Full steam ahead II

It's all change this week with our snow going by Saturday evening leaving only a few reminders of where the snowmen once stood proud, a few bits of ice where it hadn't quite thawed and flooded fields.
Did you have a train set when you was younger as I didn't not that bothered at the time as they didn't do much for me although my brothers did starting with a plastic diesel locomotive and carriage set complete with track, signals and points. I think, cos it's a long long time ago the colour scheme was mainly a royal blue with white detail and the track was red. I think the size thing (Gage?) was 00 and they had it across the front room running playing at being engine driver and rail station controller while I tripped up over it. One had a smaller o gage set made from aluminum later on mounted a small wooden board.
Anyways, this big super train will be coming near me in the future:

It's the High speed train that does up to 225 miles per hour meaning in theory at least it'll take 68 minutes to travel from Manchester to London and the track will be eating chunks of this part of Cheshire too as well as leading a point where join it from Crewe to get to and from other places.

I wouldn't mind having a model of that these days or even taking a few trips on it although I hope the improve the other services from our area as travelling knocks the stuffing out of me with having to catch buses before I get to a suitable rail station.
Sometimes I think in Britain you paid a price for being the first to get railways by getting stuck with slow Victorian system that misses out on where modern travel requirements are.

Snowbusiness!

What's white, comes by the bucketful and if you were to ask me is really rather fun even if it's a pain for the groan ups with all their considerations around getting into work and shopping?
That's right-Snow!
It might be me and my crazy upbringing but I always look forward to the winter for this powder dry reason: Sleighing, building snowman and having snowball fights really is the most fun plus it's easy to track all the animals and birds that visit your garden cos their footprints are so much the more visible.
You can watch birds arrive for feeding too:

See I'm organized,eh? Plus I have heaps of long socks to keep my legs warm.
 Cold also kills of nasty bugs off to which is no bad thing.

Getting your cds on a portable player

You may have cds either because you still buy some for titles or versions not available at download stores like 7Digital or iTunes or maybe your left with some before you started downloading albums and wondered how to get them on your portable digital music player.
Their are programs in media players such as Windows Media Player and the ITunes program store users have to install as well as paid for programs like dbPoweramp that support a wide range file formats including so-called Lossless one such as Flac.
I've used dbPoweramp for a good while and like it but have been experimenting with the iTunes ripper to make Acc files so here's a few tips.
By default the iTunes ripper works at 128kbps which may of been okay back in 2004 but doesn't sound so good and isn't as good as Apples own iTunes downloads today so you need to navigate to Customs settings on the Import tool with a cd in and set the following:
Around 250kbps and enable variable bit rate which is pretty much what the iTunes store uses actually. That setting sounds very good while still making a smallish file for players with limited memory.
When ripping (importing) you'll see a tickbox every time asking if your cd is a compilation.
I learnt this the hard way but leaving it alone is fine if your disc has stuff by one named artist say The Bangles but will separate Adam Ant from Adam and the Ants on the same disc putting the in two separate folders which isn't much use if you just to listen to the whole album on one go! For anything like that you really need to tick Compilation which will make it an Various Artists listing but in the tags artist, song title and album name will show and you get one album file.
You do the same with classical cds with different orchestras playing different compositions.

Full steam ahead

That there steam choo choo - Met Locomotive No. 1 - was a weekend visitor to London's subway systems ("The Underground") 150th anniversary on the Metropolitan and Circle line. Just imagine the smell and sound of all that steam and the regulars might even why me of all people just puts up for the first time ever a picture of a train?
While many girls shock horror love trains especially the steam powered sort probably keying into stories around getting to girls boarding schools and that marvellous 1970 film adaption of The Railway Children, for me trains are a darker thing routed in childhood abusive episodes.
Consequently talking trains to me is something I'm ill at ease with not that's your fault or anything just the demons running around my head but we're getting somewhere as I was able to view footage of of this weekends event without wanting to hide or run off.
I even thought having that train running was a really nice idea!

Playing with the Sensa Clip Zip

Well it may seem an odd combination reading a book and  note she's reading the right way - from right to left - and listening to some music but there are times you want to listen to something without being wired up to a home stereo as a former head of Sony realized when he came up with the concept of a portable tape player known in the West as the Walkman.
Following on from last weeks post having got these digital audio recordings wouldn't it be nice not to have take your computer with you to listen to them?
Well I had a player for 2 years and nine months that just clipped into my blouse pocket or skirt band but with discovering the iTunes store, I found because it wouldn't play them without me remaking them in a format it would which is time consuming as well as potentially harming the sound quality.
I needed to get a player that could so I bought this:

It's small with a 1.1 inch colour screen, allows you to just drag and drop your albums straight on to it and critically plays iTunes audio straight off the bat. It also had a big advantage over the Apple ipod Shuffle, it not only is geared around playing albums from start to finish, it has a sdhc memory card port so I was able add a 16GB card to the players own 8GB of memory which if my math is okay means I have a 24GB player for just under GBP£54.Bit of a bargain, what? It is very simple to use.
It also sounds very smooth on Apple's M4a and Window's .wma files too when played though a purchase I made at the same time a pair of Sennhesier HD202's which have deep bass and a high sensitivity to make the most of the output from portable devices.

