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Here’s a few of the recent photos I’ve posted:

Head on over to check it out, and feel free to subscribe to it by RSS or if you prefer, subscribe by email to get updates in your inbox every time I post something new. 

(I had a few issues at the beginning getting the blog layout right, so I republished photos several times over to accommodate different sizes.  So if you were an early subscriber, I apologize for the glut of updates in your RSS reader!)

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If you have firewire and shoot with a Compact Flash (CF) card, do yourself a favor and buy the Hoodman Firewire 400/800  CF card reader today.  This thing is a freakin’ speed demon!  I’m getting between 40-45 MB/s and downloading 175 RAW files from my Nikon D700 in less than a minute. 

To get the fastest speeds, you need to be using fast UDMA CF cards but it also supports non-UDMA cards as well.  Personally I use the SanDisk Extreme IV cards and highly recommend them.  I have never had one of their cards fail, and if their cards can survive explosions, they will put up with anything I throw at them

At first, I was hesitant to replace my Lexar USB card reader which is convenient due to supports both CF and SD.  However, since I shoot mostly with my DSLR, I opted to buy this additional card reader to sit side-by-side with my Lexar reader so I could save time.  I used to have to walk away from my PC while Lightroom imported my photos, but now I can see the files at freakishly amazing speeds.

Construction wise, it’s also built sturdy enough to both in your home office and on the road (assuming you have FW on your laptop) .  From the Amazon comments:

Almost immediately after I bought my reader, I dragged it across sub-Saharan Africa on some of the world’s bumpiest roads in 115° average afternoon temperature, under conditions where almost everything broke-down (cars, generators; hard-drives, computers; lenses etc.). The Hoodman CF Reader worked flawlessly… in fact, it still does, even in my air-conditioned office.

This was the best $80 I’ve spent in a really long time.

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I found out that both Foobar2000 and MP3Tag both supports some limited command line operations, and with a tiny bit of legwork, you can add a right-click (context menu) way of making this process easier.

With this approach, you can now right-click songs, select a context menu option and Foobar2000 will automatically apply ReplayGain at the track-level then MP3Tag will automatically open up and add the songs ready for you to apply the custom Action we previously created.

First, make sure you have Foobar2000 and MP3Tag installed.

Second, copy the following script and put it in a batch file and save it somewhere you can remember. I put mine in E:\Documents\ReplayGainScripts\ReplayGain.bat.  I’m on an x64 system, so notice the environment variables highlighted in red which will need to be changed to %PROGRAMFILES% if you are on x86 (32-bit).

@echo off
Echo Sending selected files to Foobar2000 to apply Track-level ReplayGain...
"%PROGRAMFILES(x86)%\foobar2000\foobar2000.exe" /context_command:"Replaygain/Scan per-file track gain" %*
if not %ERRORLEVEL%==0 goto :errorfoobar
Echo Sending direcotry to MP3Tag so you can apply the actions...
"%PROGRAMFILES(x86)%\Mp3tag\mp3tag.exe" /fp:%1
if not %ERRORLEVEL%==0 goto :errormp3tag
exit

:errorfoobar
echo Foobar2000 exited abnormally, ending script
pause
exit

:errormp3tag
echo MP3Tag exited abnormally, ending script
pause
exit

After you’ve saved the file, go to %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\SendTo, and create a new shortcut here by right-clicking, selecting New then Shortcut.  For the location, put the path where you saved the batch file.

Hit Next, then you’ll be prompted to enter a name for the shortcut. I used Apply ReplayGain:

Hit Finish and you’ll be returned back to the explorer Window and you’ll see your newly created shortcut:

You’re done! Now navigate to a directory containing the MP3 files you want to apply ReplayGain to, right click, select Send To then select Apply ReplayGain.  You’ll see Foobar2000 startup, automatically apply track-level ReplayGain, then when you finish, the batch file will start MP3Tag with the files ready for you to apply our ReplayGain action.  (Right-click on the songs, select Convert then Actions…).

