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Winamp, FLAC and media players

In earlier posts, I have mentioned switching to using Winamp as my main PC-based music player and deleting all my MP3 files and re-ripping my CD’s in the FLAC format. I have not regretted those two decisions. Having all my audio in a loss-less format means I can switch to another format at any time without losing anything other than what the other format loses. So if I convert from FLAC to another loss-less format at a later time, at least I won’t have to rip all the CD’s again. I still like Winamps media library and the ease with which you can create new “views” is great.

In the original post about ripping all files to FLAC, I did worry a little bit about the iPods and other MP3 players sprinkled throughout the home.

That challenge turned out to be a non-issue. Winamp supports “Plays for Sure” devices like the iRiver as well as iPods and it is quite simple to configure it to convert non-supported file-formats into another supported format on the fly as the files are transferred to the MP3 player (transcoding). So the PC’s used by those family members with iPods use Winamp to automatically transfer whatever audio we want whilst on the fly convert the FLAC files to AAC, and the lone iRiver has audio files converted on the fly to MP3. It obviously takes longer than transferring files that might already be in a format supported by the relevant media player.

Winamp does have “out-of-the-box” support for iPods, but I have installed ml_ipod which has enhanced iPod support. For example it can transfer cover art onto the iPod if it is present on the server.

What has not worked so well is getting the D-link DSM-320 media player to play. The version of TwonkyMedia I have is supposed to (like Winamp) be able to transcode from FLAC to another format, but I haven’t had that work reliably.

I’ve played around with TVersity which was somewhat better, but still not that reliable when transcoding. Unfortunately it is a Windows program and the home server runs Linux. I tried installing TVersity in a VMware image where the OS was Windows. That image works fine when the VMware image runs on Windows host. I installed the VMware player on the Linux server. The Windows image with TVersity seems to run fine, but the D-Link media player can’t locate it. It is most likely a routing issue. The Linux server probably needs to be configured to forward multicast (which uPnP uses, and the D-Link media player uses uPnP). I’ve tried to configure the forwarding of multicast, but without success. So at the moment the D-Link media player is idle.

I have considered buying the Netgear EVA8000 which on paper looks like it does most of what I want from a media player. There are seemingly many things to like about it, but specifically it supports FLAC files natively, and it can get access to files on any fileserver supporting SMB (which a Linux machine with Samba does), so there would be no need for either TVersity or Twonkymedia. So why haven’t I rushed out to buy it? Too many comments from existing owners about things that don’t work well, and the price is a bit high. For not much more I can buy something like the AOpen miniPC.

Playing FLAC files on PC’s

In the past, the PC’s in my home all used Windows Media Player (WMP) to play the MP3 files available via Samba shares exported from the server. WMP doesn’t support FLAC natively. There are codecs that can be installed that solve that particular issue when I tried that in the past WMP became flaky. I have tried Winamp in the past but never really warmed to it, primarily because the media library wasn’t that good. The WMP media library allows me to rate tunes and it makes automatic playlists based on what I listen to the most.

Well, things have changed. I tried Winamp v5.33 and I now prefer its media library to the one in WMP. It does most of the things the media library in WMP does. It is very easy to find the tune I’m looking for by entering an artist, tune name, group name or whatever in the search field. Winamp whittles the possible entries down as I enter my search term character by character. In WMP I enter a search term, press the search button and I hope for the best.

Included with the player is MusicMagic from MusicIP (called Predixis in Winamp). It is supposed to be able to analyse your music, when you then highlight a particular tune it can suggest other tunes for a playlist. Unfortunately MusicMagic as bundled with Winamp doesn’t support FLAC files, which is a bit odd as the stand-alone program they have does. The idea is interesting so I would like to see how well it performs.

Summary: Winamp is now the media player of choice on the PC’s in my home.

The MP3 files are gone…

I’ve deleted all my MP3 files… and re-ripped all my CD’s and encoded them in the FLAC format instead. So why did I do that? The two main (and inter-connected) reasons are: I wanted to future-protect my audio files, and I want good audio quality.

Future-protection
I don’t mean to imply that the FLAC format will last forever, but by storing my music in a loss-less format, I can convert it to something else at a later date without loosing anything. For those who understand what it means that MP3 is lossy, imagine converting MP3 files to some other lossy format, and then converting that to yet another lossy format some years later. The quality of the audio files would be worse each time they were encoded into something new. In IT terms, MP3 is quite an old encoding format originally standardised in 1991. With the astonishing success it has had, I doubt the format will disappear completely in my lifetime, but it will become increasingly dated. And who knows, maybe it will eventually disappear. The only way to ensure I don’t loose any of the audio quality of the original CD’s is to store it in a loss-less format. I may convert the audio files to another format in the future, but I don’t want to rip the CD’s again with all the associated pain of ensuring the various tags are correct.

