frankps Music

Today I was on probably the last outdoor concert of the year, the autumn has really arrived. But this was a probably also the most beautiful concert that I have attended to, filled with joy and tender. is known for his beautiful lyrics about life and the afterlife.

On Monday he will release a new record, and as no other artists that I know of so far, his release party was a concert open not only for the press, but also for the public.
This was a concert that was not to much announced, and I only recently picked it up on , but decided at once that this was a concert that I would like to go to. After all, it was to take place under a bridge, close to where I live.

Dyveke bro (bridge) is a place where the skaters normally rulez! Something you can clearly see on the pictures that I have made. But not tonight, the colorful light settings and the hundres of burning torches made an intimate and romantic setting.

As always, his lyrics went straight to the heart and warmed you on a rather cold autumn night. The acoustic sound and the string orchestra (TrondheimSolistene) in the urban jungle was simply breath taking. If you ask me, this record will be played a lot on many Norwegian radio stations the last months of this year.

Especially Floden , a duet Eidsvåg sang with . Her debut album is my most played record according to ! She is by the way playing again on Sentrum Scene this weekend.

Another guest appearing was Simone Larsen from .
I know what I am gonna do Monday afternoon, head off to a record shop and buy his new record: Nåde.
I guess you didn t expect to read this on my blog any time soon, but I have moved more and more in the direction of Microsoft.

I have stopped using Ubuntu and ZETA, and I am now only using MacOS X and Windows Vista at home. This has been the case since last summer. Vista has been a pleasant surprise, and it made me change my plans.

I had long planned to buy a Playstation 3, but I am pretty sure that PS3 will not fit in to the digital home, as long as the center is a box running Windows. And that is certainly the case in my appartment. The price of the game consoles were of course also an argument (Yes, I know that PS3 will have an inbuilt Blueray).

I considered WII, but as it is only to be a game console, and not cheaper or with better graphics then the Core edition, it wasn t much of a question. I love that the is finding new markets, but I personally don t need one even on my game console. I have two computers running it already.

Especially since the game consoles (also WII) don t have a proper keyboard.
After having been drewling and denying myself a new game console for years, today was the day I gave in. Today I bought a with included.

Quite a , only 180 € (1,475 NOK). I also bought a used game, that I have playing quite a bit over the weekend, . Impressive car racing game and the graphics WOW, I am so hooked.

I used to play Dead or Alive on my , another cool game that will arrive from that platform to XBOX 360 this autumn is . Gonna be great playing Sonic games again :-). I also wanted to buy a DVI cable to be able to connect the XBOX to my 19 LCD screen, but I could only buy a VGA cable!

I guess that CRT screens are getting quite rare even in homes here in Europe. But there is still a majority that cannot make use of HDMI, cause they don t have screens yet.
I also had a quick run on setting up the XBOX 360 as a media device, streaming music and photos between the PC and the game console and TV.

On the MacBook I installed the Universal version of from . The integration between the Mac and the Xbox worked without any problems, and it couldn t have been easier to set up! It even lets me stream music bought on iTMS (AAC with DRM) and Apple Lossless.

I almost forgot, Connect360 also support streaming of Shoutcast radio stations. That is the radio stations that you find preloaded in iTunes. Thinking about it, Connect360 integrates the XBOX impressively well with the Mac, Connect360 will even automatically update the iTunes play count and when songs were last played.

And you think it stops there? Of course not, you even have the ability to play your own tunes in place of the default soundtrack in Xbox 360 games!
Here is what you do to connect your Mac with the XBOX.

Simply just a double-click to add the Connect360 setting to the System Preferences. Once installed, it was only to start the Connect360 server and then start a search on the XBOX for the Mac. One thing that I quite quickly found out, was that I need a memory card or hard drive for my XBOX, even to use it as a media device, as it was not possible save playlists created on the device.

I could of course play playlists that I had saved in iTunes, so that s a workaround. This software is real value for money, as it is only costing 20 dollars.
Appearently Connect360 has a competitor, , which runs on Windows, Mac and Linux.

