9 posts tagged “vista”

I am not a big fan of Microsoft's Windows Media Player (WMP) but it does a pretty good job at playing DVDs.

I do not like or use proprietary file formats like Windows Media Audio (WMA) and Video (WMV). For audio I use ogg vorbis and FLAC. I have never ripped a music CD into WMA and I don't ever intend to either. Furthermore WMP's GUI and navigation are horrible. It was a pain just to find a few online radio stations to bookmark.

Anyway when I rented The Grand recently I thought that I would give WMP a try for DVDs and I was pleasantly surprised. WMP is easy to use. You double click on the movie to get full screen and when you leave the mouse alone the player's controls automatically disappear. Of course when you move the mouse they reappear and hitting the 'ESC' key takes you out of full screen mode.

I don't know about you but that's just about all I need for DVD play-back so I'll probably continue to use WMP for DVDs.

Both Ogg Vorbis and FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) are audio files that have better sound quality than MP3. Furthermore Ogg Vorbis, while a compresed file like MP3, requires less memory per given song than MP3. FLAC's superior sound quality comes a price, it produces much larger files than Ogg or MP3.

Earlier this week I got Roger Waters' CD Amused to Death (CD review coming Monday) and I used the occasion to finally set up my Windows Vista PC to rip and play Ogg Vorbis and FLAC files. This was not hard to do at all. The latest version WinAmp natively rips and plays FLAC. It also plays Ogg Vorbis and a plug-in allows WinAmp to rip CDs into Ogg Vorbis. The plug-in, Ogg-Vorbis encoder v1-1, is available from the WinAmp web site and I had no problem installing it or the WinAmp app itself on Vista (32 bit, SP1).

Is Sound Quality Really Better Than MP3s?
I'm no audiophile but to me MP3s have always sounded tinny and less full-sounding than CDs. Ogg Vorbis sounds better than MP3 and FLAC sounds great to me.

File Sizes Compared
I ripped the Roger Waters CD into Ogg and FLAC using the default sound quality settings in WinAmp, here are the file sizes: 75 MB in Ogg Vorbis and 354 MB in FLAC. 

If I remember correctly then MP3s are a little over 1 MB per minute. The CD is approximately 72 minutes long so Ogg Vorbis is right around that rate.  However FLAC is almost 5 times as big as the Ogg rip. 

Streaming Ogg
I have always been more of a steamer of online music rather than a ripper and downloader of music. Unfortunately few online radio stations stream in Ogg Vorbis. Virgin Radio UK plays today's hits and classic tracks, it also streams in Ogg (Virgin ogg stream). For classical music there is WCPE (ogg stream). The Icecast Directory has a number of internet radio stations which stream in Ogg. Now if Radio Paradise, one of my favorite online radio stations, would just stream in Ogg.

Downloading Ogg and FLAC
Jamendo has free Ogg downloads in a number of musical styles. Several recording artists sell at least some of their music in FLAC including Nine Inch Nails, the Eagles and the Philadelphia Orchestra.   

Portable Players for Ogg & FLAC
A few portable music players from iRiver, Yepp and SanDisk play Ogg Vorbis, here's a list to check out. For FLAC SourceForge has a hardware list .

Why MP3s?
First mover advantage and inertia. Over a decade ago in the days before broadband and huge hard drives, WinAmp and Napster helped establish MP3s as the defacto standard for digital music. Today most people are used to MP3 and have acquired a large collection of music in MP3 so they are reluctant to change.

So is it Ogg or FLAC for me?
Both! I will probably rip most of my CDs into Ogg Vorbis however my classical CDs I will most likely rip into FLAC. Also I will download in Ogg from web sites that offer Ogg (for free) and if I buy any music online then I will prefer FLAC. I still have not found any web sites selling music in Ogg Vorbis. FLAC files may be big but hard drives have gotten even bigger. I still have hundreds of gigabytes of space on my PC and I can easily add an eSATA hard drive if I need more space. MP3s still have a place for me since most podcasts are in MP3 and for some reason a lot of people still seem to like paying MP3 royalty fees rather than use Ogg Vorbis, which is totally free.

The rest of the world may like MP3s but I'll use Ogg Vorbis and FLAC, thank you very much.

With my recent RAM problem I left my PC case open and this seems to have produced three unexpected but minor problems.

First I noticed that my AM radio reception was not as good (my stereo sits near my PC). No real problem, I just moved the antenna around a bit and problem solved.

Then a day or two later I was not getting a full five bars on my wifi card. I'm not sure what was really the matter but I moved the power supply strip away from the wifi antenna and pointed the antenna straight out. Now I have five bars back again. Apparently size doesn't matter but position sure does.

The last minor problem involved my digital TV converter box (TV is also near the PC). For days I was getting slight pixelization on some channels. Long story short, I put the case cover back on the PC and no more pixelization. I guess radio waves from the PC were interfering with the TV reception.

So the moral of this story is keep the cover on your PC, there's no telling what might happen otherwise.

Note: check back later, I'll post a picture of my open PC case (camera battery currently recharging).

Update: added photo of the inside of my PC, radio waves are coming from somewhere inside there (August 6, 2008).

pcinside

I had to play a little with Firefox to get it to work with the full version of Hotmail / Live Mail.

I first tried to clear the cache, cookies and browser history but that did not work.

