ReplayGain itunes, iPod and iPhone or tired of songs with different sound volume

elgrandee

elgrandee

Why whould I need this?

All albums and songs are mixed differently. So in iTunes some albums sounds very loud whilst other is rather low. This has increased in something called the Loudness War. Producers of albums soon realized that if you mix an album really hot, it will sound louder then the other songs on crappy stereo equipment. So essentially you have a lot of music in your iPod/iPhone with albums recorded at totally different volume. That’s why you have to constantly change the volume knob to correct for this. Here Apple comes to the rescue with it’s Automatic Volume Settings. Unfortunately the algorithm Apple chose to use to determine the volume of the song is made to be quick, but not particularly accurate. This mean that the songs does come out all over the place volume vise.But there is an good solution to this problem, and it?s name is ReplayGain.

This is program that analyzes the music psycho acoustically and then makes an assessment on witch level the song/album should be. Unfortunately Apple haven’t embraced this techique even though it’s totally open. Shame on you Apple.

ReplayGain application

ReplayGain application

But there’s a sollution. An application called iVolume that goes though all your songs in iTunes and makes sure they have the same level. This mean that you can be certain in that you won?t have ear blead when a song of Sting ends and Mötorhead comes on.

The software is super easy to use, just start it and iTunes, make sure you have ?Sound Check? enabled in preferences in iTunes. After that you just push a button.

One downside only, the price is $29.95 witch I think is a bit high. But for me It was a must, it transforms the pleasure of listening to music.

 

Lenn-Art Tang Band W8-740C subwoofers

A Tangband W8-740C

Lenn-Art Subwoofer

Last time I ordered some speaker elements from Germany I ordered some extra Tang Band W8-740C subwoofer elements for a later build. I’ve been oogling this design to go with my home-built?ProAc 2.5 clones. Micke, a friend will make the boxes for me, provided I sent him the drawings. What an exellent excuse to try to learn Solidworks. Amazing program. I have designed my own version of the venerable GainClone amplifier with a beefed up power supply and will use two subwoofers in stereo. Nice to not have to build the boxes. Last time when I built the clones the apartment was filled with MDF dust for months.

DNS problems with Snow Leopard 10.6

I’ve had some bizarre problems with my DNS today. I checked /etc/resolv.conf but everything looked ok. Checked the settings dialog for my network and at first glance, that one seemed ok as well.

Screen shot 2009-09-09 at 00.34.55

But normally there should be a dimmed version of the DHCP assigned values there.

Screen shot 2009-09-09 at 00.35.08

Just select the empty one and press the minus sign. Sneaky little bug there!

Dimmed DNS values

Save your settings and you should be good to go.

Getting Perian 1.1.4 to work Snow Leopard 10.6 to work

There’s a problem with getting Perian to work in Snow Leopard. But there’s a quick fix outlined here, but If the PreferencePane is installed to only the current user, you need to paste the following into the terminal:

cd cd Library/PreferencePanes/Perian.prefPane/Contents/Resources/Components cp Perian.zip ~/Downloads cp CoreAudio/A52Codec.zip ~/Downloads cp QuickTime/AC3MovieImport.zip ~/Downloads cd ~/Downloads unzip AC3MovieImport.zip unzip A52Codec.zip unzip Perian.zip sudo mv Perian.component/ /Library/QuickTime/ sudo mv AC3MovieImport.component/ /Library/QuickTime/ sudo mv A52Codec.component/ /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components/