Welcome to SolamenteNiel!

I hate Apple.......this song is stuck in my head after watching the damn MacBook Air commercial.

In November Buy.com had the Zune 30 (Brown) on sale for $100. I bought one for my wife to give me for XMas. The only bad thing is that I wasn't allowed to have it until Christmas day. So in anticipation of the Zune, I took the time to clean up my MP3 collection, which included: organizing, fixing tags, adding missing album art, etc... Since the Zune v2 software could be downloaded for free, I had it installed weeks before Christmas and all my music was imported. I don't know what the old software was like, but the new software is excellent. Very nice interface, and excellent integration with Zune Marketplace for buying music and finding podcasts. I have used iTunes in the past for downloading podcasts (but never the buy music), and the Zune just software blows it away.

So here's what I like about the Zune:

1. excellent integration between Zune player and Zune software
2. podcast directory on Zune Marketplace (tons of choices, but you can podcasts manually too)
3. ability to seemlessly sync podcast titles and/or subscriptions with zune player
4. non-native formats are automatically transcoded by Zune software
5. Media Center recordings can be synced to Zune (right-click)
6. Firmware 2.x upgrade significantly improves Zune interface
7. DRM free music from Zune Marketplace
8. wireless sync - no need to hook up to computer
9. for it's size, the display is very adequate for watching videos and tv shows
10. includes FM Radio (for listening to local sports)
11. better than expected battery life
12. audio/video output makes it's very easy to integrate with entertainment system
13. ability to convert DVD movies for playing on Zune

I was listening to Mahalo Daily, and there was a story on Creative Commons Licensing. I've seen the creative commons license used for open source code and web templates, but I've recently learned that it can be used for photos and music too. Via the Mahalo Daily story, I learned about ccMixter, "a community music site featuring remixes licensed under Creative Commons, where you can listen to, sample, mash-up, or interact with music in whatever way you want."

I was curios if the music was any good, so I listened to a few mixes. It's not bad.....not bad at all. Here's one of my favorites, which I can legally post on my blog thanks to the Creative Commons license.

For obvious reasons I embarked on the process of converting my music collection from CD's to MP3 many years ago. I thought I had my collection in pretty good order, but as I acquired more music I realized that my collection was in disarray. I couldn't really enjoy my music until it was all sorted out a bit more. In particular I needed to standardize on a file naming scheme, clean up the mp3 metadata (tags) on my collection, and add the album art. I have found two indispensible tools for helping me with this: MusicBrainz and MediaMonkey.

MusicBrainz is an online service that provides an open source database of music information. The Picard client will scan your mp3 files and clean up the meta tags and rename the files according to your own pattern. The default pattern seems decent enought, so I stuck with it. If Picard can't identify the song from the existing tags or filename, it will scan the mp3 file and compare it to known mp3 signatures on the MusicBrainz service. If the song can still not be indentified, it will allow you to search the database via the browser to select the song. It's pretty cool tool.

With most of my mp3 files properly tagged, I wanted to include the appropriate album art in my mp3 files. I'm sure there are a variety of tools for doing the job, but MediaMonkey fit the bill for me. It's integrated with Amazon, and I presume it uses their database for getting mp3 data and album art. I'm still not completely done with this part of the process, but it's going well.

Once I finish adding the album art, my next goal is to equalize the volume on my mp3 collection. I don't want to have to run to my volume control between songs because the mp3 volume levels are different. Apparently MediaMonkey has this function, but MP3Gain seems to have a pretty good track record for doing this.