Crippling First World Problems

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Wheels
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Crippling First World Problems

Postby Wheels » Wed Nov 23, 2016 1:18 am

I'm sorry to start a thread and then probably end it with something so difficult to one up, but here you go.

[20:51] <@Defenestration> So, I found the catch in my new car.
[20:51] <@Defenestration> And it's infuriating.
[20:51] <Alex> <Six> It constantly calls me a nerd.
[20:51] <@Defenestration> So, it has an mp3 player and a USB port right
[20:51] <@Defenestration> So I went out of my way and got an stick that fits everything (260GB) and shoved it in
[20:52] <@Defenestration> and noticed something odd after awhile.
[20:52] <@Defenestration> It wouldn't play albums in the right order.
[20:52] <@Defenestration> It was random, but consistently the same order if I asked it to play the same album again.
[20:52] <Alex> Yeah, my mom's car's mp3 player is like that too
[20:52] <@Defenestration> At first, I assumed that it was a sorting issue.
[20:52] <Alex> That's why I just use the aux port in the radio deck and play music off my phone
[20:53] <@Defenestration> I checked the file names on my phone, and no, it was correct. Even if I stripped the file name down to a number, it would still do the same thing and ignore the track number.
[20:53] <@Defenestration> Then I scrapped that because I noticed something even stranger
[20:54] <@Defenestration> If I asked it to play every track, it did not start with A Day to Remember's albums and then working its way down, but instead played these songs in this order:
[20:54] <@Defenestration> Queen - '39, Third Eye Blind - 10 Days Late, Tool - 10,000 Days, Megadeth - 13
[20:54] <Tremolo> So the songs with number titles are confusing it
[20:54] <@Defenestration> NO
[20:54] <@Defenestration> IT'S WORSE
[20:54] <@Defenestration> IT PLAYS TRACKS ALPHABETICALLY BY THE TITLE ID3 TAG
[20:55] <@Defenestration> NOTHING ELSE
[20:55] <@Defenestration> LITERALLY NOTHING ELSE MATTERS
[20:55] <@Defenestration> STRIP THE TITLES AND IT PLAYS BY FILE NAME
[20:55] <@Defenestration> THAT'S ACTUALLY NOT ACCEPTABLE BRO
[20:55] <@Defenestration> I WANT TO PUNCH A FORD PROGRAMMER
[20:55] <Tremolo> Clearly you need to go over every title ID3 tag and number them
[20:55] <@Defenestration> No, FUCK THAT!
[20:55] <@Defenestration> I'm not ruining my meticulous sorting!
[20:56] <Tremolo> Speaking as somebody who drove a car with a barely functioning tape deck for nearly a decade, I say suck it up :V
[20:56] <Alex> Yup, that's why I just use the auxiliary port and a 3.5mm cable
[20:56] <Alex> I don't have time to fuck with my radio for longer than 10 seconds
[20:56] <@Defenestration> but Alex, it has VOICE CONTROL
[20:56] <Alex> Meh
[20:57] <@Defenestration> if it worked, I could be "Car, play There is Nothing Left to Lose" and be jamming to Foo Fighters without fucking with anything if it DID work!
[20:57] <Alex> I don't trust voice control on anything, personally
[20:57] <@Defenestration> IT's shockingly consistent in this car :(
[20:57] <Tremolo> I remember when Lyrai used to post in here using voice to text software
[20:58] <@Defenestration> The only strange idiosyncracy is that if the song is in all caps, you have to spell it out.
[20:58] <@Defenestration> Fuck, I said "Megalovania" assuming that I would get something hilarious and it did it right!
[20:58] <Alex> I just play my music on shuffle all the time
[20:59] <@Defenestration> My ideal play method is album shuffle, but is rarely supported on players.
[20:59] <Alex> Although I am getting stupid close to taking basically every version of Wily Castle 1 from Megaman 2 off my phone because I am sick of the song
[20:59] <Alex> Whereas shuffle pulls it up a lot
[21:00] <@Defenestration> Of course, there is a fix
[21:00] <@Defenestration> but it will be really annoying to shop for and probably prohibitively expensive
[21:01] <@Defenestration> An mp3 player with the capacity to actually hold my whole library
[21:01] <@Defenestration> that can sync via bluetooth
[21:01] <Tremolo> How far is your commute that you need literally every song you own in the car with you?
[21:02] <@Defenestration> I like setting something up and being done.
[21:02] <@Defenestration> I don't mind updating every 4 months or so with new batches of music, but I don't want to pick and put things on and off every day when I hear them once
Una salus victis nullam sperare salutem