Here's what I did to get it to work:

from Firefox Tools > Clear Private Data then check off Cache, Cookies, Offline Website Data and Authenticated Sessions

Thanks to Rich Menga at PC Mech for the help.

Web link: Full Version Of Hotmail Now Compatible With Firefox 3 (at PC Mech)

Update: this did not work on the MacBook but it did work on my Vista box.

Update Aug. 3: it does work on the MacBook now, strange.

The Windows Vista patch KB 952709 finally turned up on Windows Update but it's still causing problems according to Khun Woody.

Microsoft calls the KB 952709 patch 'important' and describes it very vaguely, it "will help improve the performance and reliability of Windows Vista." Khun Woody says that people have been reporting problems with wifi connectivity after installing the patch.

I'm not sure when the patch showed up on my Windows Update but I'm not installing it.

For more info.:
Even more problems with KB 952709 (at AskWoody.com)
The Case of the Missing Patch (my earlier post)

On my Vista PC today I got a notice from Apple Software Update to update iTunes and QuickTime. Once again Apple also wanted to install their Safari web browser. They got me like this before and I accidentally installed it but not this time, I un-checked the little box. So pay attention if Apple Software Update pops up on your screen.

I have enough web browsers already, I do not want Apple's Safari. I don't care how much they have improved it. I use Firefox 3 as my everyday browser but I also have Opera 9.5 and of course I have Internet Explorer. I plan on trying Flock when its new version is released. I don't even use Safari on the MacBook so I don't want it on my Vista box.

Update: Set Apple Software Update to ignore Safari (at C/Net)

Kuhn Woody recommends updating all but two Windows patches (one XP SP3, one Vista SP1) before Microsoft releases yet more patches tomorrow. The Vista patch that Woody advises to skip for now is KB952709. I'm on Vista (SP1) but I do not have that patch available to me. And I have not downloaded it by accident or with another patch, it's not on my update list. Strange. They're a bunch of witches at Microsoft, witches I say!

My Theory
I built my own Vista system, maybe Woody bought his. Maybe the OEM added a bunch of their own software and other crapware to Woody's PC. And say that some of this extra software funkified his Vista and Microsoft needed to fix it. Now I wouldn't need this patch but Woody would so he gets the patch and I don't.

That's my theory but I have no idea how likely it is to be correct.

This is my response to Gizmodo's blog entry Things No One Gives Microsoft Credit For (But Should).

1. Windows is on the vast majority of the world's computers, creating a virtually ubiquitous platform that anyone can develop for.
Not so ubiquitous when developing for different versions of Windows (XP, Vista, NT, server) matters. A story making the rounds recently was about how few developers are writing programs for Vista, so Windows is NOT as 'ubiquitous' as it seems.

2. Microsoft is basically responsible for the two-button mouse. [and the scroll wheel]
I like the two buttons and scroll wheel but how many people really use them? I have tried to explain the 'left click choose, right click choices' to some very educated people (MBAs, people with grad. degrees) and they look at me with a blank face, "Huh?" The scroll wheel has its special challenges and I find a lot of people don't use it as well. Now the real problem is that software makers think everyone can use 2 buttons so they put choices in right-click menus rather than in drop-down menus from a tool bar so the average user will then never see all the choices available to them. Apple's one button mouse forces software makers to make applications easier to use. And a 2 button mouse will work with Apple apps so it's sort of the best of both worlds.

3. Microsoft popularized the concept that software has value and is worth paying for it.
I paid for software in the late 1970s before I had even heard of Microsoft, I bought video games for my Atari 2600. So 'software is worth paying for' I'd give to the video game industry.

4. Microsoft's intimidation leads to innovation.
I don't think so and the browser war is the wrong example to use. Microsoft illegially killed the Netscape web browser  which then led to years of Internet Explorer (IE) being effectively the only browser around. And Microsoft was not going to spend money developing it when it was/is free, so guess what? No inovations in browsers for years. Firefox pushing IE innovation today? Nope, IE is still largely a piece of crap. Monopolies rarely innovate, they usually always just protect their established cash flows. Firefox pushed to innovate because of IE? I don't see it. With IE slow to develop why should Firefox really have to innovate? Mozilla has been around for 10 years and we just got version 3 of Firefox? That doesn't sound like a great deal of innovation to me.

Finally I like Windows Vista, it's the first Windows OS that I can say that about. However the future is in the clouds, software as a service. It's good Bill Gates is retiring from Microsoft, he just went around trying to protect Windows and Office and in the clouds that will hurt the company. Steve Ballmer probably needs to go too for Microsoft to be a force up there.  

Secunia Personal Software Inspector (PSI) caused Windows Vista to crash on me when I shut-down Vista. Other than that PSI worked well and I would use it if I were on a supported OS like Windows XP.

PSI searches your PC for software that needs updating and provides downloads to update to newer versions if there are any available. Woody Leonhard recommends Secunia PSI and I trust him on most things regarding Windows but PSI is not for Vista. Who's Woody? He's written several books about Windows and maintains a blog, AskWoody.com, that follows Windows and Microsoft Office news. He also prefers Vista to XP so when Secunia PSI told me it was for Windows XP, 2000 & 2003 I installed it anyway on my Vista box. PSI worked well until I went to shutdown for the night and Vista crashed. I uninstalled PSI and everything is fine now, no crashes. Too bad, PSI would be nice to have and use on a regular basis.