The Music-Thing
Today I finished listening my music collection.
The thing
When I started my bachelor thesis back in March, I thought I should listen each song in my collection, at least once. When I finished my thesis, I was something halfway through, so I decided to continue, with the goal to finish within 2013. And today I listened to the last song in my collection.
Why do I still have a music collection?
I think, music is something very personal. Music reminds me of people, places and situations. Most of the albums in my collection come with a personal story, a festival, a certain memory. Listening to my music collection is like stumbeling an old photo album. This is the reason why I don’t use services like spotify. If I would listen to any music I could just turn on the radio, I do that sometimes.
Why is this a thing?
Because music is much more than just a commercial product, some artists produce. I am interested in the story behind the music and the musician, or even better, if they tell me a story in theire songs.
Personally, I use a music server called Subsonic to listen to music everywhere. There are many apps for all kinds of plattforms. And I am not dependent on any commercial company.
Best Headphones Ever
Still in love with my Koss Porta Pro Headphones. Very comfortable to wear, cheap to buy and a tremendous sound feeling. They don’t do noise cancellation (so not recommended for long train rides or other noisy environments). I use ’em daily in my office. Koss Porta Pro 
Convert FLAC to mp3
{Long story}
I love music. In Berlin I bought a pair of Sennheiser. Then I started to realize what a big influence bitrate of hard compressed mp3 had on the quality. The solution to the problem is FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec). In short that is the quality you get from a cd. But since my mobile devices and portables can’t handle FLAC I’m now on two lanes:
- FLAC for office and home usage
- compressed VBR mp3 for my phone
{Short}
However, if you wish to convert FLAC files to mp3 and do not want to loose the id3 Tags (like me), I found somewhat on the internet and created this little (bash) script:
[code lang=”bash”]
#!/bin/bash
# by K-Soft! 05/24/2012 with parts from
# http://bash.cyberciti.biz/multimedia/linux-unix-bsd-convert-flac-to-mp3/
# convert flac to mp3 and writes id3 tags
# usage: flactomp3 /path/to/my/awesome/music/
# requires FLAC, ID3, LAME
# change quality -V 0-9
IFS=$’\t’
if [ $# -eq 0 ] ; then
echo ‘No arguments provided, usage: flactomp3 /my/awesome/music/’
exit 0
fi
for flacfile in $1*.flac
do
outf=${flacfile%.flac}.mp3
eval "$(
metaflac "$flacfile" –show-tag=ARTIST \
–show-tag=TITLE \
–show-tag=ALBUM \
–show-tag=GENRE \
–show-tag=TRACKNUMBER \
–show-tag=DATE | sed ‘s/=\(.*\)/="\1"/’
)"
flac -c -d "$flacfile" | lame -m j -q 0 –vbr-new -V 0 -s 44.1 – "$outf"
id3 -t "$TITLE" -T "${TRACKNUMBER:-0}" -a "$ARTIST" -A "$ALBUM" -y "$DATE" -g "${GENRE:-12}" "$outf"
done
[/code]