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Wheels
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Re: Crippling First World Problems

Postby Wheels » Wed Nov 23, 2016 1:19 am

This post reserved for obligatory link to
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Thad
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Re: Crippling First World Problems

Postby Thad » Wed Nov 23, 2016 1:44 am

Yeah, fifteen years after the original iPod, how the fuck is it that music cataloging is still such a huge damn mess?

I just bought a 128GB USB OTG stick so I could get all my songs on my phone (because of course phones don't come with SD card slots anymore, they just call internal storage "sdcard"). I haven't been able to find a music player that will actually let me tell them what directory to use for music, except Kodi, which sucks my battery like crazy when I use it to play FLACs. (I of course can't simultaneously have a charging cable and a memory stick plugged into my USB slot.)

This being more trouble than it's worth, I bought a FiiO X1. I'm impressed as hell with the pack-ins (it not only comes with a rubberized case and screen protectors, it comes with a screen protector already applied; I got my bathroom all clean-roomed up for nothin' getting ready to apply one because I didn't realize the two extras were extras and there was already a screen protector on there) but I haven't actually had a chance to use it yet, because I don't have any 128GB microSD cards. I found a great deal on some on Amazon the other night, they were going for eight bucks a pop, so I put 3 in my cart, but it must have been either a mistake or a flash sale that expired, because when I went to check my cart later they were gone, and when I looked them up again they were up to $35.

And I'm pretty damn sure there are going to be some memory card sales in the next week, so I'm going to wait.

At one point I was thinking of just building my own portable music player with a Raspberry Pi or a BeagleBone, until I did enough research to realize how impractically expensive that would be and how hard it is to actually get one of those running off a battery.

Meanwhile, I'm slowly working my way through my music collection (and whatever portion of my wife's is stored on our shared HTPC) and fixing all the metadata so that, for example, my Frank Zappa collection is not split up across "Frank Zappa", "Zappa, Frank", "Frank Zappa and the Mothers", "Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention", and, inexplicably, "Frank Zappa l" (that is a lowercase L and I have no idea what it was doing there).

Which is still probably better than whatever son of a bitch decided Hey, ''Weird Al'' Yankovic, let's see, that's spelled apostrophe, apostrophe, W...

Which is still less baffling than my wife's Adele album which, when ripped, wound up numbering the artist instead of just the tracks. Like, track 1's metadata said the artist was "01 Adele", track 2 said "02 Adele", and so on.

Anyway. My point here, really, is, how the fuck is "just let me browse my music collection by directory" too much to ask?

(I mean, yes, it's Apple's fault, obviously, but other devs have studiously avoided doing most of the other stupid shit that the iPod did/iPhone does, such as having to use a proprietary goddamn media library program just to copy files to your device. I don't have to use a dumb, unwieldy system to copy songs to my phone, so why do I have to use one to play them once they're there? I know they're arranged in a damn directory/file hierarchy; why won't you let me browse it?)

