Twelve Black Code Monkeys

Back to Content ConsumptionI’ve been struggling recently with keeping up with audio content. In general I prefer audio to text because, as I mentioned, I’m a slow reader and I can listen when I otherwise wouldn’t be able to read – such as exercising, driving, cooking, doing housework, etc. I can also speed up much of what I listen to via a feature on my Ipod. I can divide my listening into two main categories – talk and music. Within Music, I can listen to my collection of CD’s I’ve burned to MP3, or I can listen to a much larger collection of tracks from my Launchcast internet radio account. Within talk, I listen to podcasts, to audio books, and to traditional radio shows, primarily NPR. The biggest technical problem is that there are too many different formats which may or may not work on a single device or program. My burned music is in MP3, Launchcast streams Windows Media, and my Audio books are in a proprietary format that Audible.com uses. While podcasts are usually initially in MP3’s, I convert them to AAC in order to take advantage of the ability to have them play at faster speeds on my iPod.

All these different formats cause headaches, but are not insurmountable, at least on a computer. iTunes will play most of these, although it won’t do the Launchcast radio and I can’t install it at work. If I want portability, I can play MP3’s and Audio Books on my Treo 650, but no AAC files nor streaming Windows Media or Realmedia which would allow me to listen to Launchcast and NPR segments of my choosing – which I’ll elaborate a bit on below.

When it comes to NPR, or any radio show for that matter, there are ways of making it more portable than you initially would think, but it is not elegant or easy. I can listen to NPR shows on my Treo, but they are just streams from live broadcasts, not specific selections that I make from the archives. So what? Well, for one, why even bother with a Treo and just use a radio? Exactly my point! A radio is for live broadcasts, but the whole power behind digital devices like the Treo, the TiVo, the iPod, etc., is that they enable you to have a much greater say in the matter of when and how you watch or listen to something.

I did find a program for my PC that allows me to “timeshift” radio like a TiVo does TV and used it for a while to record numerous NPR shows which I then synced with my iPod. This software, called Replay Radio, does really seem to be useful, but it just wasn’t fleshed out enough for me. Maybe part of this had to do with the fact that I was telling it to record 9 hours of content a day! Ok, so maybe I was overdoing it a bit. But still, all this writing files to the hard drive and then optionally converting them to AAC was making my computer sluggish as well as taking up lots of storage space. Sure I could have archived some of this to CD or DVD, but that means yet more time spent managing files! Speaking of which, just managing the process could take a while. It’s not nearly as easy as recording and managing shows on TiVo. While there are a few hundred channels on TV, there are thousands upon thousands of potential radio stations, so actually compiling an accurate programming list of even a fraction of these is a monumental task! Still, if you need to timeshift radio programming, this is definitely a way to do it, just realize that depending on how much you record, the process of keeping everything straight (not to mention actually listening to the stuff!), may take up a considerable amout of time.

Not long ago, I discovered that at least some of the shows I was listening to from NPR have RSS feeds. The feeds present each report within a show like Morning Edition as a separate entry in the feed, so that you don’t have to listen to the entire program to find what you are interested in. You simply pick the ones in your newsreader that are of interest, and link to a page on NPR’s site which has a button to listen to a streaming version of just that segment. I can’t do this when I’m away from a computer as my Treo cannot download these streams or play these streams, but at least it cuts way down on the amount of time that I would have had to spend listening because… I can filter! Ideally I would like to see a way to listen to these on my Treo and/or the iPod, but this would either entail NPR producing streaming MP3’s in addition to the other formats, or to provide actual files to download ala podcasting (they do this already for On The Media, Future Tense, and Morning Stories, but that’s it), neither of which I think they will be doing any time soon. But hey, you never know!

Speaking of podcasting, there isn’t much of an issue here. I can transfer podcasts at home onto my iPod (or theoretically by Treo) and listen to them anywhere. If I haven’t been able to do this for a while, I can still listen to them by just downloading and playing them on any computer connected to the internet, or even theoretically doing this with my Treo, although personally I haven’t tried yet because the GPRS download speeds I can currently via T-Mobile are too slow.

