Jump to content

kevinfisher

  • Posts

    36
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Country

    country-ZZ

Retained

  • Member Title
    Freshman Member
  1. Because of severe budget restraints, I've been a digital audiophile wanna be for quite some time; but I have recently added something that has significantly increased my listening enjoyment. I've been sending my analog music signal over a cat5 wire to my media room from the office until the headphone jack on my laptop began to fail (loud hum resulting), and my local tech recommended the Sound Blaster X-fi external sound card, which I purchased from Amazon for about $60, Amazon.com: Creative Soundblaster X-Fi Surround 5.1 Pro USB Audio System with THX SB1095: Electronics. I'm now outputting "Direct Sound" from JRiver Media Center via USB to the X-fi, out RCA jacks over the cat5, and the increase in sound quality is breathtaking. My next project will be to pull an optical cable through the existing conduit and eliminate the cat5. I'm very curious as to the next increase in sound quality and will do some A/B tests between that signal and cd's once I've made that change. I don't know the spec's on the X-fi and whether it is bit-perfect, all I know is what my ears tell me and they are very happy indeed. So, for the cash-starved music lovers among us, I'd highly recommend this very modest upgrade until we can afford more expensive gear. Hey, maybe Chris can start a C.A.S.H-Starved section on the site...;-))) I'm open to receiving any suggestions to tweaks on JRiver settings. "It's all about the music" Chuck H. Happy listening... Levovo TP1/XP-Pro>JRiver>USB>SoundBlaster X-fi>RCA/cat5>Denon AVR-3808CI>Paradigm mini monitor v.4
  2. I recently solved an issue with my music having "disappeared" out of itunes by installing JRiver, which promptly found all my music. What I discovered was duplicate folders in various places, my music, music, with as many as 6-10 copies of most songs. I need to understand a methodology to combine all of these scattered files into an organizational structure that makes sense. I have no idea how this diaspora occurred, and would like some assistance on how to go about corralling all my songs. From JRiver I can see the locations of all of them and since I've transferred my loyalty to MediaPlayer I don't think I need to be concerned with the itunes file paths, but since MediaPlayer doesn't care about the file system, it might be prudent to use the itunes file paths "just in case". I'm hoping there is some form of drag and drop whole folders so I don't have to deal with individual songs. Any suggestions for my folder challenged brain would be greatly appreciated.
  3. I haven't solved the lan issue, but I copied My Documents onto my old Gateway (from my ext drive) to use it as a temp music server. The file path of all the songs is F (ext drive), so I wasn't able to play them with itunes on the Gateway. I'm looking into creating an F partition on the C drive for this because i don't know of a way to change the file path en mass, only one song at a time. Tonight my brother recommended I might look at another media player, so I downloaded media monkey, had it search all the folders that contain music files and in 16 minutes, it found ALL my missing tracks. WOW, after all these months and days and hours painstakingly opening up the many duplicate folders that somehow got created, and in 16 minutes mm found everything I was missing and loads of stuff I forgot I had. I don't know if this means I have permanently left the itunes community, but I'm pretty happy with mm at the moment. i wish someone had recommended this sooner. All the "search" tools I tried were useless, but mm rocks.
  4. Thanks everyone for all your suggestions. I did not have any success locating the missing files with any "search" options. However, I have recovered about 95% of my music by manually opening my Acronis backups. My first attempt at locating the files there was unsuccessful, as I tried using the "recovery" function in Acronis. It kept telling me there were no files to recover, but eventually I went to the ext drive through "my computer" and found the backups and restored most of the songs. I'm now attempting to fire up an old Gateway computer to use as a server, until I can afford an NAS, and create multiple backups of my files. I still have no idea why the files disappered in the first place, but am very happy to report a, mostly, happy ending. I won't go into the hours it took to do this, most of you know the hours/days it takes to sort through this kind of meltdown. My current challenge is get my lan functional. So far, none of the Windows networking wizard/dunce tools have allowed me to network between my XP Pro laptop/ext drive and the Gateway XP Media Edition desktop. Any suggestions/links would be gratefully received on how to get my computers to "talk" to each other. I downloaded a free utility from CNET called "Advanced IP Scanner" and I can "see" the Gateway from my Levovo laptop, but keep getting "access denied" error messages whenever I attempt to link up the two computers. I've done all the standard things like make sure the 'work group' names are the same, disable the firewall as a test, etc, etc. Kevin
  5. I went to the mirror download page and clicked on the suggested link (http://sourceforge.net/projects/partedmagic/files/partedmagic/Parted%20Magic%202012_3_24/pmagic_2012_3_24.iso/download) and was taken to a page that displays: demandbaseiosheader_extra_htmlprecommendedsafari_dl_delaymirrorreleaseie I see no way to burn this to a cd.
