Filling the digital gaps

One of the good things about digital download sites is sometimes albums that aren't currently available on record or cd are made available in that form.

This is a good example of one, the tenth Commodores album form the Fall of '83 which was not issued on cd in the UK or States and to whom had been long deleted  on  tape and record featuring the hit Only You.
Well as part of the Apple's Mastered For iTunes program all the Commodores albums have comeback out, freshly mastered and in with them was this, which I've only ever owned on pre-recorded cassette and my only digital copy was that copied to MiniDisc several years back.
Also included in it are the Caught In The Act and Movin' On albums the latter does sound a lot better than the PTG cd taken from a rather distorted record and the classic Hot on the tracks,Zoom,Natural High and Midnight Might albums, the home of hit 45's Brick House, Sweet Love,Just To Be Close to You,Three Times a Lady and Still.
Naturally I topped up on titles I don't have on cd for my music collection as these AAC 'lossy' encoded versions do sound rather good.

Getting the best sound for the Dollar

If you hadn't noticed, things over the last 18 months have been changing when it comes to portable digital audio players (D.A.P's) with many people using that Swiss knife of a device, the Smartphone, to play music from while searching the mobile net and texting.
Thing is it's not really designed to get the best sound from your recordings even if an increasing number do better quality lossless files while at the other end of the scale people like Astell and Kern sell very high quality dedicated players from approx £700 upwards and players like the much talked about Pono somewhere in the middle.
Really cheap players are either very limited in terms of capacity and file types or are comprised by cheap electronics when it comes to the sound.

The enterprising Chinese company Fiio launched toward the end of last year a cheaper player from the much liked X3 (a newer version of which is out soon) for around $100 and recently I got one discounted to GBP89.00 (the UK is expensive for electronics).
The first shocking thing to say is it has no internal memory but as micro sd cards are so cheap at around £21 for 64Gb's and may have some from your older player, it's no problem and this play takes upto 128Gb cards which is quite something when it comes to capacity.
Unlike the original X3, this player uses a scroll wheel with a centre okay button for selecting things such as your music, formatting to FAT32 cards over 32Gb, engaging gapless playback for albums where tracks run seamlessly into each other and so on.
Unlike the X3, the player can't be used to output files directly via a computer to a stereo and the battery capacity is a bit less but is appreciably cheaper.
What it does do is play everyday 'lossy' downloads from the likes of Amazon, 7digital and iTunes Store as well as the higher quality lossless (Flac) ones INCLUDING 24 bit better than cd quality ones of which a increasing amount  of new and older recordings are being made available to buy.
Because this player has the option of either using its own high quality headphone circuit or a dedicated line output for a high quality stereo, such files can be fully enjoyed at home and on the move.
It takes around 2 hours to charge the battery using a 1 Amp or higher USB charger ready to set up ready for use from new using the supplied lead.
I find it an easy to use player use although you need to 'index' the card every time you change it for another to use things such as searching by artist, song or playlist.
While it's quality isn't quite as high as the X3 using headphones, it is a lot clearer with better fine details and dynamics  from anything around this price point bettering the various Sansa Clip models and smartphones.
If you're looking for a cheap upgrade for player with more potential for memory expansion, better sound and the ability to use higher quality downloads it can be recommended. 

A question of organizing

 A hot start to the weekend that saw England drop out of the World Cup sees me continuing on a bit from last weeks theme.
Normally you'd load music and and off your player depending on how much capacity the player has and what you normally listen to. For instance I keep on mine a collection of 'evergreens' I usually listen to on the internal memory to save having to reload every time and have used a card for loading odds and ends on such as new albums for immediate playback but the rigmarole around this does jar a bit.
See, I'm used to Cassette and MiniDisc walkman where you just grab a stash of tapes or discs already done and easily to find with labels from their storage containers to listen to with no need to fire up the computer, waiting for it to boot up and then connect the player to load stuff on and off.
Preloading cards on the face of seems a good idea but you do need a way of knowing what - and we could be looking at over 20 - albums are on what card which are typically the size of a small postage stamp.
I had discussed a few ideas with friends and one thought was plastic loose leaf inserts for SD cards you put in binders but while available in North America, the leading Stationery stores here in the UK such as Staples, Ryman and W H Smith don't stock them.

I did spy on Ebay this which while not perfect was promising, a small pouched zip up case with room for 22 full size SD cards which because the pouches are plastic could have a small paper label with a name or number attached you could use with a small pocket book, something else not requiring booting up!
You would have a sticker with say 2 on the pouch and maybe a genre statement  say "70's Rock".
The entry in the book would go like this:
2

Badfinger
(listed album by album)
P McCartney/Wings
McCartney
Ram
Wild Life
Red Rose Speedway
Band On The Run

and so on

This would make it easier to find the right card with the albums I want to listen to so I could just slot them in, waiting a few seconds for the player to index them to its' album list and be away without faffing about with the computer every time I want to go out.
For major artists you could have separate Artist Cards and this week I assembled a "Beatles in Stereo" card from what I consider to be the best sounding cds and I could easily make one for the Rolling Stones albums from the 60's to the early 80's as they live in my iTunes library just to slot in and play.
By my math, you could easily get 440 albums in that pouch which would be ideal and even If I were to get another surely 880 albums is more than enough!