 Because I have a small head being a small built person, I find most headphones are way too big sliding off of my head, not keeping background noises out and leaving me not hearing all those low bass notes. I also find small ear bud types don't feel comfortable either.

Artwork for the Clip Zip
This can be a bit confusing and the manual doesn't really cover how you get artwork onto your files.
Your art work needs to have a combination of  being under 100kb in size as well as Under 500 x500 pixels. The easiest way to get some is type the name of the title of the album and select images to find a Jpeg file of the right number of pixels and files size. You can resize using a utility such as MS Paint if it's too big and save it.
You then need to drag and drop that image  into the folder that album belongs to in the player and rename it "album art" (no inverted commas and a space between album and art) and save.
It should now show up on your players display.

Downloads? Good enough?

Today, it was announced on radio and television that the amount of media, that's to say music, video and games people bought directly by downloading on to their many digital devices such as music and video players,games machines, music and computers now accounts for approximately 22% of all sales of these products.
You don't have to be an avid collector of movies or music to have noticed the demise of traditional record stores in many neighbourhoods and the increasingly limited stock carried by those still around including in the case of those resident in the UK, the HMV flagship store on Oxford Street, London.
It is true that niche markets such as specialty cds sought out for exceptional  sound quality still have a following as well as vinyl lps that are finding favour with youngsters as well as those of us who grew up with them who like the whole feel of owning something that can fully display the album art apart from those who feel cd just isn't as satisfying as sound.
One reason for this certainly all those gadgets we have, taking them with us which have freed us from the dependency of having to make copies in real time of our favourite music to listen out of our homes. Indeed quite a number of devices such as tablet computers allow you to buy music or films outdoors and listen to them  on the spot! Electronic book readers are very popular for this reason.
But there is something controversial in audio circles that has aided it.
When Apple launched it's first music player in 2003 - the iPod - a few years after the very first Mp3 portable players came out, the quality of the connection you had to the internet was often poor and really slow as most people didn't have broadband.
This meant when Apple started the iTunes Music Store as it was first called, they had to make the files this music was stored in quite small as otherwise it would of taken ages to get your music.
Apple also used a different way of altering the digital sound in the form a cd would normally use to a smaller file called Aac otherwise known as M4A, that stood for Advanced Audio Codec that sounded better than the older Mp3 early downloaders especially those who downloaded stuff for free used.
It helped make the ipod in many ways the replacement for portable cassette tape players as you could carry a lot of music about with you without lugged pockets full of tapes but while it was convenient and wasn't bad as sound goes it didn't really equal the best cassette players or the so 90's MiniDisc player for sound.
In time Apple have improved the sound quality by allowing more detail to be captured by decreasing the amount of sounds the device that converts a regular cd to a Aac file to be removed (all so-called lossy digital formats like Mp3 and Aac work by removing sounds tests showed we didn't really hear).
All of this is helped by people having more reliable and faster broadband internet connects that make downloading bigger higher quality files quicker
In addition, recently some albums are being polished (aka Mastered) by Apple themselves from sources they specify to a set standard one of which is tracks cannot be so loud they may cause poor sound on the loudest moments on the device that encodes the file you, as an iTunes store customer buy.
These albums have the phrase "Mastered for ITunes" by them and some audio fans have found their can be more of a difference between the quietest and loudest moments of a song in these versions than the high street cd!
At one site I visited, many people remarked on how well some of these tracks sounded compared to the many cd versions they own and so I did the unthinkable and got an iTunes store account.
I was really quite taken back by just how good some of the albums you can buy on Itunes really are when played on expensive home stereo system being gobsmacked to hear two out of print Temptations albums sounding at least as good as cds and I'm a fussy so and so as far as sound quality goes.
I got many of the new Led Zeppelin releases that have been "Mastered for iTunes" only to amazed with how good they were.
Some people from day one liked services like the iTunes store for the ability to buy odd tracks they liked but when as a jaded by bad sounding cds person like me can be amazed by this, isn't the case that perhaps for anyone other than a total perfectionist  downloads aren't not only convenient but actually so good that for everyday purposes they need not concern themselves with cds and their storage?
Plus a good number of titles can't be found on in print cds but are  available as downloads at the iTunes stores as well as Amazon's and 7Digital's Mp3 stores.
I'll tell this much folks, my aversion to downloads anything other than stuff not being on cd just died last week.

For those who aren't using an iPod or the iTunes player.
Sometimes  you'll find in the iTunes store a track is marked as album only meaning to get the song, you have to buy an entire album. This works by marking the track with a slightly different file extension which is accepted on an iPod or the iTunes player.
I did find some other players like WinAmp couldn't see them meaning they wouldn't play  but this can be fixed.
If you open up the iTunes folder on a PC and navigate the individual album in  a folder marked iTunes media you'll see each song has a file name like this:
all you need is love.m4a
above the artist info.
The tracks that are specially marked to prevent non album play read like this:
rockandroll.m4p
The p  stands for protected which in the early days of iTunes all the tracks were.
To fix it right click rename  and just change the p on the file extension .m4p to read .m4a and save.