Mini Update - Software Review

[asc3nti0n]

So my Mac OS is still alive, at 10.5.2 only, a holiday from the gaming world is working for me for the moment. I have clocked SPORE (well got into the Space stage) only once thus far under XP before my Mac OS X installation was even considered, and I can't consider it until I make a successful update to 10.5.3 or later.

So next update I'll talk about my failures getting to 10.5.3 (and beyond) before, and then post my current installation blog, which I have on a TextEdit doc, in my Documents folder, in a state of "pending".

 

SOFTWARE REVIEW

So my computer is currently parsing the music collection. BeaTunes is a brilliant parallel app to iTunes that will sit there and analyze the iTunes Music Libraries tracks and calculate BPM, set the Start Time and Stop time to crop out silent seconds, and determine a color of the song, which I haven't looked into just what that really is, as it hasn't yet finished going through my collection. But its using both cores of my E8200 quite well and the rest of the system is very responsive; although if you let BeaTunes analysis hit the web for lyrics and PUID... then don't think you're going to be using your computer for as long as you have a iTunes list, I tried to add my whole collection with analyzing for EVERYTHING... it got through an MP3 in as long as the track is... and my collection is 106 days long.

 

Another great Music package is AirFoil. Designed to hack into the Apple Remote Speakers protocols, it is Linux, MOSX and Windows aware, you run the free "Airfoil Speakers" package on as many networked computers as you have speakers connected to, and with a licensed copy (US$25, AUD$32) of Airfoil running on the computer where you have your iTunes collection setup immaculately and you know what songs you want to play without copying out of your iTunes Library and throw it into another media player on someone elses machine.... etc... the Airfoil will hack the digital audio stream on the local machine, ping and timesync all speaker clients including the local machine, and you have synchronized audio playing throughout the house! or office, or as far as your bonjour can see!

 

So in my case we have in our place, three "living areas" the front lounge, the computer lab, and the back Rumpus Room. The front lounge has a computer in it with a decent set of 2.1 speakers, the computer lab has three systems, one the media server (Ubuntu Server, Feisty Fawn i think), a Windows XP machine, and my Hack) and in the Rumpus Room there's a projector, 5.1 Dolby, on a Windows XP desktop (i know, disappointing buildup). and then a couple of laptops etc for bedrooms upstairs or anywhere.

 

So with airfoil I can have the entire house rocking in sync from my iTunes. Or if at the next party my crew is going to hit up the, i'll send my tunes into there, and they can hit up the hardcore trance in the Rumpus. and halfway through the night, I swap, and that's a simple change... can even take out the laptop to the garage, put the mini-system out there and send the tunes to that, it syncs perfectly, until you have the inside bass turned up so loud that it overpowers the local speakers and then you get distance lag... but if you sit halfway between them then it sounds just fine.

 

I don't get many sound pops and glitches, my brother serves the tunes from a Ubuntu Linux desktop install (its a MythTV frontend that he hijacks the sound from) and he reckons that its fairly buggy from that out over a Wifi-B, although he's got a slow old processor in the mythbuntu system, I have the luxury of plenty of grunt behind all the PCs in the house here.

 

So I'm loving getting my Tunes collection more complete, I do enjoy putting together playlists for events, I have rated around 10% of my collection and being able to utilize the new iTunes 8 "Genius" feature has been a real boon, because if I genius up a 5-star rated tune, then it creates a collection that are sufficiently my type of music that my rated collection is getting better quicker than a normal random shuffle. and hopefully with beatunes able to created Colored playlists, I'll be able to create quality mixes for moods. I look forward to being able to create playlists and do searches based on words in the lyrics field. As that's the next effort, complete the Lyrics of a major proportion of my collection.