The ending of this ending made me bust a laugh, it was priceless.
Terry Poulin
With a little help from my kitchen tools
An idea occurred to me last night that I decided to try this morning: omelet in muffins.
I’m reminded of my mother telling me as a kid that her father managed to destroy several toasters trying to make homemade McMuffins when they came out in the early 1970s. Never really understood how you would do that, short of putting runny egg in the toaster. In my case, I simply put two whipped eggs in a greased tamagoyaki pan and only folded it over in half to finish before cutting that in half. Perhaps this is ironic considering that my grandfather was in the pacific theater during WWII, lol.
One muffin was made with a thick slice of snack-cheddar so that it would melt just enough to get soft and spongy enough to fill the crevices of the muffin and omelette, and the other with the available sandwich cheese at hand (a thin slice of Swiss). Kinda made me wish that I had bothered to grab some ham or pastrami while I was at it, but alas I did not.
Since I’ve been watching the sodium and cholesterol intake with my blood pressure, I’ve tried to avoid the temptation to take a Drive-Thru breakfast on the way to work over this past year. So I found this a rather nice breakfast, if rather large for me. Between the lack of ham and my disinclination to salt the shit out of my food, each probably represents half the sodium content of one McMuffin.
Batteries and Old Computers
One of the downsides of breaking out an old laptop to test something that involves a bunch of file I/O, is watching the battery life deplete. To be fair, my old X61T was old when I bought it. That it’s still got about 44% of its original battery capacity left is kind of impressive, and it’s enough for it’s purposes.
One of the upsides of modern software is the oh crap your battery is at 2% warning 😆. This is a great contrast to my very first laptop, where there was a certain tendency as it aged for the power connector to get loose enough to stop charging, and the key way you could tell was the BIOS changing the screen brightness…or the screen suddenly going blank.
The part that I find kind of sad, is given the popularity of ThinkPads I could probably dig up an aftermarket replacement battery for this old machine, but Hill was mostly an experiment that didn’t work out due to hardware issues. On the flip side, somewhere between updated Alpine Linux and replacing my wireless network, the Lenovo PCI-E ID locked BIOS and its P.O.S. Intel card no longer seems to experience routine firmware crashes and connectivity problems. Which has made it rather handy for those times where a spare Linux computer to one side is useful. I think my fiddling with vintage Macs has also in a round about way, provided the hardware that I would need to flash hacked BIOS for removing the hardware check and bumping up the SATA link speed.
But let’s not go booting into DOS while we’re at it 😛
Old tunes
One miscellaneous upside of the recent putzing with portable media players, I ended up cleaning off one of my older USB sticks where I had stashed some files that never quite made it into the Plex-ification of my music library back in the day, which in turn helped me find the associated backups of those on my file server.
In most cases, these are files that I either have on my server’s Music folder already, or have the original CDs and plan to make a modern rip. In some cases, old downloads and freebies where I’d just go back and buy the rest of the album at this point. But in a few cases there are files that aren’t so replicable: party mixes and compositions that musically inclined friends did back in the day, that I assumed had been lost in the years since my first laptop was decommissioned.
Yeah, well, it turns out I’m an even better backup-horder than I remember, since I’ve found copies exported from my first laptop, and archives of old backups from the same laptop, lol.
The iWar Continues
Largely wrapping up the cluster-fuckery that is File Server -> Apple Music -> iPod, I find myself only mildly perturbed with some of the files that were filed (pun intended) for later review before import.
Cases where the album’s original source is a FLAC or WAV with an unusual sample rate when having Audacity convert it to an M4A/AAC file for import. Apple Music will happily import files with the crazy high 96 kHz sample rates, and Audacity happily uses 44.1 kHz for the project. Apple Music, whatever Finder uses for its previews, and VLC (the known good) all play them audibly fine but these can’t be synced to the iPod because of being unplayable due to the sample rates. In one specific case, Apple Music had audible muffling artifacts but otherwise sounds fine through multiple local audio outputs.
Adjusting the conversion options in Audacity to encode these at 44.1 kHz, works in that all points of software reference sound fine off the laptop, but generate chirp artifacts on the iPod as the source goes outside the sample range. Reconfirmed that it’s not just my ears by way of jacking into my speakers with a 3.5 male to male cable, and comparing the output of the iPod to Apple Music on my laptop.
Which makes me even more tempted to just say to fuck with it and load Rockbox. I’ve mostly tried to use the provided tools, even if I’m pretty sure that the iTunes side must have been the worst aspect of iPod software. But my temptation for replacement firmware has been more driven by the aspect that I’d prefer to treat the device as a generic storage device for media and playlists. Whether or not the FLAC encoder is up to snuffs or can support some of the more esoteric files in my collection would really just be a benefit IMHO.
In other weirdness, of course the first 3.5 M to M analog cable doesn’t work, because it’s probably the one weirdo in the box of analog computer stuffs, forcing me to go get the known good cable from my car just to do that AUX IN test, lol.
Random factoid: Linux can still read HFS+
Imagine my surprise when I boot up Hill, load hfsprogs, and mount my iPod’s data partition under Alpine Linux and it just works ™ provided the magic sanctified cable that cost $20 at the fruit store rather than the generic one.
Of course, the oh crud involving the file server’s RAID enclosure means experimenting with Linux media players for syncing music is tabled for another day, along with whether or not Rockbox shall replace its OS in favor of not having to suffer Apple’s software for the sync.
Server Recovery
There are rare occasions when I am glad to be both smarter than the average computer user, and a touch paranoid. Today has proven to be one of those times.
Earlier today, my file server’s RAID enclosure managed to take a ThinkPad to the face, and this lead to a great circle of profanity upon the discovery that said server was no longer seeing a disk label. Turns out that managed to nudge the mode switch (which of course some arsehole put on the front) and depress the power button sufficiently to switch modes to combined disks. Of course, switching back wiped out the metadata and so on.
