Seems to me that the best plan at the moment is :-
for car use - _either_ a personal mp3 player with homebrew amplification _or_ usb sticks and a compatible cd/mp3 car radio head unit
for ripping cds - pc
for grabbing cassette / vinyl - Creative Zen nano plus (has line in socket), plus Goldwave for cleaning-up (have copy already from an earlier project) - combined with cassette player or turntable for a stand-alone 'grabbing' application
All sounds deceptively simple - wonder what I've missed !??
Note also that some, whilst supporting folders, simply play the tracks (files) within the folder in the order listed in the File Allocation Table (FAT). This order is often unpredictable if you drag an entire folder over with files in it.
There are some tools (well I know of one, on Linux, but there must be more) to reorder the FAT alphabetically (etc) but the issue is something to be aware of.
The other 'twist' that I hadn't thought of is the fact that an mp3 'album' looks like a single file to an mp3 player - there seems to be no notion of 'tracks' within the album.
However - it looks as if Goldwave has the nouse to split an mp3 album into individual tracks - so that's not necessarily a big deal...
Learning all the time !
I know that all this mp3 stuff is p2p - but doncha wish that people would at least check that what they're uploading is complete ? Dragged down a Steely Dan album only to find that half of the last track (Reelin' in the years) is missing - bah ! However - the track is available on its own - so I'll be able to stitch it back on
What fun - and a great deal faster than recording it off the vinyl !
I'm not sure what you mean by that - an album would normally be encoded into individual files/tracks and any notion of the 'album' would simply relate to the folder they are stored in (or identified by the ID3 tag). Perhaps you happened to have come across an album ripped as a single mp3 file - this was perhaps either on purpose e.g. albums intended to be played as a continuous uninterrupted series of tracks (e.g. many 'dance' albums) because mp3 transition between files/tracks tends not to be seamless (multiple causes) or maybe it was rip from an analogue source and the ripper hasn't split the album into individual tracks.
'Spose so..... So can an mp3 file have 'tracks' within it ?
I was playing the file with Realplayer on a laptop, in case that makes any difference... pressing the 'fast forward' button on Rp had no effect, though you could drag the little position indicator along to move forwards in the album...
Certainly not a 'dance' album ...! - though it's quite possible that whoever mp3'd it just set it to rip the whole thing from vinyl....
The best way to get to grips with all this is to continue as you are - hands on. You'll soon be 'down with the kids'... ;-)
There are a million and one web pages about MP3, all with a different slant, which I guess is part of the problem when finding answers to your own questions. However have a glance over the MP3 Wikipedia article -
formatting link
- loads in it that's far too deep for now (or ever) but possibly some other bits you might pick up on which could be useful if only for some further background knowledge.
Actually, perhaps I should've been a bit clearer here. An MP3 file could have multiple 'songs' in it but there'd be no 'digital divider' (for want of a better phrase) to identify them as individual tracks - each would just flow one to another (with possibly some silence between them depending on the source). Hence, to skip to the next song would require you to 'fast forward' until you reached the correct point in time.
No doubt someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think there are digital dividers on CDs either. There's some sort of digital index, presumably at the start of the CD, which indicates to the player how far in each "track" starts, and that's it AFAIK - nothing "between" the tracks because there is no "between". The silence that you usually (don't) hear is actually part of each "track".
You're actually right here - I only know about the cd thing because I biult a piece of kit to an Elektor design that played the tracks on a cd one at a time - and waited for a trigger befreo playing the next one...
(application was to play hymns one-at-a-time in a Church - but that's not important right now)
The TOC (= table of contents) on a CD gives the information about 'start' and 'end' for each of the tracks on the CD.... but the data recorded on the CD is actually just that.... data....
'Quiet bits' as in the grooves between tracks on an LP are just 'bits of silence' encoded into the CD....
It seems that this TOC is what's missing from mp3 'album' files... unless I've misunderstood it again.... ?
Found a Creative Zen V today in the local town - and had great fun filling it up with music from various sources. Just need to place the order with Maplin for a couple of modular amplifiers and then we can play music in the car again ... great ! Apparently it'll also tuen analogue music into mp3 - haven't had the chance to test this yet....
This'll do until we get a 'proper' mp3/cd/usb/sd 'head' sorted for the car.....
Does anybody know if this unit can _play_ mp3 while it's charging from a USB conection. Doesn't seem to work at the moment - but maybe that's because it's a real usb connection from a PC - rather than one that just supplies charging volts ?
Well, yes, but then this is the trouble with keeping things simple to demonstrate the point in hand - there are always holes to be found! To put it a more accurate way then, an mp3 file does not have any sort of index and hence the contents are for all intents and purposes treated as one. The closest thing to such an index would be a 'playlist' but that is only able to refer to seperate tracks/files as opposed to positions within a single track/file.
If you read up on P and Q channels in the context of digital audio, you will find there most certainly *is* a digital code that indicates the presence, or otherwise, of audio tracks, including the pauses in between each track. You are right in that a basic audio disk is one continuous spiral of data, though. Clever shenanigans such as multi- sessions, track-at-once recording and truly random access are largely confined to cd-roms.
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