are a few home-grown alternatives around (that I might try, lol)
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