The other main issue that I was grappling with recently was how to make all this audio accessible to me at home without a) having to be right next to the computer, or b) having constantly be walking around with headphones on. I’d seen these streaming media servers at some computer stores that intrigued me. These allow you to transmit audio files on your computer, or even internet radio to this device that you hook to the audio input jacks of your stereo. The communication between the device and your computer is via Wifi. Voila, you have an instant serious listening station to play your music and/or spoken word audio no matter where your computer is in the house related to your stereo.

So I went out and bought the SMC EZ-Stream Wireless Audio Adapter (SMCWAA-B). I was unable to determine prior to buying it whether it would play Launchcast radio, but I thought I’d give it a shot. The description on the box says that it’s compatible with Rhapsody, but I don’t use that. So, I bought it, brought it home and started struggling first with simply connecting it to my wifi network. I use WEP security to encrypt my network, and the user interface on the device was not very straightforward, so all this took a while to get working. The software that comes with the unit makes you install Musicmatch Jukebox in order to play MP3’s or WMA’s. Despite doing this, the unit couldn’t find some sample tracks I added to the Musicmatch library. Luckily, I found that one can download third-party server software, most notably TwonkyVision, which can greatly expland the initial capabilities of the software your device comes with. Initially TwonkyVision didn’t work either, so I had the idea to turn off my TiVo Home Networking Option, and all of a sudden success! Perhaps this was my problem with the original software not working as well. More importantly, though, TwonkyVision gave me access to my preferred audio software on my PC: iTunes. It was able to use my iTunes library to create basically a mirror of the same hierarchical menus that are on my iPod to navigate through tracks based on album, artist, genre, etc.. The only problem was that it would still only play MP3’s and WMA’s. No AAC’s, and no Audible files. Researching this further I found that the only media server that can currently play AAC’s is Airport Express with AirTunes. This would have been the perfect solution for me, except that of course this doesn’t play Launchcast radio! Argh!

And there’s the rub. It seems like no streaming media server out there is perfect in that it will let you stream any type of file or internet stream to your stereo. Certainly I don’t understand the intricate technical details in back of these technologies, but to me it seemed a fairly obvious product would be one that simply took the analog output of your computer’s sound card, converted it to digital bits, transmitted over a wifi connection to a device that could decode this into analog again to be output to the stereo. The media servers that exist allow for actual browsing through your music collection with a remote control and a visual textual display. This of course requires the device understand file types, directory structures, etc. What about simply a type of audio “modem,” if you will, that converts an analog stream into digital and then back into analog? It wouldn’t have the interactive ability to control things through the stereo – you would have to do that controlling on the PC side - but as far as I’m concerned, that’s icing.

I posited this question to the TwonkyVision forums over media-server.com as they seemed to have a lot of knowledgeable users and the main relevant suggestion I got was for a product that’s pretty different, but one that I decided to try out anyway.

The Radio Shack 2.4GHz Audio/Video Signal Sender/Receiver is something that looks like it was designed to share the signal coming from a dvd player, CD player, VCR, satellite receiver, etc., among stereos and/or TV’s in different rooms in a house. Its 2.4 GHz range seems to indicate some Wifi compatibility, but really it has nothing to do with Wifi, which is completely digital. Instead it is just an FM modulation transmitter/receiver that works on the same frequency as Wifi signals. You can only do so much research on the web, although it really depends on the device and who sells it. Radio Shack does not offer a way to review products on their site. The cost of it was low enough ($100) that I could just go buy it myself and if it didn’t meet my requirements, I could return it. So that’s what I did. Here are my impressions so far:

The device is actually two devices, a sender part and a receiver part. Both of these not only have to be plugged into a power outlet, but also have to be plugged into your computer and/or stereo. So what is in one way a “wireless” solution becomes one which also adds a lot more wires! The instructions are pretty sparse, as you can see (Radio Shack no longer has the manual available online), but there’s really not a whole lot to these things. You can operate them on four different “channels” and they not only have RCA stereo audio jacks, but also an RCA and coax video jack. I suppose with the video I could transmit stuff from my PC monitor if I had a video out on it. Alas, it is a non-multimedia laptop, so no such video out is available.

