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09.07 MuzicMan Feature Spotlight:
Copy Playlist Files to your Portable mp3 Player
This then is the first of what may or may not eventually be a series of posts describing some of MuzicMan’s useful features. Today, we will be talking about the “Copy All Files to…” playlist feature which can be used as a way to move files between your MuzicMan library and any portable mp3 player that shows up as a removable drive when connected to your PC.
Remember how I said you couldn’t synch with your iPOD? Well that’s still true. They require iTunes for file synchronization and won’t work with MuzicMan or any other generic MP3 software. I can honestly tell you that I have spent more time troubleshooting iTunes synch errors than I have actually spent listening to my 1GB iPOD shuffle. It’s really cute though and I feel cool when I use it, like one of the silhouettes on the iPOD commercials.
Many other MP3 players, such as the Creative Muvo, SANDisk Sansa and Blackberry Bold show up as a removable drive when I connect them to the USB port on my PC.
Once you’ve connected the device and got it to show up as a removable disk, it is easy to copy the contents of a MuzicMan playlist. All you need to do is load the playlist, and then rick-click anywhere in the playlist area of MuzicMan. Of course you can load any library view into the playlist, simply by left-clicking on the icon in the top left of the library view.
Make sure you pick the correct folder. MuzicMan will create an artist / album / track directory structure within this directory.
After the files are copied, you may need to disconnect the device to allow it to access its files. This is what the music player looks like on a Blackberry Bold:
“She wore lemooon...but never in the daylight… “ |
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MuzicMan Version 5.13 build 301
Freeloaders
Registered Users
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09.05 12 Days of U2
On the first day of U2, My true love sent to me Two GA tickets, And a partridge in a Joshua Tree.YB
12 days to go... I can hardly wait! |
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08.31 “Amped”
I got to play with one of these on the weekend:
The harman/kardon AVR 245 is a nice piece of kit, however, similar to every other AV receiver manufactured within the last 5 years, requires hours of cajoling to get it to work the way you think it should. I’ve been set up this way so many times. “Hey, you know about electronic stuff, why don’t you come over and help me get that receiver thing working with my TV?” When I got there I discovered that its intended purpose was not only to provide an audio signal to the speakers in the living room, but also to an assortment of other speakers hidden in random parts of the house, including a pair of rock-shaped speakers hiding beneath the shrubs outside. Its predecessor, an old Denon amp, had two sets of stereo outputs with buttons on the front and was well suited to piping music to the inside and/or outside speakers.
The new one was considerably less intuitive. I tried the surround speaker output first, but the music was barely audible. I even tried boosting the different surround channels to +10, but it was still very soft. How could this be? I figured the Dolby algorithms programmed within this modern day Enigma machine decided that surround outputs are better used for movie sound effects than Lady Gaga’s Poker Face.
Eventually I resorted to what I should have done in the first place, which was to find the manual on the internet and that was how I discovered that the Surround back outputs can be used as multi-room speaker outputs. The next trick was to find the on screen display which allowed me to select the source for the other rooms. Only problem was, I couldn’t choose HDMI1. Hmmm. There was another input that I could choose called “The Bridge,” which was the name given to an expensive iPOD cradle that had been procured shortly after the main unit. I dropped in an iPOD touch and selected “The Bridge.”
My work on the AVR was interrupted when a massive explosion occurred in the garden. This turned out to be the garden speakers operating at 10 000 decibels due to the adjustments I had made to the surround channels before. Of course, the main volume knob has no effect on the multi-room output and it was a good 45 seconds before I managed to get the output level down using the cryptic on-screen display.
In summary, the AVR 245 is an impressive amp that is great for sending a stereo signal to a pair of speakers in another room. It is able to do this simultaneously to its regular job of providing surround sound for your TV if you’re prepared to downgrade from 7.1 surround to 5.1 surround. The only gotcha (other than the cludgy OSD) is the lack of support for HDMI as an input. |
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08.22 Do I know you?
Yes we changed the website. Don’t complain. Be glad that there is a website. We’re not sure how many of you out there still even use MuzicMan anyway, what with your iPODs, iPhones, iToothbrushes... Thanks to you and Mr jobs we were about to shut the whole thing down. Speaking of which, does anybody else find iTunes to be slooooooooow like molasses on an Ottawa winters morning? Seriously…
But we digress...where were we? Oh yes, so there we were, contemplating our hosting charges costing more money than a case of Windhoek Lager and we were just about to pull the plug and head off to Makro (to buy beer) when we changed our mind. Lets try this adsense thing we said to ourselves.
That way we cover our hosting bill, you get your MuzicMan updates (along with some targeted advertising—please support our sponsors.) Just to be clear, the advertising is on the website. There is and never will be any advertising in the software.
So muzicman.com lives on… for a little while anyway. Secretly we are hoping there is some uber-cool dude out there who goes around calling himself MuzicMan who can’t wait to get his hands on our domain name. If you are that dude, send us an e-mail. Maybe we can work something out. Let’s get back to business, shall we?
MuzicMan is still your all-in-one MP3 library manager, organizer, ripper, encoder, player, ID tagger, cross-fader, playlister with giant interface and faux-1980’s-stereo-style-LED-segment-display panels.
No, it doesn’t play movies or WMA files or run on a Mac and it will not generate the dreaded iPOD 1439 error (mainly because it will not synch with your iPOD AT ALL!) It still works better than anything else out there if what you’re looking for is a fast, simple and powerful way to play your MP3s on your Windows PC. |
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* Due to the numerous changes within Vista compared with prior versions of Windows, customers should ensure that the program operates correctly in their own Vista environments. |
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MuzicMan is an all-in-one MP3 solution, making your MP3 music more accessible and easier to manage. It captures, encodes and manages a large MP3 collection through a realistic and logical interface. Customizable skins and remote controls are support to provide a truly easy to use add-on for your home entertainment center. MuzicMan operates under Windows 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP and Vista *. |