Casette Tape vs Online Music continuous play

[Dan Espen]

Used to be hearing aids weren't covered by insurance.

Mine actually were and I see more and more insurers advertising coverage.

I got a pair that fit entirely in the ear. No one even knows when I have them on.

Yep, it's a process.

I've had tinnitus a long time. I'm lucky it just sounds like crickets. I don't notice it much now.

A hearing aid that helps? My first thought was that it's a scam. They apparently work by making a masking sound. Still sounds like a scam. I search for it on Google and all I see are ads for them. The ads cite ground breaking research. Funny I don't see the research. I'm going out on a limb and calling it a scam.

I paid about 6x the numbers you cite above. Or I should say my plan paid.

I heard crickets for years. I started to wonder why it would be snowing outside but I was hearing crickets.

...

Here are the numbers from my backup USB stick. The directory is named "mp3" but it's all flac:

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sdc1 233G 131G 102G 57% /back-mp3

So, a total of 130 Gig on a 256 Gig stick. Looks like 6310 tracks.

find /back-mp3 -type f | wc -l

6310

I've mentioned tinnitus to the doctors but I haven't tried to get any treatment. Most of the sites say there isn't any, and it doesn't bother me much.

Yes I can imagine how bad it could be. Running water and crickets are sounds you might have to live with in nature. Like I said, it doesn't bother me much. A whine or ringing sounds could be a lot worse.

[gfretwell]

These transmitters are very low power so any adjacent signal will step on them. It isn't a huge deal but if you are anything close to a purist the occasional signal dropout might make you nuts. It is more apparent if you travel around where you get closer to other radio markets. I am also not sure how good the bandwidth is. I know lots of people who won't even use 320KB MP3s because they think the sound is still not up to snuff. I call them "Audiphools" because they also claim to hear the oxygen in their speaker wires. They do make scammers rich.

[gfretwell]

The volume will work since you are still using the final amp of the radio but if you have a player plugged into the aux port you are not going to control that player from the steering wheel (change tracks etc). If the radio can read USB, it is the player so the controls should work.

This is based on dozens of rental cars over the years.

[gfretwell]

If I am recording I use WAV for my master but these days I usually just buy the MP3s. (Amazon or maybe the artist directly) The Napster guy was right. When they make music easier to buy than steal, people will buy it. I still do have plenty that was taken from the ALT.BINARY.SOUNDS.MP3... newsgroups before that was true. Usenet was the main reason why I was an early adopter of broadband (2000 or so). At 50 kbs it takes 10 minutes per song to download and most MP3s on usenet in those days were 128kbs.

[gfretwell]

The sound on TV really sucks. My PC in the living room has the line out from the TV connected to line in and even on the primary HD (broadcast) channels the sound is nothing to write home about. I recorded a few songs from the Grammys for my wife and on a good sound system they sucked. When I put them in the spectrum analyser of Sound Forge, you could see the heavy compression. Older shows like Gunsmoke and L&O were even worse. This is FM radio quality at best. We ended up just buying the ones she really liked from Amazon in

320kbs MP3. Quick, easy and only a buck.

[Jim Joyce]

On the 2002 Highlander that I mentioned, it also had a CD player built in, but apparently that radio supported an external 6-disc CD changer and that's why it had the port on the back.

I remember being ready to dismiss USB options that used the CD changer port because I didn't have a CD changer, but then I read on the ToyotaNation forum that most Toyota factory radios from that era had the changer port. It was just something that Toyota included, even on cars that never had a changer option. I thought that was interesting, so I popped my radio out and sure enough, there it was.

IMDB is having a hard time finding that movie. Do you know if it was released?

[Jim Joyce]

For non-critical navigation, we use the Nav system in the car. It's convenient because it turns down the music in the front speakers when it wants to say something, while leaving the rear speakers as they were. It's very handy because it's always available at the push of a button.

Our embedded Nav system has two big flaws, however. First, the map is a static snapshot in time. We bought the car new in 2016, but the map doesn't have things that were built in 2009, for example. I've asked on the forums and people with newer maps have the same complaint - too many missing items. Google Maps, OTOH, about two days after an IKEA was built near my old neighborhood, Google Maps knew it was there and knew of all the new streets they had put in to get there. They might have known even sooner, but I didn't think to check.

Second, the embedded system has no real-time component, so it has no way of telling us about accidents ahead, construction zones, radar traps, detours, etc. For that reason alone, when we really care about navigation we use Google Maps. It solves all of those problems. The only downside is that it doesn't turn down the volume on the car stereo when it speaks, but that's minor.