I was initially concerned that there would be interference between these and the Wifi I have in my house, but that seems to not be an issue. Whether this has to do with the different channels, I don’t know, but I just used the default channels for the device and there’s no interference like when I used to have a portable phone that worked on the 2.4 GHz frequency that would always toss all the computers off the network whenever we used it!

While there was no interference from Wifi, there was a lot of interference from other radio frequency sources. For example any time my cell phone rang, there was tons of crackling and other distortion, although of course the degree depended on how close the phone was to the transmitter or receiver. When the microwave was on there was some as well. As far as sound quality is concerned, it’s not bad, but with FM-Modulation, you are only getting FM-quality sound. This probably will not matter when it comes to spoken word, but for music, you can definitely tell the difference. The dynamic range is truncated so that you aren’t hearing the sounds that are on the extreme ends of bass and treble. Probably mostly bass because when I play music through these it sounds a bit tinny. I have to really play with equalization, but I know that even when I set loudness on and add additional bass and/or treble, that I’m simply stretching the information, not adding back in sound that’s been chopped off due to the smaller dynamic range. And I’m not an audiophile by any means. I can only imagine how horrible FM sounds to all those with more sensitive ears than mine!

Still, having a set of these sender/receivers is still the main option that fits at this point. I suppose if I got over my love of Launchcast, I could move on to the Airport Express, but as I’ve explained in the past, there is something inherently great about Launchcast that I so far have not found on any other internet radio platform – the ability for it to learn exactly what you like based on your own ratings and those of people who rate music similar to you – a kind of big social network based on music ratings that allows you to keep hearing new music that fits your taste even though you may have never known such music existed!

Another usage that the Radio Shack units allow for that I would not be able to get with a media server is something like Atmosphere, a background sound generator which I’ve talked about before which I really like. Of course I could record Atmosphere to an MP3 file and just play that over and over, but that would do away with some of the inherent randomness that Atmosphere has built into it.

As you can see, there are lots of options out there for those who want to listen to music and spoken word audio, and for many people one of those options will provide everything they want or need. Being somewhat picky about this stuff, of course, hurts the chances of this happening. We’re obviously still in the infancy of digital music when it comes to distribution mechanisms, portability, and compatibility. It may not seem like that with the iPod being around for close to five years and Internet Radio close to ten, but eventually there will need to be some consolidation in terms of formats and technologies or else many of us will have to continue to trudge along with multiple devices, multiple programs, tweaks and workarounds in order to enable us to play everything we want in every way we want, and any place we want.

Update: I’ve recently learned that Launchcast IS partnering with an equipment manufacturer to stream their content to stereos wirelessly. Philips Stremium brand devices apparently will do this. They are, however, very pricey compared to other media servers and I’m not quite sure why. The other problem is that currently Launchcast support is only for its genre stations and not for a user’s custom station. This really defeats the whole purpose. Apparently there are plans to get the custom station support working but I could not get any kind of timeline out of Launchcast folks. Without this support, I can’t see considering such a device, and even with this support I’m hard-pressed to spend such a huge premium just to get somewhat better quality over my current solutions. Of course these devices let you stream video as well, so if you have lots of digital video that you download off the net or create with your camcorder, this will allow you to transmit this stuff to your TV, but then you can do this with devices that cost a fraction of the price…

I’ve talked about the difficulty of staying on top of all the content I want to consume these days. This is one of the biggest double-edged swords to the net. You have so many choices that it’s hard to keep up with even a fraction of them. One might ask why you need to “keep up” at all, but perhaps that’s only my obsessive-compulsive streak playing out. In fact, that is part of the reason I haven’t posted for a while. This week I’ve been trying hard not to keep up, but just to get through some of the backlog that seems to build up in record time. I could seriously spend every waking second reading, listening, and watching all this stuff, but, although this is obvious, one really needs to create filters to pick and choose because there’s way to much produced in a single day for one individual to consume probably in an entire lifetime.