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Wheels
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Re: Crippling First World Problems

Postby Wheels » Wed Nov 23, 2016 1:58 am

You seem to be unaware Thad, so as a OCD file organizer that has refused to add music to my main storage or playlists until it is tagged correctly since 2006, I strongly recommend MusicBrainz Picard: https://picard.musicbrainz.org/
The software checks an extensive online database for results to autofill if you don't care that much, or even if you're a OCD organization freak like myself it's definitely the best way I've found in years for mass id3 tag sorting and the most space efficient image encoding for the album art preview.
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Z%rø
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Re: Crippling First World Problems

Postby Z%rø » Wed Nov 23, 2016 2:23 pm

Funny enough, I feel like Zune had this problem solved a while ago. (Yes, I used a Zune)

It had multiple ways to list tracks: Artist, Playlist, Song, Album, Genre.
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Re: Crippling First World Problems

Postby IGNORE ME » Wed Nov 23, 2016 2:39 pm

From all I've ever heard the Zune was a pretty damned good product line in every respect except for its riding the height of Microsoft's image problem.

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Re: Crippling First World Problems

Postby Mongrel » Wed Nov 23, 2016 3:40 pm

Only mp3 player I ever owned was a Zune. Eventually the memory was getting really badly corrupted, so I ditched it.

I could put music on my phone, but I've decided I don't really want portable music anymore.
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Re: Crippling First World Problems

Postby IGNORE ME » Wed Nov 23, 2016 4:00 pm

Like almost all other media now, I've just got a subscription that lets me stream music and not keep or own it in any way which I'm actually totally fine with because now that I don't have to do it any more, I'm realizing that keeping a personal library of (albums/movies/books/games) was always a pain in the ass.

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Re: Crippling First World Problems

Postby Mongrel » Wed Nov 23, 2016 4:16 pm

I don't think I will ever trust those to not shut down/be sold/change policy/etc. So I always keep my music on my own drives. Plus I have a ton of weird or obscure/old music that are not going to be on any streaming service (or even if there is one, it's not going to have all my music).
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Re: Crippling First World Problems

Postby Mazian » Wed Nov 23, 2016 11:53 pm

Defenestration wrote:You seem to be unaware Thad, so as a OCD file organizer that has refused to add music to my main storage or playlists until it is tagged correctly since 2006


You may also be in the target demographic for beets, the lovely software that does all my music-tagging heavy lifting and ongoing collection management.

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Re: Crippling First World Problems

Postby Mothra » Thu Nov 24, 2016 3:55 am

I use an old Zune to listen to podcasts on my commute, and holy shit is it bad at letting you easily navigate long lists by the same artist.

You can "play new," which starts only unplayed files in order, but you can't, say, pick a spot on a massive list of 85 episodes of the same podcast and have it continue to play from there. It'll just stop, which requires you to fumble around with the Zune while you drive, trying to navigate back to the same folder so you can scroll down the list and try to find eject episode. I'm not crazy about it.

I do like how it uses ALL metadata in the file for organizing music into a half-dozen categories.

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Re: Crippling First World Problems

Postby beatbandito » Thu Nov 24, 2016 8:02 am

Mothra wrote:I use an old Zune to listen to podcasts on my commute, and holy shit is it bad at letting you easily navigate long lists by the same artist.

You can "play new," which starts only unplayed files in order, but you can't, say, pick a spot on a massive list of 85 episodes of the same podcast and have it continue to play from there. It'll just stop, which requires you to fumble around with the Zune while you drive, trying to navigate back to the same folder so you can scroll down the list and try to find eject episode. I'm not crazy about it.

I do like how it uses ALL metadata in the file for organizing music into a half-dozen categories.

Funnily enough, I use a Zune HD (the skinny touch one) for podcasts specifically because I can just choose whatever episode and listen from there. As opposed to my usual car ipod which will straight-up remove any episode I've listened to, and make me select each manually.
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Thad
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Re: Crippling First World Problems

Postby Thad » Fri Nov 25, 2016 1:31 am

Mazian wrote:
Defenestration wrote:You seem to be unaware Thad, so as a OCD file organizer that has refused to add music to my main storage or playlists until it is tagged correctly since 2006


You may also be in the target demographic for beets, the lovely software that does all my music-tagging heavy lifting and ongoing collection management.