I have not tried, nor do I plan to, as reviews told me that this software smells suspiciously of Java. TwonkyMedia must also be configured through a browser, and that is simply not the Mac way of doing things!Setting up a connection between the XBOX and Vista s mediacenter wasn t that easy, but I think this is a far better integration between once set up.

I liked the fact that Microsoft had set up an encryption between the game console and computer, but what I didn t like was that it required that I had a Live account. Why? And what is exactly a Live account?

Well, I will have a closer look at that in the following days. I see that the Core system over time, will be extended with a wifi adapter and a hard drive. But for now it is not something that I need.

If you don t manage to connect, then please check the following: Make sure that the internal OS firewall (on both MacOS and Windows) and on the network router have either port 1900 or 9335 open.
For those of you who don t know how the sharing is done, and want to know more about it, head over to the Wikipedia and read the articles about and . I am gonna limit myself to say that WMC is built in to Windows Media Player 11, and that the purpose with UPnP is to allow computers and devices to connect seamlessly and to simplify the implementation of networks in the home (data sharing, communications and entertainment) and corporate environments.

The UPnP standard is implemented in all the major operating systems, and sounds pretty similar to Apple s technology.
This weekend me and my mom travelled home to Flekkefjord. She stayed a few days at my place after we flew home from Hungary.

I travelled home mainly for two reasons, to teach my father a little bit computing and Internet as they now have gotten broadband and voip at home and to visit Fjellparkfestivalen. The broadband connection is delivered by , the first ISP that delivers Wimax in Norway, even though this was just Internet over radio link. Their VoIP connection is delivered by , and now my parents also finally dropped and their overpriced services!

Saturday started with some work in garden, before leaving for a swim in Selura (a lake close to where we live). Water temperature was real refreshing, even though it was said to be a little over 20 degrees. That was cold for me, as I swam in 28-29 degrees in Tisza home in Mindszent (Hungary) earlier this summer.

Sorry, but I have many homes . In the evening I went to .
Fjellparkfestivalen this celebrated it s 25th annoversary, making it the oldest music festival in Norway!

!! Impressive isn t it, my small, little hometown.

This year they on the paper seemed to have managed to get a great program arranged. On Thursday, the first day of the festival, was playing. She was high up on the national billboard lists this spring, and has become one of my favourite artists, currently on my most frequently artist list and on my portable MP3-player.

Among the artists that played on Friday were and Ragarockers. Sadly I came home to late on Friday eve to actually be able to see Tønes playing. The band is known for their lyrics and that they are singing on dialect.

I have two CDs from and will try to buy their last published CD this week. I just realised that I missed that one. Interested in hearing them?

They have published several of their songs as downloadable MP3s on their site. Let me suggest the song Bonde for your pleasure. On Saturday I made sure to not leave home before 9 in the evening, just so that I would make sure that I didn t have to listen to Ravi DJ Løv.

I m sorry, but I cannot understand their popularity. I can simply not stand them. Sadly I then missed out on a French band, The Sons of Saturn.

I listened to and quite enjoyed them. I had heard great things about the so called upcoming band . But what a disappointment!

What a horrible noice. Unbelievable . The last band out on the stage was , my favourite live band.

It was the second I saw them this year, and hopefully not the last. Impressive electronica. Running out to buy their last CD first thing tomorrow.

recently started a campaign called . Telling the potentional buyers of portable media players and iPod users simply to not follow the herd.
I am a Macintosh user since the Color Classic, but have never had an iPod, nor do I plan to buy one.

I must admit having bought 3-4 albums on iTunes Music Store, but found the quality to not be good enough. Perhaps that is why rumour now say that Apple is about to add support for lossless quality to the web shop? Another reason is simply that I love going to music shops and listen to music there.

I never liked the fact that Apple has locked the content sold on iTMS to their own devices, but it has not bottered me as I am not buying music from them. I belive in buying the music in a lossless quality and being allowed to choose the bitrate and the format I want to rip the music to.
I have long been wanting to buy a portable player, but my requirements seemed to stop me.