Notes:

• This was tested on MP3Tag v2.45a and Foobar2000 v0.9.6.9 (which are the latest versions at the time I wrote this).
• Foobar2000 isn’t designed to be controlled entirely by command line which is why you can’t suppress the UI
• MP3Tag is extremely limited with only 2 command line options, so the scripts is limited to sending the entire directory to MP3Tag. This means 3 things:
• Even if you selected a subset of songs from a folder, Foobar2000 will correctly apply ReplayGain only to the subset of songs, but MP3Tag will load all the songs from the folder
• You can only work on a single folder at time. So do not select songs from multiple folders
• Currently, there is no way to get MP3Tag to auto-apply the action.
• I wrote this really quickly so there might be some bugs

Troubleshooting:

• Check the batch file output to see if Foobar2000 or MP3Tag are exiting abnormally. Most common causes will be because you’ve specified the wrong path to the EXE’s or you have a copy and paste problem somewhere

If you have any issues, drop me a line in the comments.

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1. Look at the song title
2. Type the song title into search box
3. In the search results, right click and delete the song

This was such a pain in the butt that I always wished there was an easier way to do this straight from the playlist.  Turns out there is!

I found this list of Windows shortcuts on Apple’s site which shows that Shift+Delete is the answer I’ve been looking for:

Shift-Delete

Delete the selected song from your library and all playlists

So when you’re in an iTunes playlist and want to remove the song from the playlist only, use Delete.  If you want to remove it from both the playlist AND your iTunes Library, use Shift+Delete !

(There is also another undocumented shortcut – CTRL + SHIFT + Delete which will do the same thing as Shift+Delete except it will add an extra confirmation for sending the file to the recycle bin. Since you already get one prompt using Shift+Delete, there’s no reason for this extra step)

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One of the hidden surprises of this camera was that there is an undocumented black & white mode!  I stumbled across it by accident going through the menus one day, and the great part is that it also works for videos!

Here is a shot I took of downtown Seattle:

Here’s how you turn the B&W mode on:

1. Start with the camera off
2. Press the “On” button and wait for the screen to say “Ready”
3. Press “Menu” button 5 times so you cycle through all the menus and end up back at the screen that says “Ready”.
4. Press “OK” button 3 times – first time to toggle into Video mode, second time to toggle back to camera, then the third time to go back to video mode. 

Tada! You’ll now see video mode in B&W, and if you press the “OK” button one more time, you’ll go back to photo mode which will now also be B&W. 

You automatically go back to color mode when you turn the camera off and back on, which means that you unfortunately can’t stay in B&W mode by default.

Note: I have the Zumi 2.0 camera, so this may not work for the first generation that was originally sold by Photojojo.

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Results from dslreports:

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One of my biggest pet peeves for the longest time is that songs and albums across my library vary in playback volume.  Since I almost always listen to music in shuffle/random across the entire library (or within a specific genre), track-to-track volume differences are very noticeable.  It’s particularly bad if I’m listening to through headphones.

By default, iTunes will analyze volume information on songs as you add them to your library.  It stores volume normalization in an extended ID3 tag called “COMMENT ITUNNORM” which it will read and adjust playback volume before each song starts.

While iTunes handles this really well, it sucks if you also use other media player software or want to move to another music player in the future.

Since I wanted to future proof myself, I started investigating how I could have a more portable solution that would be player independent.

Solution: Replay Gain

After doing some searches, I stumbled upon various ways of analyzing audio files in order to normalize overall loudness of song playback.  The most popular method seemed to be “Replay Gain” and it was getting a ton of support in 3rd party applications.

According to Wikipedia:

Replay Gain is a proposed standard published by David Robinson in 2001 to normalize the perceived loudness of computer audio formats such as MP3 and Ogg Vorbis. It works on a track/album basis, and is now supported in a growing number of media players. Although the standard is formally known as "Replay Gain", it is also commonly known as "ReplayGain" or "replaygain." It is sometimes abbreviated "RG".