  6. I did the search for jj cale, j j cale and got no results. I'm trying a simpler name "moby" as suggested. "Search" has been running "moby" for about an hour and has not found any files that match. I never deleted any music files, ever. I moved to a new house, plugged in my computer and the drive letters changed on their own. What's so puzzling is that it seems to me it should be no different that when there is a power outage when I'm not home and the UPS runs out of power and the computer shuts down. That's happened several times, but this problem never occurred before. My local tech suggested unplugging everything from my USB hub and plugging in the external drive first, but that didn't resolve the change in drive letters. Regardless of the drive letter issue, which I solved in "preferences>advanced" by changing the drive letter to match what is the current reality. I know that some music got filed under C, (my ext drive is F, which is where I store my music), but when I change it to C in advanced, it still doesn't find the missing files. itunes must have reverted to the default of C after one of the many "updates" I have installed. I now know I must check the drive letter in advanced after every update. Seems like a glitch with itunes that it would revert to the default of C after an update... I have followed the file paths as shown in itunes, get info, and the folders are simply not there. I'm going to try some of the suggestions for a program that can find missing files, including those that are in trash. I'll report back later. It's been a busy couple weeks, as I am fostering an emaciated mama and 4 pups (plus my own 8 mo and an 8 week puppy) which came from the local animal rescue group here in Boquete, Panama. I'm up to my ankles in poop, pee and assorted chaos. And yes, they bite my toes and ankles as well. All good fun...and totally exhausting. I tried to check out foobar yesterday, but I could not log on to their server. Thanks everyone for hanging in there with me...
  7. I'm with you, that occurred to me as well, so it is now searching for j j cale instead of .m4a, etc. Nothing yet and it's been running for about half an hour. I'll go have a look at foobar now. I kept putting "i hate itunes" in the subject line because I didn't want to confuse the thread, but maybe that's not necessary anymore.
  8. Here is a representative screenshot of a song I cannot play. The search feature is checking C,F,G, which are all the drives where music is stored. I did not run the linux distro as I am a little nervous running something I'm not familiar with and I'm not sure how to verify that's safe to do so.
  9. Yes, I've been trying that repeatedly for many songs. I go to the place where "info" says it is, and this is after I get the error message "song cannot be played because original file cannot be located, would you like to locate it?" I click no, then go to info and see the file path. I go to where it says the songs is, but it's just not there. I'm sure that at some point, itunes changed from my ext drive "F" back to the default "C". I know this because I had to go to preferences and change it back to F. I did not change it to C, itunes did that on it's own, hence part of my dislike of itunes. It's been many weeks since I tried it, but I believe I tried to consolidate all music to F, but this didn't solve the problem.
  10. Actually, no. Thanks for asking. I copied this from the search window. *.aif,*.aiff,*.m4a,*.mp4a. I tried several combinations because I'm not sure which is the right one. It found no music, not even the m4a music in itunes I can listen to now. It only found mp3's, which are not my main concern. Can you suggest anything else?
  11. I wasn't sure if the star "*" was necessary, so I put it in both ways...*m4a, m4a, *aiff, aiff. Uh Oh,I see it now, I wasn't putting in the dot. Good grief!!! Thank you...
  12. As a follow up, since I'm not concerned with mp3, I deleted that from the search and left m4a, aiff. It has not found a single track in the last 7 hours, not even the ones that itunes will play. It's a head scratcher for sure.
  13. After moving and then hooking up my computer and external drive, somehow itunes has 'lost' most of everything I've ripped from my purchased cd's/downloads. If I go to the location itunes offers when it can't find the file, there is nothing there. I have not deleted any music file EVER. The drive letter seems to have changed on it's own and my external drive (F) no longer contains all the files. Some of them have migrated to ©, but when I go to © to retrieve them, the songs are not there...I HATE ITUNES...is there any way to recover all my music and more importantly, is there a more stable music platform I can acquire to manage my music. I am just sick and about to throw up over the distress. XP-PRO
  14. The settings hold when the power is off. It may be a glitch in the network that more often causes a problem than the unit resetting, which requires re-entering the password. I somewhat regularly have to turn off home sharing and turn it back on. Figuring out that simple step has saved me from a lot of networking troubleshooting.
  15. I use my ATV2 in the media room where the tv lives, so not having a monitor is not an issue, but every once in a while something glitches and it has to reboot so you may need to drag in the tv for those times. Or, have extra cabling set up at your media center and take the ATV to there for programming. Since I don't have any cool accessories, I have to go through the very tedious process of using the remote with the on-screen keypad. But it's not only the Trilateralalists or their overlords the Bilderbergers you have to worry about, which I believe to be about as serious as a heart attack. To keep ones sanity about such things, a little humor can help, such as the folks a the theregister.uk, where you can go to a dedicated page called "Rise of the Machines". There you will learn about the true overlords from outer space, the Lizard Alliance, (with a Lizard Army, of course) and the brave, non-mind-controlled humans, known as the neoLuddite Resistance Army (NRA). It is spine tingling stuff.
×
×
  • Create New...