Gadget Family man shows you how to get groovy this Christmas (and impress the kids)

The Gadget Family motto is ‘If it ain’t broke, it ain’t ours’.

So it came as no surprise recently when the CD player waltzed its last. After all, how much Britney Spears can one machine take?

But music still fills the house. Our entire music collection is stored on our computer hard disk as a library of mp3 files and available via a wireless transmitter through our stereo amplifier.

Huh?

mp3 is a format for compressing and storing music files. A track on a normal audio CD is in AIFF format and occupies about 50Mb of disk space. If that track is converted to mp3 format, it occupies about 5Mb. The ‘trick’ in the conversion is to lose as little musical information as possible while achieving maximal compression.

iTunes is the jukebox application we use, and comes pre-loaded on all Macs. Similar software is available for Windows (a selection is available at www.download.com).

Using it is very straightforward, even for those in our family over 14 years.

When a normal audio CD (say, The Worlds Best Ever Beer Songs) is placed in the CR-ROM drive of the computer, iTunes automatically consults with an enormous database on the internet to determine the title, artist, genre, and the names of all the tracks. You click ‘Import’, and the songs are ‘ripped’ from the CD and converted to mp3 files on the hard disk. This takes about 20 minutes per CD, but you can play those (or other) songs while ripping. Once the songs are in the library on your hard disk, you can throw the CD away (or give it to our kids, which is effectively the same thing).

You can also download songs from numerous sites on the web, or use an application like gnutella to find just about any song from the libraries of thousands of other users. Also, this month major music companies will begin selling music online (in a very restricted and likely to be unpopular format http://www.smh.com.au/icon/0112/05/news1.html).

You can use a $10 cord from a hi fi store that allows you to plug your speaker outlet from the computer into the normal RCA ports on your stereo amplifier, perhaps where the CD once went.

Or (and here’s a groovy bit), since the computer is in a bunker distant from the stereo, we use a special audio/video wireless transmitter to send the signals to the stereo. Plug the computer speaker in the transmitter unit, and the receiver unit plugs into the stereo. Works beautifully, unless you turn the microwave on!

The iTunes software allows you to create different playlists for different listeners, moods or occasions. Each song can have a preset volume and equaliser settings. And, once created, you can burn any particular compilation back to CD, simply by clicking the ‘Burn’ button.

Or you can listen to a random selection of songs from your library. It
creates interest when the computer chooses a Duke Ellington / Baha Men / Boz Scaggs triple play. You discover lots of music long forgotten. Our library currently has 788 songs, which uses 3.6 gigabytes of disk space (which leaves us with only another 14GB), and we could listen for two days seven hours before a song is repeated!

Very Big Christmas Hint

mp3 files are portable. A tiny walkman-like iPod player with a 5GB hard disk can be connected to the iMac and automatically synchronise with your iTunes library and playlists so you can take your entire collection walking (ed. with your Nordic Poles), or in the car. I have emailed Mrs L and Santa with that hint.

Convergence is the term used to describe the merging of video, audio, book and computer technology. I believe that in the next few years all our music, movies and TV will be accessed in digital format through the computer. As long as we don’t break that too.

tlembke@medicineau.net.au