USB Turntables - S/D

Oh shit. Expect old folks across the land to confusingly ask their stressed out offspring "what's this USB business, then?" and "how do I play music off the computer, then?".

(Or just my bloody folks.)

Yes

I'd been saying "Just get a USB to Jackplug Cable, mate!" up to now.

Mind you, still true.

hammacher schlemmer lp-to-mp3 converter

but now we are just running the stereo into the computer and i don't need to.

It used to be, back in the AudioGalaxy days, if you included 'finding the album, minidisc taping it, feeding it into xputer, manually finding track gaps, etc...

Not now, now it's harder to find the stuff online.

in my case yes

-- M Grout

Yeah, I was on dial-up during the AudioGalaxy era, unfortunately. Do find that Torrent sites are pretty huge now though. But obviously a ton has never made it to CD or been ripped.

So anyway, how do I access your archives?

i find it marginally easier to scout about for stuff on ye interwebbe, but even then it's hugely annoying when, for some reason, you can find every track from an album EXCEPT ONE.

now i find myself delighted when i stumble across some rare, forgotten vinyl gem in the cupboard and decide to listen to it; it's almost a pleasure to have some music that isn't digital. at least, that's what i'm trying to convince myself.

a learned colleague told me at the weekend that USB turntables were "shite", but i'm not sure whether to believe her or not. given that i've got a trusty 13-year-old thorens turntable, an even trustier 14-year-old nad amp with line out, and a powerbook with line in, i don't give a fuck :)

dude, just record it all in one track and throw it into a WAV editor like Cool Edit Pro or Peak, then chop it up into tracks. Be sure you have something like Trader's Little Helper (PC) or xACT (Mac) to take out the sector boundary errors when you're done, though, especially if you make track cuts while there's still signal.

I used to have to do that with my Sony CDRW33, then I got a G4 and Peak. Life is much easier.

But I can't go back and run it *then*

>> Not now, now it's harder to find the stuff online.

Uh, ever hear of Soulseek?

I don't get how so many people lament the loss of Audiogalaxy while I continue to find HUGE QUANTITIES of obscure music that was never on Audiogalaxy or Napster with relative ease.

i'm just gonna put everything on ILM. it's fun! though i have been considering getting my own website. i'm sick of blogs. maria pays 200 dollars a year for hers. i might still do something like that.

audacity makes this really easy. i am no expert though.

absolute crap. avoid.

Yeah, the wishlist is key. It helps putting in different variations to find the same thing. For instance, last night:

Smoke Some Kill: 0 results
"Signifying Rapper", a track on Smoke Some Kill: 5 results, all of which also contain the words "smoke some kill" wtf

The Soulseek search engine is a mysterious thing.

renice -n 20 `ps axwww | grep -i '[s]sx' | awk '{print $1}'`

That will make ssX SLOWER than everything else (which is what I'd prefer, since ssX sucks up all the CPU and makes the other apps slow). If you want to make ssX FASTER than everything else -- this probably isn't going to make any difference at all to you -- do this:

sudo renice -n -20 `ps axwww | grep -i '[s]sx' | awk '{print $1}'`

Be sure to get the quote marks exactly as I have them, too.

That said, I have my ssX tuned rather tight: Outgoing bandwidth is low, I've disabled all unnecessary "server" features, and so on. Still, it winds up like a testicle strap on a bull after about a day. My feeling is that the SLSK search algorithm favors peers that have been online longer, since they've "proven" themselves as better providers, due to their relative stability, etc., thus they're stressed more the longer they're online. ssX may not be up to the task.

I'll have to check out SolarSeek (again). It was a miserable lump of crap the last time I used the pre-recode version, and the latest totally-reworked version was in a codemire for the longest time. People got jobs and shit, I guess. I'd sooner do ssX than Nicotine, in any case, and Nicotine >>> Azureus. I dunno if anyone here remembers when Azureus had a bug that caused it to k-panic 2xG5s, but that was a real nasty one.

http://www.dolphinmusic.co.uk/shop_image/product/89ef9ba7f1587cdf8294baea1eaafb5d.jpg

What the fuck?

And it's priced at $300, for which you can get a barely decent non-USB guitar.

when i was thinking about buying one, the model that got the most positive press/feedback was the one that audio technica puts out. and it's cheap too. and, yeah, i read too much negative stuff about the ion to even consider it.

So is the preamp any good on USB turntables, and would I get really get less background noise using a cheap belt drive table like that than I would using a good direct drive one?

WhenAudGal went down, I did suddenly find that all the really obscure stuff I'd been looking for for years, I'd actually got now, and was kinda stuck for new 'searches'.

And Kazaa was such a pain/computereater, I lost the will to go S/sk.

napster/kazaa were a joke unless you wanted britney spears or a virus

Just get a regular phono preamp/receiver and plug it into this:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000BD1AF0

Or run it directly into the line-in on your computer. Scott's been getting good results with that.

Another Slsk feature I love: Search, no results. Stop search, search again, many many results. However, as pointed out it's stable as hell and not a resource hog if you're running wintel.

And it's priced at $300, for which you can get a barely decent non-USB guitar.

I've messed about with one. It plays about as well as you would imagine, which is to say, if you're into super-high fretboard action and strings that go out of tune after a minute or two of strumming, well, go nuts.