The Theory of ReplayGain, with the relevant parts in red:

Replay Gain works by first performing a psychoacoustic analysis of an entire audio track to measure peak levels and perceived loudness. The difference between the measured perceived loudness and the desired target loudness is calculated; this is considered the ideal replay gain value (the target loudness of most Replay Gain utilities is 89 dB SPL — 6 dB higher than the Replay Gain specification and SMPTE recommendation). Usually, the gain value and the peak value are then stored as metadata in the audio file, allowing Replay Gain-capable audio players to automatically attenuate or amplify the signal so that tracks will play at a similar loudness level. This avoids the common problem of having to manually adjust volume levels when playing audio files from albums that have been mastered at different levels. Should the audio at its original levels be desired (e.g., for burning back to hard copy), the metadata can simply be ignored.

With lossy files, another benefit of Replay Gain is that the peak information can also be used to prevent loud songs from clipping.

…

Replay Gain utilities usually add metadata to the audio files without altering the original audio data. Otherwise, a tool can amplify the data itself and save the result to another, gain-adjusted audio file; this is not perfectly reversible in most cases. The Replay Gain standard specifies an 8-byte field in the header of any file, though many popular audio formats use tags for Replay Gain information.

Track vs. Album Gain

There are 2 ways to calculate Replay Gain – Track-gain or Album-gain.  Track-gain does analysis so all tracks are the same volume on playback.  Album-gain will gather additional peak and gain values for every song within an album, and try to maintain the intended loudness differences between tracks.

Album gain makes sense if you typically listen to a whole album at once.  Since I rarely do that, using track-gain made the most sense.

You can calculate both track and album-gain for each songs, but for me, it was a waste of time to do it in addition to track-gain.

How to calculate Replay Gain?

The easiest way I found to calculate Replay Gain (RG) for all the songs on my library was to use the well-known free music player Foobar2000.  After calculating RG for every single track, it’s one button click to add the RG values to the ID3 tags of all the songs in extended tag values called “REPLAYGAIN_TRACK_GAIN” and "REPLAYGAIN_TRACK_PEAK”.

Unfortunately, iTunes doesn’t read these 2 extended ID3 tags and uses it’s own ID3 tag called “COMMENT ITUNNORM” to store it’s volume normalization information. Yes, once again, Apple sucks for interoperability

The easiest way to get the value of both the RG standard ID3 tags, as well as having iTunes support is to convert the RG tags to the iTunes recognized ones.  Luckily there free tools to help us to that.

Disclaimer

While this only changes your ID3 tags, it is actually writing changes to each file.  Since we’re making changes broadly across your entire music library, make sure you’re extra careful before committing any of the steps below.

I recommend you take a complete backup of your music library before starting this in case you have to revert anything.

Software needed

You’ll need 2 free applications before we begin:

• Foobar2000
• MP3Tag

We’ll use Foobar2000 first to calculate the track-gain for each song and write out the ID3 tags, then use MP3Tag to copy the ReplayGain tag into the iTunes supported tag.

Step-by-step (click each screenshot for larger version):

1. In Foobar2000, add all your target songs either by using File | Add Folder, or drag-and-drop.  Best to try 1 album first, before doing your whole library.
2. Select all the songs that you added, right-click and choose Replay Gain then Scan Per-File Track Gain.
   
3. You’ll see a progress bar as it analyzes the peak and gain for each song you’ve selected.  This should be fairly quick assuming you haven’t chosen thousands of songs:
   
4. After that completes, you’ll see a summary window showing the results.  You won’t see any values calculated for Album gain or Album peak since we are only calculating track again.  Press Update File Tags to write the new extended ID3 tags to each song.
   