Audio Quality
I remember when I first listened to some MP3 files 8 years ago or so. I couldn’t understand what everybody was so excited about, I mean, the sound quality was terrible. I could easily hear the difference between a CD played on my stereo and the same music played as MP3 files on my stereo. Later I learnt that it was possible to encode MP3 files in a good quality. So that is what I’ve been doing until now. I encoded all MP3 files as vbr, variable bit-rate at the highest quality settings. That resulted in audio quality good enough that I couldn’thear the difference between the CD and the audio files. But as pointed out above, it wasn’t a future-proof solution. It is also some time ago that I started ripping and encoding my CD’s so I wasn’t really sure that all CD’s had been encoded the same way.

How I did it
I’ve done all the ripping on my Linux server, not because there aren’t any decent Windows programs around to do it, but because it could quitly sit in the corner ripping and encoding while I was doing real work. Occasionally I would then slip it another CD.

The programs I used were grip and of course the FLAC encoder/decoder. The latest version (1.1.4) is really fast compared to previous versions.The paramters I used with FLAC were:

-8 -V

-8 ensures you get the highest compression. Some sources on the internet claim that the time taken to encode using -8 is not worth the few extra % disk space saved. As already mentioned, v1.1.4 encodes much faster than the previous version. I found that it did save me anything between 50-150 KB per track, so I thought it was worth it. -V verifies the file at the end of the encoding, if you have a lot of CD’s to rip and encode, you want to be sure your copy is good.

Grip (like cdparanoia) does a lot of checking of the CD and that takes time, but unless you want to do it again as you find that some of the CD’s had scratches resulting in poor audio, you had better do the ripping right the first time.

Disk Space
Well, loss-less encoding takes up way more space than a lossy format, even at the high quality encoding settings I was using for MP3. I did a test of 6 different CD’s (some classical, some modern), comparing the disk space used when they were stored as MP3 files and afterwards when stored as FLAC files.

6 CD’s, encoded in 86 files: Mp3: 622 MB, FLAC: 2117 MB

Encoded as FLAC files, all my music CD’s now use 54 GB of disk space. I was actually a little surprised by how much disk space the FLAC files are using, but I don’t regret it.

Anything else?
I expect to run into a few problems with being able to play the FLAC files. My D-Link DSM-320 media player for example doesn’t support the FLAC format. One of my kids has an iPod, the other an iRiver, so there will no doubt be other posts about FLAC files.

D-Link DSM-320 Media Player

I have had my DSM-320 for almost 2 years now, so this post does not exactly document a new device, but my experiences with it may still help those looking for a media player in terms of what to look for and what to look out for.

The DSM-320 is a so-called streaming media-player. It contains no local storage, so the media must be stored somewhere else. You could compare it with a DVD player. A DVD player does not contain any local storage (the storage is the DVD you insert), all it can do is navigate the media that sits on the DVD, it can decode the media you select and send sound and picture through its plugs to a TV and/or an amplifier. It is the size of a thin DVD player, in fact in my home it sits underneath the DVD player. I have had a love/hate relationship with it. I love the idea of a small set-top box with decoding built-in and the rest of the functionality located elsewhere, the actual device has however had a number of irritating bugs which D-Link hasn’t seemed very committed to fix.

Basic description of how it works

The idea behind the DSM-320 is that you have all your media located on a computer somewhere on you network. This media can be music, video and photos. On this computer you run a media-server (a uPnP server). The media-player has cables connecting it to your TV, your stereo and of course your network. When the media-player is turned on, it connects to the media-server over the network, and through the user interface of the media-player you select the media you want. The media-server sends that media to the player, the player decodes it and your TV shows the decoded data (if it was video or photos) and/or your stereo plays the sounds.

Using the DSM-320 media-player

Music

Firing it up (using the TV to show the user interface) I can select whether I want Music, Video or Photos. If I select Music I can select a particular genre, a particular year, an artist, an album or… well, the choices for how I want to find the music I want is huge. The choices I have are actually not dependant on the media-player, but on the media-server running in the background. I’ve got close to 200 CD’s that have all been ripped and MP3 encoded so I have a fair amount to choose from. It is a lot easier to find the music I want through the DSM-320 than hunting for it in the bookshelf (I have tried to institute some kind of system a couple of times and it is always messed up within a month). The data that allows me all this choice in how to select is held in the MP3 tags in the MP3 files, the media-server reads that and organises the lists accordingly. Being able to choose music (or audio books) as easily as I can and then play it on the stereo is great

