Order of the Bath

After having been doomed to closure back in March, Planet Rock’s future has been secured by being bought out by rock music fan Malcolm Bluemel. I’m sorry I can’t say the same for The Jazz which has closed to just become an occasional program on Classic FM.

Engadget has this information. In addition to the features mentioned in the article (Smaller, 802.11n wireless, no analogue out) I also note the following: There doesn’t seem to be room for the massive torroidal transformer of the ZP100; this must affect the quality of the power supply: smaller and a plastic rather than die-cast case. Similarly it is a two pin rather than three pin mains offering no earthing, and there are only two RJ45 sockets, though I doubt many people use more. This looks like they may be using many common parts between this model and the suggested replacement for the ZP80, whereas currently there are very few.

The intelligent speculation suggests that the wireless mesh will remain and that it will communicate “g” to old models though it is uncertain if the whole system will then be “g” if one device is. I can’t see that this will be a problem as it works quite adequately but the greater “n” range will be appreciated by those who need it. I hope the “n” signals use 5GHz as they should do.

I expect this is only a small part of a larger product range revamp. This particular model looks like a move to reduce cost and hence price. What people are also looking for is an improved controller and larger index capacity.

A problem we have had with our very tall house has been getting Wi-Fi access from the top to the bottom. Our office, with all the gear, is at the top but Mary likes to work at the bottom while eating breakfast etc. In order to get a decent signal I had resorted to putting the access point on the top landing with the aerial horizontal and sticking over the edge of the stairs. To reach this required a cat5 cable out of the office door, behind the book case and over the bedroom door. The power had to come out under the bedroom door as there were no convenient sockets.

Then Dave and I had a wizard wheeze. The Sonos music system runs wireless throughout the house and each box has a built in switch with 2 or 4 RJ45 sockets. So I have now connected the access point to the Sonos in the sitting room (the middle of the house) and reception works anywhere with no trailing wires. It needs two wireless hops, one to the access point and then one over SonosNet to the router but it doesn’t seem to affect performance very much.

I have just heard that MS are disconnecting the MSN Music (otherwise know as PlaysForSure) authentication server. Part of me is saying “told you so” but I can’t help feeling sorry for those who bought tracks and will find that they can no longer play them. After 31-Aug it will be DeadForSure if you have to change your PC, get a new hard drive etc. They will discover that they haven’t bought the music, just rented it for a while.

At the end of a particularly good meal on Saturday, the talk drifted to concerts we had been to recently and then onto favourite pieces of music. The Brother-in-law said that he had been to (or had organised?) events where a few guests were invited to put their favourite five pieces of music onto a CD and talk up to them in the manner of Desert Island Discs. When asked what my favourites would be I quickly rattled off

• Melanie—The Saddest Thing: from “The Good Book”, Buddah, 1971.
• Robert Wyatt—Song for Ché: from “Ruth is Stranger than Richard“, Virgin, 1975
• Elton John—Song for Guy: from “A Single Man”, Rocket, 1979.
• Fauré’s Requiem (Pié Jesu): The Choir of King’s College Cambridge, solo: Robert Chillcot, EMI, 1968.
• Missa Luba (Sanctus and Benedictus): Les Troubadours du Roi Baudouin, Philips, 1965.

Later I realised that these would not do at all. They were chosen because they are the most beautiful pieces of music I know—but I couldn’t give any other good reason for choosing them. They don’t hold any special memories for me so I will have to think again if I am ever to do this. In practice, if stranded on an island, I would prefer a book like the Guinness: British Hit Singles and Albums because, for the older ones at least, I can sing them in my head for days, whistle or hum them and it would require no power. I am not so good at remembering words.

The announcement by the corporate suits describes them as “non core brands.” What on earth does than mean when they are in the radio business; what they mean is that there is not enough profit. I think they are very mistaken; DAB Radio is only just beginning to take off in a big way so they need to hang on for a bit. It takes a while for the market to go from niche to mainstream and, as portable radios die, they will be replaced by DAB now the price is right—that is unless all the broadcasters pull out.