5. After all the tags are written out, you’ll be returned to the main Foobar2000 window. I couldn’t find any way in Foobar2000 to verify the ID3 tags were written out, but don’t worry, you can verify that in our next step.
6. Now, start up MP3Tag and add the same folder/albums/songs you just worked on in Foobar2000:
7. Optional: To verify the Replay Gain tags were written out by Foobar2000, right-click one one of the songs and choose Extended Tags.  You can then scroll down and see REPLAYGAIN_TRACK_GAIN and REPLAYGAIN_TRACK_PEAK tags and values:
8. There is no built in functionality in MP3Tag to convert the ReplayGain tag to the necessary iTunes tag.  Luckily, MP3Tag supports custom scripts that we can do almost anything we want with meta data.  Select all the songs in MP3Tag, and choose Convert then Actions.
9. On resulting Actions dialog, click on the little icon on the right side represent New Action:
10. Give a name to the action, I called mine “ReplayGain to ITUNNORM” and hit OK:
11. Another dialog will appear looking similar to the first. Click on the same “New” icon to actually define what this action will do:
12. For the Action Type, select “Format Value” and click OK:
13. You now have to define the format value.  Specify COMMENT ITUNNORM for the field name, and $rg2sc(%REPLAYGAIN_TRACK_GAIN%) for the format string.  Pay attention to the spelling of both, it needs to be exact. Press OK.
    
14. You’ll be returned to the Action groups dialog, where you’ll see your newly created action. Make sure you check the box next to it, and press OK to invoke the action.
15. MP3Tag will make quick work of the tag conversion, and you’ll see a summary dialog tell you how many tags it formatted.  It should be exactly equal the number of songs you selected originally.  If it’s not, then your work in Foobar2000 didn’t work and you should restart.
16. Optional: You can verify that the new iTunes tag was added by doing the same thing we did in Step 7, except this time we look for a new extended tag called COMMENT ITUNNORM  
17. The last step is to now get iTunes to read your new track gain information.  If you don’t already have the song added to your iTunes library, you can just add it and it will be read automatically.  However, if the song is already part of your library, there’s an easy work around.  Just select all the songs, click Get Info.  On teh information dialog in iTunes about the selected songs, do not make any changes.  Instead, just click OK and iTunes will re-read all the song information, including the new COMMENT ITUNNORM tag you added. 

Presto! Your music is now all set with Replay Gain information, and will be supported in iTunes, your iPod and even your iPhone.

If I ever get around to it, I’ll look into creating a simple app that can automated this. But don’t hold your breath

Update (1/3/2010): I create a simple batch file to help alleviate some of the manual steps.

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One drawback, however, is when you need to install Windows from bootable media such as a DVD.  With Windows Vista, Microsoft Store only gave you an option to download the Windows setup files, and to install windows, you would run setup.exe to kickoff the Windows setup.

This happens when you have a PC without an existing version of Windows installed, or even a Mac where you are trying to install Windows with boot camp.

In these cases, it’s hardly convenient to have an ESD version of Windows since you have no way of starting setup without a lot of manual steps.

Windows 7 ISO files

After purchasing your downloadable Windows 7 edition on Microsoft Store, you now have the option of several types of downloads.  By default, we offer the 32-bit version of the edition you purchased that can be downloaded and Windows setup can be kicked off right away.  This is the version that most of our customers be downloading.

However, in addition to this, we also now offer a set of “Advanced” download options that gives you choice of 64-bit installer and both 32-bit and 64-bit ISO files!

Offering ISO files in addition to our regular “installer” versions, helps customers that need both the convenience of a download but also need physical media to boot from.

The Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool

Our team is committed to creating the best experience for downloading software from Microsoft.  We previously created the Microsoft Store Download Manager to help with the download process.

To burn an ISO to DVD you can use any of the many free or commercial applications that are available.   However, majority of these programs don’t provide easy ways to create bootable USB Keys in addition to DVDs.

We created the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool (WUDT) to help customers that have more advanced needs for their Windows 7 installation and need an easy way to create bootable media.  The WUDT will take the ISO files from Microsoft Store and easily create either a bootable DVD or a USB Key with only a few clicks.

This is a free tool and available for immediate download.

Here is the WUDT step-by-step for creating a bootable USB Key:

After the process is completed, you can take the USB key and plug it into your target installation PC and choose to boot from the USB Key which will automatically start the Windows 7 installer.  If you chose to create a bootable DVD instead, the process is nearly identical except that you’ll boot from the DVD.

For answers to frequently asked questions, please see our FAQ.

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