Chovy’s Blog

I have an Alpine car stereo deck, which supports the iPod interface with cable (the advantage being the iPod will charge while it’s plugged into the deck). I can’t for the life of me figure out how to navigate the thing via the alpine deck (nearly got in two accidents trying). I simply hit Random and let it play while driving.

This was the only reason I bought an iPod. I hate the iTunes interface, requiring you to use their software instead of simply copying over files on the iPod. The real kicker is that it duplicates all the songs you add to your iPod in it’s own folder, taking up twice the disk space.

I’ve heard that the Creative NOMAD Zen Xtra (up to 60gb drive for price of 20gb iPod), doesn’t require you to use their software (if anyone has one, please let me know if this is true). I’d rather just copy the albums over to the Zen rather than installing some lame software to do it for me.

The real necessity, keeping me from buying a Zen is that I know of zero car stereo decks which support it. I know I could get an FM Transmitter, but I like how the Alpine iPod/MP3 deck will charge it while it’s plugged in, as it does when plugged into your pc.

Well, after talking about it for the last year and a half, I’ve finally gotten everything in place to rip my entire cd collection!

For starters, I had to setup a reliable file server running Gentoo Linux with Samba file sharing services for Windows clients.

Once I set that up, I bought a 300GB western digital harddrive, with removable drive kit. I wanted to be able to remove the drive and keep it in the trunk of my car incase of disaster (fire, etc.) so I won’t loose all my hard work.

The main drive is 250gb maxtor. Using rsnapshot for Linux, I am able to backup the main drive to my removable drive via cronjob on an hourly basis (not to mention all my remotely hosted databases and web sites).

The best CD-ripper, Lame MP3 encoder I’ve found for Windows XP is BonkEnc which supports Variable Bitrate and is Open Source GPL’d (ensuring you never have to pay for anything). I have the setting at VBR-MTRH, which rips the cds extremely fast (under 5 minutes). I set no minimun quality, with a target rate of 192kb, and maximun bitrate at 320kb. This will get the most out of the compression, as the quiet areas of the song are encoded at a lower bitrate, saving valuable harddisk space.

I tested ripping at Quality level 5 (middle) and Quality Level 0 (best), and the size of the album “Paul Simon – Graceland” went from 39MB to 75MB, and when listening, I noticed virtually no difference. So I’ll be keeping it the middle level to save disk space (not to mention more mp3s will fit on my iPod).

I also recently hooked up my 15GB iPod to my car stereo deck, which is an Alpine supporting iPod connections, with 2×10 inch subwoofers in the trunk of my Corolla! The next thing to do is replace the stock corolla speakers with some nice ones.