But since the lights went out I’ve never been the same

[venta]

Yesterday I had one of those moments where I realise I have a very specific opinion on something - but no real justification for it, and no clear idea where I got it from.

So, you, my dear self-selecting sample of guinea pigs, have the opportunity to prove me right. Or wrong. But I'm not going to tell you which is which. I'd hate to bias my otherwise-scientific survey.

I'm asking here about portable mp3 players (or mp3-a-likes). If you use your computer to play mp3s at you at home, or have some form of mp3 monster in the car, that's not what I meant.

[Poll #442057]

Comments

[wimble.livejournal.com]

I've just upgraded the hard drive in my in-car mp3 player. It's going to take a while to copy 80 Gig of data back onto it! But I'll be fairly future proof, since it's now got a 200 Gig drive instead.

Apart for a very small fraction (50 Meg? Other people have requested me to provide) every track is one I have personally ripped. In some cases, I've done so from "pseudo-CDs" (ie. copy protected CDs), and in many cases, they're from CDs that I don't own, but have lurked in my house long enough for me to get my grubby little fingers on them.

I'll concede that I may qualify as one of the "very few".

Now mp3 has entered general awareness, people would easilly acquire a large mp3 collection from their own personal CDs: 200 CDs turns into 12 Gig quite easilly, and seems a "reasonable" size for a CD collection. Things like iTunes (and indirectly DRM) are what interrupt this "legal" conversion process, with customers fishing into a much larger pool for short-lived play lists.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Ripping other people's CDs, even if done personally, still qualifies as illegal content, surely ?

(Please nobody do that joke).

[wimble.livejournal.com]

Yes, it is. But it does mean that every track I've got is is first generation copy of one that has been legally paid for. As such, it's several orders of magnitude less "illegal" (has less financial impact) than downloading gigabytes from Napster, or anywhere else.

It also counters the possible claim that nobody with more than 200 CDs would rip their entire CD collection. (I'm having a hard time counting up the number of actual CDs I've got involved in my collection, as it requires counting leaf - and only leaf - directories.) But it's less than 1400 CDs to make 80 Gig. So a 700 CD collection would be legitimate enough to fill a 40 Gig ipod.

What are CD collection sizes?

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

it requires counting leaf - and only leaf - directories

find . -type d | perl -w thingy.pl

thingy.pl:

$leaves = 0;
$previous = <STDIN>;
chomp($previous);
foreach (<STDIN>) {
  chomp;
  $pos = index($_,$previous);
  if (($pos = 0) && substr($_,length($previous),1) eq "/") {
    # then this one is a subdirectory of the previous one,
    # so the previous one is not a leaf
  } else {
    # this one is not a subdirectory, so because find returns
    # children before siblings, the previous one has no
    # subdirectories
    ++leaves;
   }
   $previous = $_;
}
print 

Or something like that, I haven't tested it. You can make it more concise at the expense of clarity.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

Should say "print $leaves, "\n";" at the end.

[wimble.livejournal.com]

897 it says, after typo fixing.

So there you go. Where "there" is, I dunno :)

[shrydar.livejournal.com]

Almost all our tracks are ripped from CDs that we own, and our 20GB iPod is full.

Sadly, in Australia that doesn't help, as it's illegal to rip stuff even if you own the CD (same applies to taping). As the iTMS is not available here yet, this means that almost every iPod in the country is being used illegaly - the only content that's legally available is non-DRM'd tracks either [sold directly or released for free] by individual artists.