(A quick side note. I am going to try for the first time to divide this particular entry into a few different “parts” which will actually be separate entries. A fellow blogger has suggested this mainly because my entries tend to me so long and this will allow people to consume them in smaller and easier “gulps.” Let me know how this works for you. If it doesn’t, I won’t do it again.)
Content types:

“Content” is one of those way overused words, but I don’t know of anything else to describe the general conglomeration of all the different types of information you can consume. I can clearly categorize this content into three main forms: audio, video, and text:

Text: text for me is mainly about blogs and rss feeds. I use Bloglines to “keep up” because it lets you hold onto an historical record of what you’ve read or haven’t read. This way, I can come back after a week of not reading Boing Boing and have 200 old entries stacked up instead of just getting the last 30. Keeping up is still a struggle, but it’s mostly just a matter of time. As far as the portability issue, I can access my Bloglines account from any computer connected to the net, and even on my Treo 650, although its mobile interface has some inherent flaws that cripple its usefulness for me. There are other readers specifically built for handheld devices, but none yet with the same functionality I describe above - Bloglines seems to have an exclusive on both for portable and non-portable solutions. What about books, you ask? I’ve never gotten into eBooks, but of course there are plenty of old-fashioned paper books on my bookshelf. Alas I am a slow reader in general which means that I opt for audio books whenever possible because it makes reading faster.

Video: video for me is mainly about a collection of DVD’s much of which I haven’t even watched for the first time, and TiVo. The DVD’s are kind of like books. They tend to be movies that are at least a couple of hours long, and what with the bonus features, commentaries, etc., it could be many more hours to fully consume a DVD’s content. TiVo lets me record the programming I want to see and watch it as I have time or inclination. TiVo by itself can be quite different from consuming a backlog of blog entries mainly because TiVo’s have a limited amount of space to record. So at a certain point your TiVo will have to delete content in order to record new content. Of course I did an end-run around this limitation by buying the Humax DRT-800 which includes a DVD writer, so if I ever get too low on space, I can always just burn as many DVD’s as I want. And at around $.30 per DVD, I’m probably not going to go broke even if I’m recording 30 DVD’s a day! Luckily, I tend to record only about 9 hours a week max, and often less than that due to repeats or when programming simply skips a week or two or more. Using the 30-second skip that TiVo offers, this becomes closer to 6 hours max, and that’s very easy to keep up with for someone who used to watch probably 7 hours of TV a night as a kid! Even if I increased this programming and didn’t have time to watch everything at home, I could theoretically burn a lot of stuff onto DVD and watch it away from home. I can also take those programs and put them on my Treo 650 for viewing, although the small screen doesn’t make the viewing particularly enjoyable!

Audio, for some reason, has for me become the most complex part of the equation, perhaps because its nature falls somewhere in between text and video in terms of space needed, flexibility, etc., and at the same time it has its own unique qualities. The most useful of those unique qualities is something that’s so obvious that one doesn’t tend to think about it in its full implications; Audio does not require your eyes! Because of this fact, Audio becomes inherently something that you can multitask with as part of other tasks, like driving, working, exercising, etc. Audio can also take the place text. Audio books can provide alternative to hard copies. Even what normally would be seen can be transferred to audio such as radio theater, and entertainment that we would normally associate with TV but which doesn’t lose anything critical, such as stand-up comedy, talk shows, news reporting, etc.

Technically speaking, audio files (especially when compressed using MP3, OGG, AAC, or WMA) are much smaller than video but much bigger than text. As such, they can be handled with some degree of ease. However, even though MP3 players have been around for at least 7 or 8 years now, audio is still wrapped up in large companies trying to protect their revenue streams, just as movies and books are. Early MP3 player manufacturers were sued by the record industry and even today we continue to see efforts among these companies to keep a stranglehold on what they want you to hear when and how. The record industry along with the massive radio station chains pretty much control what you hear on conventional radio, but with satellite radio, internet radio stations, and the flexibility to buy individual songs from artists that don’t have to be officially “approved” by the powers that be, there’s a much bigger choice for consumers. As bloggers have opened up a world of textual content as an alternative to the mainstream media and publishing, the podcasting movement has done something similar around all forms of radio, in particular talk radio but also music. Audio Books are geared to a much narrower audience, but the main online Audio Book publisher, Audible.com, is beholden to similar interests in the publishing arena but if not already being done, we should very soon be seeing unpublished authors recording their own works and publishing them as podcasts or similar audio files.

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