Misplaced

[caddyman]

It looks as though I may have left my Network Walkman at the office. Either that or I have lost it completely, along with close on 15,000 tunes that I have patiently copied to it over the past few years. The last place I recall seeing it is on my desk at work. This is at least cause for hope, for although things not bolted down at work have a habit of walking off under their own steam the fact I missed putting it in my pocket suggests that I had moved a piece of paper over it.

I don't fancy the thought of buying a replacement just yet - that player still had a couple of GigaBytes of space out of the advertised twenty and the battery life was (is) excellent between charges. Much better than on an iPod.

Oh well. Fingers crossed, otherwise I shall be shelling out on an iPod or something since they don't do that particular Walkman any more and I don't like any of the current Sony offerings.

Comments

[bluesman.livejournal.com]

Fingers crossed indeed, that it is under something and will not be seen and stolen. You may remember my entry about the theft of my colleague's i-pod a few weeks ago. It's rotten when you can't trust people you work with.

'Angonasec, fifteen thousand items??? Have you listened to them all? Caramba.

[caddyman.livejournal.com]

Most of the 15,000 yes. But individual tracks only come around rarely, it has to be said.

I like having pretty much my entire music collection portable!

[jfs.livejournal.com]

What bitrate are you storing the tracks at? 15,000 tunes is impressive for 20Gb. (Especially given that, knowing you, some of the tracks will be prog rock ... :))

[caddyman.livejournal.com]

I couldn't possibly confirm or deny any rumours that some tracks may be around 20 minutes long... ;-)

By far and away the majority of the tracks are recorded at 64 kbit/s on Sony's ATRAC3 plus. This gives a similar sound quality to MP3s at 128 kbit/s. A couple of hundred songs are MP3 at 128 knit/s, but I can cram so many tracks on simply because they take half the space!

Over the headphones I can't tell the difference in quality and even on those occasions when I've played the Walkman through the hifi the 64 kbit/s sounds fine.

While ATRAC is (may be?) better than MP3 and will play MP3 tracks, MP3 software won't play ATRAC codec tracks and since Sony seem to have kept it as a proprietary thing, I expect it is going the same route as Betamax video tapes. They don't seem to use it on their smaller MP3 players and most people want MP3s so they can swap music.

[jfs.livejournal.com]

Thought it might be something like that. I'm ripping all my music to AAC at the moment because for the same apparent listening quality, 128kbit/s is the same as 192kbit/s MP3.

Having said that, when I get a new player, it's likely to be the 120Gb iPod, and there's a significant number of tracks that aren't brilliantly ripped, so I might re-invest the time in re-ripping my collection, and rip them to whatever is the next AAC value up.

I'm only talking about 5000 tracks or so, though.

[caddyman.livejournal.com]

Yes, because I am generally lacking optimism about people being able to resist snaffling my Walkman, I have been looking at possible replacements, should I need to invest. The 120Gb iPod Classic looks like my favoured option, too.

Of course that means that I would have to start from scratch and re-copy all my music since what I have on this PC is ATRAC encoded...

[phil99.livejournal.com]

Any luck finding said implement of doom?

[caddyman.livejournal.com]

Indeed yes!

For just about the first time ever, something left out by accident has not been filched!

[phil99.livejournal.com]

That never happens. I'd check the office very carefully for signs of being in an alternate universe :)

[caddyman.livejournal.com]

The zeppelin refueling from the water cooler was a dead giveaway.