I wanted a flash-based player (2 or 6GB) with support for Flac and Ogg Vorbis. I found there are simply not many around. Well, Flac isn’t so important if you don’t plan to connect your player to your home stereo system, but I had ripped my CD collection to Ogg Vorbis and mainly been playing music with the Listen player under Gnome when using my IBM Thinkpad.

I guess I chose that player as my default one, as it’s approach to organizing music is pretty mush the same as iTunes.
The few players I found were all quite expensive and most of them only had 1 GB of memory. The thing is many of the players I have concidered as good options to the iPods, were more expensive then them.

Then I come over the SanDisk Sansa e260 4GB MP3 player for about 1.500 NOK, and bought it. I first saw it on online newssites around Cebit this spring and I had read great reviews of it.

As I am writing this, I am sitting here swearing and ripping my CD collection all over again. I’m using the public beta of Windows Mediaplayer v11 and the syncronization between the mediaplayer and device works flowlessly with the MTP transfer protocol. The protocol was new to me, so I had a quick look at : The MTP is part of the Windows Media framework and thus closely related to Windows Media Player .

So for Windows users this is truely a great option to the iPod Nano series. MTP options are available also for both and . Windows Media Player v11 works, but being a beta it of course has issues and I think it will always be a player that I will try to avoid.

The SanDisk player I am quite satisfied with, knowing what I had bought. Sound is ok. I write ok, cause I guess my cheap headset is the one stopping me from having an even better sound experience.

It also has an inbuilt FM radio, sadly something we Europeans will not be allowed to enjoy because of the additional tax the EU puts on any device that carries one. A shame really, but hopefully unofficial firmware will sort this issue out. SanDisk has the to port the open source Rockbox firmware to the e200 series.

But according to Rockbox website no such port is on it s way. The user interface is the best one I have seen on any device so far, no doubt! The Sansa 200 series support USB mass storage (UMS transfer protocol), so if you want you can just drag-and-drop your tunes onto the player that should work.

Good thing about this, is that the player can be used with MacOS X, Linux and ZETA (more about this later). SanDisk has also implemented Microsoft s PlaysForSure, that let you transfer and play DRM d music. I guess this another feature that I will never try.

I have managed to only buy CDs, and stayed away from all the Copy Controlled disks floating the market.
I also like the fact that it has an inbuilt microphone and voice recorder. I am working at the university and my scientific staff have a couple of time asked me to buy them an iPod with a microphone.

My experience is that that is easier said then done. The perphials are often not compatible between the iPod generations, and I think that we now have 6th generation of iPods, and last time I checked, there were no microphones available.
Sadly, I have a few negative things to write about the SanDisk device.

The design is eye catching, but there is a big design issue. I have problems pressing the buttons surrounding the wheel. The device is power charged over the USB, which means that you need to have your computer on to charge the it.

The SanDisk player only has 1,8″ screen, so why would you watch pictures or videos on these devices? I have been a long time user of the Sharp Zauruses and these devices were equipped with a 3,5″ screen. The movie experience was horrible, and it cannot be better on the SanDisk Sansa model line.

I guess this is something that I will not even try out… . Another thing is that if you would like your portable media device to also be able to playback videos, you should go for a harddisk based one instead of flash. There is simply not enough disk space for several video files.

Here’s my question to SanDisk: Why didn’t you focus more on sound? How dare you use a campain towards endusers asking us to be different, when you are doing the same as 95% of the hardware vendors, only adding support for WMA, MP3 and useless picture and video? The terms iFollow, iSheep and iDonkey sadly describe your business model very much: “Lets do what all the other hardware vendors do…”.

If you really wanted to start a movement, getting people to buy your players instead of the iPods, why didn’t you approach Linux users with implementing Ogg Vorbis yorself? Don’t you think that they would be more then happy to ditch the iPods? My biggest focus as an OS junkie, is to keep all my data in free, open source formats, to be able to transfer and use the files without problems on the platforms that I use.

The software itself doesn t have to free or open source, the same goes with the content!