Tom's Hardware has an interesting piece on building an HTPC based on AMD's Maui platform and Windows 7. Silent PC Review and others reported on the platform in November and what's interesting is that the audio amplifiers can be integrated in the HTPC.
Not for me though, my 13 kilogram AV receiver won't be exchanged for an amplifier on a PCI express card. I'll keep feeding it digital signal exclusively.
Showing posts with label Internet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Internet. Show all posts
18 February, 2009
26 July, 2008
Last.fm
In the battle between the music communities Last.fm and Pandora, the choice is obvious in Europe: Since Pandora had to block service to anyone outside the Land of the Free in May 2007, the prize went to Last.fm.
Wikipedia gives a decent explanation of what Last.fm is and what it does, so I won't repeat that here. This month, Last.fm released a new web layout with a number of improvements. The Last.fm blog visitors are raising hell about the layout, but it has actually improved. With so many links and information, the pages used to have a tendency to get cluttered up. The new interface does a better job at that.
Now, about the auto-dj capabilities. I like to play my local music and not be dependent on the quality of the streams that Last.fm provides. The plugin available for MediaMonkey is trash. It's based completely off of Last.fm's recommendations. Typically, the recommendations are songs that the user hasn't played, so there's a big chance the recommendations aren't present in the local collection. The plugin fails to find a hit and defaults back to a favorite.
The MediaPortal plugin seems to do a better job. It really looks for songs similar to the songs played. Just playing "Hunting high and low" by A-ha results in a true 80s playlist, while "Ruby" by the Kaiser Chiefs gets me a playlist with recent Brit pop. Unfortunately, after a while some artists are played more and more often.
Part of the problem is that the auto-dj's use queries from last fm, but Last.fm doesn't really support the auto dj plugins. With all the data gathered by Last.fm, it should be possible to make a better guess of what song I want to hear next. I'd expect a setup page for configuring auto dj preferences integrated in Last.fm.
What I end up doing is just go to Last.fm, pick an artist and play the Music like... stream. Great fun, but anyone can do that, even if you don't have a profile at all. And then, what's the point in uploading data about every song I play?
Wikipedia gives a decent explanation of what Last.fm is and what it does, so I won't repeat that here. This month, Last.fm released a new web layout with a number of improvements. The Last.fm blog visitors are raising hell about the layout, but it has actually improved. With so many links and information, the pages used to have a tendency to get cluttered up. The new interface does a better job at that.
Now, about the auto-dj capabilities. I like to play my local music and not be dependent on the quality of the streams that Last.fm provides. The plugin available for MediaMonkey is trash. It's based completely off of Last.fm's recommendations. Typically, the recommendations are songs that the user hasn't played, so there's a big chance the recommendations aren't present in the local collection. The plugin fails to find a hit and defaults back to a favorite.
The MediaPortal plugin seems to do a better job. It really looks for songs similar to the songs played. Just playing "Hunting high and low" by A-ha results in a true 80s playlist, while "Ruby" by the Kaiser Chiefs gets me a playlist with recent Brit pop. Unfortunately, after a while some artists are played more and more often.
Part of the problem is that the auto-dj's use queries from last fm, but Last.fm doesn't really support the auto dj plugins. With all the data gathered by Last.fm, it should be possible to make a better guess of what song I want to hear next. I'd expect a setup page for configuring auto dj preferences integrated in Last.fm.
What I end up doing is just go to Last.fm, pick an artist and play the Music like... stream. Great fun, but anyone can do that, even if you don't have a profile at all. And then, what's the point in uploading data about every song I play?
25 January, 2008
Antec Fusion HTPC case
Tom's hardware has posted a review of the Antec Fusion HTPC case. The timing seems odd, this product is not exactly new on the market. But they did a thorough job and it is a nice case.
07 November, 2007
Links
Here's two completely unrelated but nevertheless interesting links:
Missing remote has a helpful guide on building a Media Center PC for a little over 1000 dollars. All important aspects are covered, check it out if you're building a yourself a new set.
The other link is to All out Assault, a forum site where Audiogon users display their monstrous audio setups. The absurdness is funny to the point where you almost feel pity for the audiophiles, basically feeding their addiction by throwing tons of money (literally) into their hunt for the ultimate listening experience.
Missing remote has a helpful guide on building a Media Center PC for a little over 1000 dollars. All important aspects are covered, check it out if you're building a yourself a new set.
The other link is to All out Assault, a forum site where Audiogon users display their monstrous audio setups. The absurdness is funny to the point where you almost feel pity for the audiophiles, basically feeding their addiction by throwing tons of money (literally) into their hunt for the ultimate listening experience.
10 October, 2007
Internet
Using information from internet is what distinguishes a Media Center PC from a harddisk recorder, a Tivo, etcetera.
MediaPortal is constantly finding information from the internet about the media it shows or plays. It gathers tv guide information for watching tv, artist information, related music and cd covers while listening to music, actors with your movies, episode guides with the tv series. And then there's the stuff that you can only get from the internet: Webradio, rss news feeds, movie trailers.
Now, this also means that using a Media Center isn't half the fun when you loose connection to the internet. Dutch readers: By all means - avoid Tele2 as an internet provider. It took the Swedish maffia 10 weeks to move my phone and internet connection.
In my new house I also made some improvements in connectivity. Instead of wireless, my desktop pc and Media Center PC are now hard wired to my ADSL router. That means I got rid of USB WiFi devices not starting up properly. And that I have 100Mbit connectivity between my PC's, or more if I upgrade the router. So I'm set up for some serious nerdmanship...
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