And this is only one day after I managed to figure out how to stream “Planet Rock” to my music player. These stations don’t make it easy by not publishing their stream addresses; whizzy popup javascript windows are no good at all, nor is proprietary real-player format. Planet Rock is http://mediasrv-the.musicradio.com/PlanetRock if you need to know.

I had never heard of “The Jazz” but would have listened if I knew that a decent Jazz station existed, I tried “Jazz FM” a while ago but that was feeble; perhaps I will have to give it another try.

Having got involved in discussions on the forum, I found that the Magic Nodes script for Media Monkey had advanced considerably since the last documentation was written. With little time to spare and without English as his first language, the author was unable to do this. So, rather than just gripe, I have put together a manual for Magic Nodes for MediaMonkey3 with the approval and being proof-read by Zvazdan, the author of the script.

At the moment it is in PDF format (but this may change) and documents the script at release 1.6.2.1. It will be updated in-situ and revisions will be announced on the forum thread.

Just two days after posting about my use of Media Monkey and Magic Nodes they finally released the long awaited Media Monkey 3 (what were they doing releasing software on Christmas Day!) This changes a few things—all for the better as it is now a much improved product.

The old Magic Nodes, which was well out of support anyway, has been replaced by an unofficial version (currently v1.6.2) by a new author. There have been a lot of enhancements and improvements and is being actively maintained. Remember to shut down Media Monkey and remove the Magic Nodes script before installing the new versions.

Media Monkey itself now does a lot of things natively that scripts used to be needed for, including some that Magic Nodes did. For instance, there is now an Album Artist node which is close enough to the one I created such that I don’t think mine is necessary any more. There is also a Composer node but that doesn’t filter for Classical Genres so the original needs to be retained but slightly altered for the new Magic Nodes syntax. First remove the standard Composer node from display (using right click –> Options –> Choose Tree Node and then create this one.

Composer|icon:top level|child of:artist|filter:genre in ('classical', 'opera', 'operetta')\<composer>\<album with album artist>

The Encoding magic node can be retained as before

Encoding|icon:bottom level|child of:year|show tracks:no\<format>\<VBR>\<bitrate>

There are a lot of other fancy things that can be tailored but, so far, this is enough for me.

N.B. I have noted that with the “Choose Tree Node” menu you can move nodes up and down the list, overriding the “child of:” value in Magic Nodes, but you do still need it to get the node into the library section in the first place.

These are the definitions that I find useful. This is for Media Monkey v2.5.5 with Magic Nodes v1.3b. There are later versions in test but these are both stable.

This one creates a node sorted by Composer for Classical Genre’s only.

Composer|icon:top level|child of:artist|filter:genre in ('classical', 'opera', 'operetta')\<composer>\<album and artist>

The standard Media Monkey Artist includes all the artists on every track (and maybe composers as well). This creates a note with only the whole album artists.

Album Artist|icon:top level|child of:artist\<album artist>\<album|sort by:max(year)>

Finaly, this one is useful to sort out the various formats and bit rates so you can see which ones need replacing.

Encoding|icon:bottom level|child of:year|show tracks:no\<format>\<VBR>\<bitrate>

I have finally had enough with Windows Media Player messing me about. The issues were

• Even though I operated every available switch to stop it, it continued to contact the internet to get what it thought were better track listings and cover artwork even if I had set them manually.
• When changing tags, you could never actually tell when they would make it into the files. The library database showed the correct information but the song files themselves may not be updated for hours, during which time, WMP had to be left running. Not a lot of use when my Sonos system gets its information directly from the files.

Maybe I was doing something wrong but I couldn’t figure it out. Anyway, now I have stopped using it. After asking around, the consensus was that Media Monkey was the best available, largely because you could customise it (trivially) with skins and (functionally) with scripts. The changeover was clean and painless and all the information loaded into the very fast database with no trouble.

I like a simple interface so off came the baby blue skin and back to windows default styling and all my earlier reservations about it vanished. Once I found my way around the powerful options and commands available I was able to clean the library up properly. The missing features that I wanted, organising classical music by composer and all music by the album artist rather than the track artists were easily added using the Magic-Nodes script. I will post the configuration lines for this another day.

Once version 3 is available, which adds navigation by cover art then I will be fully happy. I have purchased a Gold licence, not so much for the extra features it offers but to support the team developing it.