When you're on a road trip and you suddenly see a string of cars taking an odd exit, it's pretty likely that there's a traffic slowdown ahead and Google Maps is recommending a detour. It even tells you how much time you'll save by taking the detour.

Did you see the story back in February of this year where a man put 99 phones in a kid's wagon and slowly pulled it down a deserted street? On Google Maps, they turned the street red to show a traffic problem. Pretty funny.

says he caused fake traffic jams on Google Maps with 99 phones

[Dan Espen]

Of course it was released. It was one of the follow on movies to the French Connection:

My wife was so exicted to hang out with Roy Scheider and the rest of the cast. I was the only one home when the scout came by and I told him sure. I told my wife they'd be coming by, she didn't believe me. They were just towing cars off the block when I left for work.

I'm not sure why people go gaga when they meet famous people, but my whole household was walking on air when I came back home.

My house was used in the "climactic scene" just outside co-op city. They mention Erskine Place which is the street that they built right through the middle of the house.

When I first lived there we would swim in an Eastchester River tributart right across the street where they show the parking garage.

I got $150 for letting them use my house. I took their first offer. My wife tells me all the neighbors attempted to extort the movie company for money for using the streets. They didn't get anything.

[invalid unparseable]

On Fri, 21 Aug 2020 00:52:42 -0400, micky posted for all of us to digest...

I have also found that true. NBC & Law & Order are especially hard to hear because of the background effects. Why they do it I have no idea, it sure doesn't add anything to mood... Sometimes I just use closed caption but that is distracting from the video.

[micky]

They built a street through the middle of your house?

The movie pretends there's a garage or google maps says there is one.

Did you move away becaue of the street through the middle of your house?

If the street had guttters and sidewalks and manholes, that does seem low. Did they remove the street when they left? Do any damage?

[invalid unparseable]

On Fri, 21 Aug 2020 12:26:02 -0500, Jim Joyce posted for all of us to digest...

I use Waze on my phone. Real time traffic, because it's reported real time by the users. Need a system with Apple or Android. It does use data on your plan but very little. I have found that OE nav is outdated or inept from the day the vehicle was made from outdated data. Then *if* they come out with an update the manufactures want to charge you for what is essentially outdated data. My one dealer glommed me on to it. It cuts the music off when giving directions. As I understand it you can use it through Bluetooth thru Apple but not Android where a cable is required.

[micky]

When I had a little tv in the bedroom, I had an external speaker that improved the sound a lot. In the kitchen it was supposed to be a temporary setup, but it's turned into years.

L&O was the first tv show to bother me, because the music was too loud for me to hear. I don't understand how someone with better hearing could hear either. L&O ran from 1990 to 2010. Sometime during the second half of that I noticed the music could be too loud

I think a lot of their problem is from their transferring back and forth. How else could a whole syllable be missing?

And this is over the air tv. There is no compression for the transmission because a simple tv has no way to decompress. Unlike a cable box.

Did they compress it when they stored the show from 2000 to now?

Buying what ones? What cost only a buck?

[Jim Joyce]

I wonder if that house was the motivation for the Talking Heads song, with lyrics that begin with "Our house, in the middle of our street."

[micky]

That oxygen thing is nonsense. It's the helium that makes the sound good.

[Jim Joyce]

I've tried Waze a few times but it's not polished like Google Maps, so I've gone back to Google.

One of my vehicles has an in-dash touch screen display, but no nav system. With that car I can use an app on my phone called Scout GPS Link. The phone does all of the Nav work but the results are displayed on the touch screen. Even that is too much trouble, though, so I go back to Google Maps in that car, as well.

[Jim Joyce]

He's talking about buying individual songs from Amazon for $1 each, in mp3 format.

[Dan Espen]

It's the speakers on TVs that suck. When they went digital the sound signal went digital too so it has none of the distortion that's common with analog signals.

Put a sound bar on your TV and the sound will be excellent. I think the problem is they can't build decent speakers into the flat TV profile.

I often use my Kindle to go over the WIFI network to the music on my Linux PC. Then have the Kindle make a bluetooth connection to the sound bar. Excellent sound.

[gfretwell]

My 97 Honda had a DIN port for a changer too but nobody on the Honda user's group had successfully hacked it for an MP3 player before I yanked it out and put the Blaupunkt in. Evidently there was some sort of data handshake before it enabled the audio in. I suppose eventually that got cracked but not before I gave up.

[gfretwell]

I am not shocked you couldn't find it but it is the top hit on a search.

[Jim Joyce]

Like I mentioned earlier, I was misspelling the title. I searched IMDB for "7 Ups". My mistake.