But because I’m a right pain in the ass myself and the first reaction to going from a Master / Backup drive pair to a RAID 1 redundancy was roughly, “Ahh shit, now I need a third drive for the backups,” I only lost data since yesterday at about 0102 UTC when I backed up the array to my NVMe drive. Which largely amounts to having to re-upload some recent files to the server’s Music share, rather than 100 GB of family photos that aren’t offsite so frequently.
Being the anal retentive pain in the ass that I am, the restore process is even relatively simple for the file shares since it’s roughly reformat drive, run script for each share, copy files for each share, verify permissions / access control lists / ownership / contexts / yada, yada. I’m too paranoid not to already know that the backup procedure will work, because how the fuck would I have migrated the data the first time? 😁
The catch? Well, the virtual machines weren’t backed up but were being stored on the array. It’s been on my todo list to study the best way to handle backing them up automatically. Only one virtual machine actually had any local data of consequence, and was the authoritative name server for my LAN’s domain. Except I kind of don’t need to worry about that for three reasons:
- Name servers two and three are configured so that either can be converted to take over the job with a minimal fuss.
- Their topology was chosen so only resolving local domains would fail if name server one fails longer than the pair serving my LAN caches.
- Name servers one, two, and three are each automatically backed up every night to, you guessed it, the file server!
Which means name server one’s sudden demise fits into the “important but not urgent” quadrant of my Eisenhower matrix, and affords cause to revisit the issue of how the VM’s should be managed on Zeta.
Also while I’m at it, I’ve repositioned Zeta’s RAID enclosure to make it much harder for anything to hit that fucking button and switch. I might build a proper safety cover just to be extra paranoid, lol.
Destruction of trust and faith, supplemental
Well, that’s fun and interesting. Several attempts at removing / reimporting later, I found that results would not change. But in between importing and quitting, if I used “Show in Finder”, it decided to open one of the missing tracks–right out of the trash. Emptying the trash, deleting the album, quitting the app, relaunching, and re-importing seems to have worked. Watching the activity window, it even worked its way through sound check information.
So, I guess it can be made to work–Apple Music just can’t be trusted unless you’re prepared to quit app and review that every import matches what it should. ‘Cuz that scales so well \o/.
Yeah, my urge to press my old ThinkPad or Latitude into song management duty is rising.
The way to destroy all trust and faith in your music software
Eons ago when I had first encountered iTunes, I will admit that I really hated it–but I will also admit that it *worked* which is ya know, like the most important thing ever about software? We just had a difference in opinion on how things should work, but it did work, and for that I respected iTunes despite the sour taste it left in my mouth. For friends, it was often the gold standard unless they were fellow unix nerds.
Importing music into Apple Music is mostly painless. Drag a folder of tunes onto the icon and boom, it’s imported. The tag editor even makes it easy to add album art and metadata, if so inclined.
And here’s the rub?
Drag and drop “Alan Jackson – 34 Number Ones” onto the icon, it imports, it plays, the files get organized into “$HOME/Music/Music/Media.localized/Music/Alan Jackson/34 Number Ones” by way of the default copy and organize settings. Yup. All good. Everything working perfectly! Now quit and relaunch Apple Music, and go open the album. Suddenly tracks 4, 20, 32, and 33 are present out of tracks 1 through 37 but here’s the real kicker: the files are still in Apple Music’s library on disk, they just are not in the database after quitting the app!
Now I know why the fucking hell partial albums were showing up on my iPod for some of my content that came from my old MP3 files rather than re-rips to fresh AAC/M4A generated in Apple Music. At first, I thought that it might have been because these are later 320 Kbit/s files encoded for quality unlike the 128 Kbit/s typical of older files. I considered those worth breaking out the stack’o’discs and external optical drive for ripping again, but these don’t need anything else.
Why is that a problem? Well, guess what: Apple Music just destroyed any faith or trust I have in its ability to _ever_ manage my music collection. Because if you can’t reliably import and database files reliably, you cannot be trusted to manage them safely. I could forgive throwing up your digital hands in horror with an error message decrying the files as unable to be imported; that would be fair because it’s descriptive if you encounter some kind of error. Silently flushing data into the aether on the other hand, not so much, even if you leave the files on disk.
For shits and giggles, removing the album removes the 4 tracks from its place on disk and leaves the other 33 behind. Which suggests that it really is a logic error somewhere, as if Apple Music imported the files but forgot to mark them as imported, so it doesn’t actually manage them. Trashing the entire folder on the other hand and re-importing, has a more interesting result. The GUI loads the entire set of files but only the same 4 tracks are copied into the library.
SMH, seriously what the fuck, Apple!
As far as I can tell, this occurs irrespective of the location of imported content. I’ve copied the file server’s master copies to my laptop, so that I could non-destructively sort them into imported and review folders after reviewing what’s ready to drag’n’drop as is, which will need updating metadata, and which require some thought (e.g. albums with mp3/flac and mp3/wav side by side), and so on. That eliminates any possibilities of the network or removable media, and ya know, checksums are kinda reliable at detecting oops a file is corrupt. I don’t think that I’ve had any problems with content directly ripped from disc, only with files imported.
Random things that make me roll my eyes
Apparently, Finder’s Get Info dialog has support for some common multimedia metadata in the “More Info” section much like the “Details” section of Explorer’s properties dialog. Except when viewing network shares or external drives, in which case the More Info section will be pretty useless. Which makes it more grumble some to review such things before importing into Apple Music, and trying to decipher how the application handles various types of metadata on import.
On the flip side, ffprobe still works perfectly on Linux. Because between Linux and ffmpeg, if one isn’t the solution, often the other is, lol.