Firmwear upgrade

You might recall sometime in 2010 I write about a portable music player, the Sansa Clip+, I bought cheaply from Amazon because of an interest in downloads I was starting to buy from stores such as 7Digital and wanting the means of listening to them away from the computer which back then was a behemoth of a Desktop.
Well, that player is still alive dispute what some doommongers said cos it wasn't a fashionable brand like Sony or heavens above an Apple although like them it contained a non-user replaceable battery.
It has had a couple of upgrades by Sansa one adding support for the rather geeky Ogg Vorbis audio format but in that time they hadn't done anything about adding support for other file formats such as Aac such as that used on the iTunes Store which was a much bigger thing for most people, but did add it to the later Clip Zip as standard but they've stopped doing upgrades for the Clip+.
I also experienced an issue with a few Flac (Free Lossless Audio Codec) files such as when playing Sgt Pepper where they would hang or crash the player so I was reading about what you might do about this when I read about an alterative software you can put on it called Rockbox you can get from Rockbox.org.
I decided given its' age it was worth trying this this so having the found the graphical user interface downloader followed the instructions - the only bit I found hard was finding from the Sansa official site a copy of the original software for  a .bin file to link Rockbox's software onto the official players directory.
It went in without any fuss.

The display now looks like this and it will also show the upcoming track as well track time.
It cured the Flac playable issues completely, added proper gapless replay so albums where one track segues into another don't pause even just a second.
Best of all it now can play Aac, Alac (Apple's own Lossless format) and other audio file formats native so I can play anything on one single player.
I set the database to automatically update every time using the manual drag and drop to the memory on your computer I alter the  contents just like the original software did.
I have noticed as well the sound quality seams to have noticeable improvements when it comes to stereo image and fine detail.
The radio gained more presets and the ability to label the stations where on the Clip Zip it used RDS to get this and display program and song playing which is nice but still the upgrade does make things better.
Was this worth doing? Yes because it improved on the capacities of a fine player at no expense and it does show how sadly products can be limited by the software released.

Enjoying ones music

Every so often on one site I frequent there remains a lingering thought that a substantial number of its more active users appear obsessed with the pursuit of high fidelity to the point they are no longer enjoying the music.
It's hardly an original observation as Flanders and Swann wrote the great musical satirical piece "A Song of Reproduction" very much around that in the early 1960's  where the tinkering around buildings ones own 'rig' and habitual bashing of commercial equipment was all the range.
In my experience   many people fail to get as good a sound as possible from modest equipment simply because they have not invested the time to set it up properly, using good quality leads, determining the best spot and support for their loudspeakers that move the air within the room used and so on.
Those steps that need not cost much, saving many an audio fan from spending a never ending amount on upgrading when often they've not heard all their existing equipment is capable of.
One often feels like saying, go treat yourself to a new great recording be it on record, cd or high quality download instead of spending hundreds of pounds on what turn out to be sideways changes in hardware.
One thing you soon learn with good equipment regardless of price is, recordings vary wildly in terms of their own quality to which the best good equipment can do is not make reproducing them any worse than they really are and where available, look for the best sounding recordings of your favourite artists and music. 
Unfortunately much new popular music is made much louder with less difference between the softest and loudest passages and some classical recordings have had whole passages seriously edited to perfection losing any real sense of a conductor's own character showing in how a note is performed compared to recordings in the analogue (generally pre-1980's) era so much so that many musicians seek out these older recordings because they sound more like performances with their own character.
In many ways what is sad is it's  that while the wanting to hear music well reproduced that gets people into better sound, they get locked into obsessing over hardware and their specifications so they feel obliged to spend more time thinking about that than simply playing a recording and enjoying it.
When I'm happy with my equipment, as a rule I stick with it until either I become less satisfied or it needs replacing.

What It Is?

I'm not too good this week but one thing that has always bugged me was not being able to replace my original 1972 pre-recorded cassette of The Temptations Solid Rock with a much better cd version as this title only briefly came out in the 1980's and currently has an asking price of up to $500 used when you see one.
As an album goes its a transitional one issued just after Eddie Kendrick left his sole contribution on this album is 'It's Summer' as he felt the Psychedelic Soul producer Norman Whitfield was having them record wasn't the old style R&B with ballads they had been previously known for and to which also they felt they were guesting on his albums.
It does however capture that feel of social consciousnesses prevalent back then rather well  in 'Stop The War, Now' a meditation begging  the end to the Vietnam War with its many destroyed lives (a topic that resonates with me regarding the Afghanistan War today), 'Superstar', in part a dig at former Temptations and call to arms to those who ride on the tails of their peers getting to the top and then disowning them and their needs, plus  'Take a Look Around' inviting people to see the poverty of the Inner City.
This was issued as a download mid January 2013 but only in the US which isn't much use as I don't live there but fortunately I had a friend who was able to get it for me from US iTunes and move it in my computers general direction by the wonders of the Internet.
It sounds much much better than my ancient tape which was very compressed, hissy because back the EMI who issued Tamla Motown titles didn't use dolby noise reduction on the tape and the tape quality was such that on the loud passages the high notes no longer existed.
I also got the download of Psychedelic Soul a very good 2 cd set covering this period of the Temptations with two extended remixes.