Hm, I'll look into it. So far I've just been going through my collection looking for stupid/duplicate artist listings and then manually bulk-editing songs with kid3.

Most of my songs were ripped using Konqueror, which has the rather amazing feature of browsing a music CD as showing a directory for each format (OGG, FLAC, etc.) and allowing you to drag-and-drop files from the specified format's directory to local storage. But yeah it's not great at tagging them (and doesn't add album art at all).

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Bal
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Re: Crippling First World Problems

Postby Bal » Fri Nov 25, 2016 2:43 am

For the record, I have the identical system in my car, but I use the iPod Classic for music, and in that set up in works exactly how you'd want it to because it just lets the iPod handle it after the initial query.

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Re: Crippling First World Problems

Postby Silversong » Wed Nov 30, 2016 11:25 am

My car has a cd player, it plays files in whichever order I burned them to a cd. It's a slight downgrade from when I had a tape deck, and could use one of those adapter thingies to play from my portable mp3 cd player (which had a sweet startup screen where I had SILVERSONG written in this dorky, starry font).

I think I'm saved from crippling first world problems, by still being in the early-00's of technology. Someone gave me an ipod, but I haven't figured out how to use it yet.

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Re: Crippling First World Problems

Postby Grath » Wed Nov 30, 2016 2:45 pm

My car just connects to my phone, which switches into a driving-friendly large-icons-voice-commands-and-no-typing-allowed interface when it hooks up to the car's bluetooth.

My crippling first world problem: Sometimes not all of my wifi-connected lightbulbs are getting good signal so occasionally one of them doesn't turn on with the rest. Also, occasionally the app that's set up to turn them on when I come home doesn't trigger correctly so I end up turning them on via voice command instead of them just already being on.

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Re: Crippling First World Problems

Postby Caithness » Thu Dec 01, 2016 12:25 pm

I totaled my 2006 Prius. Now I've got a 1997 Celica convertible with after-market Bluetooth, a 2010 Prius with an aux port, and a $3000 annual insurance bill.

I started listening to podcasts for the first time.

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Re: Crippling First World Problems

Postby Mongrel » Thu Dec 01, 2016 9:58 pm

Just about threw my phone at a wall today.

So apparently the Blackberry browser has started blocking websites with certs which are through less-reliable providers or which have small issues which present a potential security risk. While in theory this is a good idea, in practise any number of perfectly safe and valid sites are blocked. Not only are the blocked, but you are not allowed to allow them as an exception or acknowledge the risks to navigate to them manually in any way. They are off limits, period, full stop and there is effectively no workaround.

This is THE cardinal sin for me with computers. Nothing is more fatal to a digital device in my hands than the computer telling me that it's in charge and not me. Huh-uh, we ain't at the robot overlords just yet buddy. Holy shit am I ever angry about this right now [joke about Parkinson's, or KC & the Sunshine Band, or something].

Fucking CANADIANS. FUCK THEM in the fucking EARHOLE.

EDIT: The square brackets thing is a reference to the current meme where people are jokingly posting that they're "Literally shaking with rage" at something trivial. But in this case I actually am REAL FUCKIN MAD.
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Re: Crippling First World Problems

Postby Mongrel » Thu Dec 01, 2016 10:08 pm

I'd say something like "Well! I'm never buying a Blackberry again!"

But uh, I don't really think there was much of a danger of that anyway.

Stupid Canadians.
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Thad
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Re: Crippling First World Problems

Postby Thad » Mon Dec 12, 2016 12:44 pm

One of the fun(?) things about going through your music library and resolving redundancies is looking up whether or not the word "the" is actually part of a band's name. (Remember: The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads.)

It turns out there IS a "the" in The Smashing Pumpkins, but NOT in Red Hot Chili Peppers. (Unless you're talking about their first album, which IS annoyingly / confusingly titled The Red Hot Chili Peppers.)

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