Video

I have also encoded several older VHS tapes (particularly children’s videos) that are now selectable and playable via the DSM-320 without having to find the right tape and (even better) without lots of tapes taking up space in the bookshelf. There is no such thing as an MP3 tag for MPEG2 files, so here I have had to decide on a directory structure on the hard-disk. Video is selectable either by name or by browsing the directory structure. Things have not been good on the video front for the DSM-320. The DSM-320 remote control has a fast-forward and a rewind button. Within the setup for the DSM-320 you decide whether pressing the fast-forward button makes the video play twice as fast or whether it will bring up a question about where (in hour:minutes format) you want it to start playing. Sometimes I would like to have the one, sometimes the other function, but I can’t have both (which is probably understandable). With some video formats, the “play faster” option just doesn’t work, with all video formats, the time-based format doesn’t work past 1 hour. So if I want to “fast-forward” into a film after the first hour and 20 minutes, sorry, you can go to the 59 minutes into the film location and then play normally from there. I have some MPEG4 files that played fine when I first started using the media-player, after applying the last European firmware upgrade it could no longer play those files (Unsupported Media was the message I got).

Photos

Displaying photos is a feature I haven’t found that usefull, Photos just don’t look that good on a normal TV. But we have occasionally sat down to look at holiday snaps on it rather than sit in front of the computer (where the photos look much better). The DSM-320 will read the date and time from the EXIF header of JPEG pictures, but I haven’t found that way of selecting the pictures I want that great. As with the videos, a good directory structure (Year, Month, Occasion) is much better at finding the images I want.

Internet Radio

D-Link have made it possible to subscribe to music from services such as Rhapsody and Napster. I haven’t tried those services, the media-server software from TwonkyVision I used makes it possible to listen to Internet radiostations using Shoutcast.

Media Server Software

The media-server software that came with the DSM-320 was fairly basic, but to be honest, I only ever used it once as an initial test so I can’t really comment on it. There are several media server implementations around, I have primarily used TwonkyMedia from TwonkyVision as their software can run on Linux.

10 things I hate about you

Well maybe not 10, I am well pleased with the overall functionality, but the DSM-320 is not particularly well thought out and it is buggy, in no particular order:

• The remote was obviously not designed by someone who never used the device. Look at this picture of the remote control. This is how you would use it to play some music: First, turn the DSM-320 on (red button at the very top), then press the “Music” button (4′th row of buttons from the bottom), select the artist or album you want to listen to (use the navigation arrow keys, this actually works fine), now press “Play” (2′nd row of buttons from the bottom). If you want to skip to the next song, you do that with one of the buttons on the very bottom of the control. It is not a one-handed affair, you need one hand to hold the remote and the other hand to press the right buttons. On the remote for my TV and my DVD player, the buttons I use the most are located in such a way as to make it possible to operate with one hand. Ok, so maybe the usability of the remote control is not the end of the world, but it sure is the most irritating remote control I have ever used.
• On the European version, the plugs were placed by someone who never actually tried plugging it in. The SCART connector is too close to the network connector. A SCART cable sits at an angle to the plug, and on the DSM-320 this means that the network cable is bent close to the connector (of course this only happens if the device is cable connected, if the wireless option is used this is not an issue).
• Connect the device wirelessly and the only security option is WEP. This may be something they can’t do anything about, but if it is something a firmware update could “fix” I sure would like WPA. Until recently it hasn’t been an issue as it was connected by cable.
• The bugs, none of them cause the product to be dysfunctional, but there are several in different parts. Which leads us to…
• Firmware updates are very easy to perform. The DSM-320 will itself check for them over the internet (if it can reach it over your network) and if there is an update will suggest that it applies it. I think there have been 2 firmware updates in the 2 years I’ve had it which considering the known bugs is not enough. It is not very difficult to find irritated owners who on the internet have documented reporting a bug to D-Link and then nothing happening. In summary, the firmware updates have been few and far between and when they have happened they haven’t fixed all the known issues and they have usually introduced some new ones.

Summary

Overall I have liked the DSM-320. The bugs it has I have been able to overlook. Some of the known bugs in the DSM-320 media-player also exist in newer products such as the DSM-520. That does give one the impression that it is a product-range D-Link don’t intend to focus much on. It does make one wonder when one reads that D-Link claim to have a strategy for the digital home and to be the leader of the digital home arena. I’m still using my DSM-320, but I am looking for something to replace it.

Other DSM-320 reviews:

• NoDRM.com review
• PC Magazine
• Geekzone
• OzCableguy