User:Synthetic Soul

Personal

My name is Neil Popham. I live in the city of Exeter in the United Kingdom.

I am married to Lucy, and am the very proud father of Tilly, Romy, and Jasper.

I am currently employed as a web developer, mainly working with PHP and PostgreSQL.

I first got involved with Hydrogen Audio after I decided to back up all my CDs. I hung around the forums for a while, asked a few questions, and have been lingering ever since.

Methodologies

I am currently using WavPack images with accompanying cuesheets to archive my CDs. Archives are stored on both DVD and a 300GB hardrive. I also store PAR2 parity data on the DVDs, which is created for each image individually. I've yet to see whether this is a good method. I use EAC to rip the audio, in conjunction with REACT.

I get very little time to actually listen to my music! The main opportunity I get is walking to and from work, listening on my iPod Nano. I encode my music using LAME -V5 --vbr-new, and find the quality perfectly adequate. Still, I was very glad to see that the latest ~128kbps comparison proved that many people found the setting (near) transparent. Up until that time I had felt a little inadequate...

Contributions

My contributions have so far been quite minimal. I try to make up for this by answering as many of the easy questions as I can, so that the real stars can spend their time discussing the meaty questions. It also makes me look more knowledgeable than I am.

Tag and Wapet

Before using WavPack I used Monkey's Audio. In order for me to be able to automate my archiving process I found it necessary to adapt Case's Tag so that I could set tags from the contents of a text file - namely a cuesheet.

I'd never programmed any C(++) before and found the whole episode both immensely frustrating and incredibly satisfying.

I added the same functionality to Case's Wapet, as I thought it may be useful in the future.

There seemed little interest at the time, but both applications are now used by various other third party applications, such as FLACAttack and REACT.

foo_cuesheetcreator

foo_cuesheetcreator was originally created by Revision17 as a proof of concept.

I had been looking for a component to create cuesheets from a playlist for a while, and was amazed that I had not see it before. However there were some flaws with the component, e.g.: frames being calculated as 1/60th of a second rather than 1/75th and meta data tags being case sensitive, so I adapted it into a usable component.

Diskwriter With Cuesheet Support

I adapted Foobar2000 0.8.3's Diskwriter component so that as well as merging tracks into one single file you could also choose to create an accompanying cuesheet generated using the playlist information.

Since 0.9 beta 6 the same functionality has been included in Foobar2000 0.9. Of course Peter's implementation has more functionality, e.g.: the automatic embedding of the cuesheet in files that support it, and a similar facility using chapters in MP4 files.

Moderation

In February 2006 I was offered the position of moderator, which I accepted. It seemed only fair that I give something back to the community which had helped me so much, and generally offered such entertainment. I think the offer was made mainly on the fact that I spent way too long hanging around the forum, and that I was in a useful time zone. Now, there's qualifications for you. ;)

Settings

For your information, and my record. :-)

Converter and 'Move, Rename or Copy Files'

[%album artist%\][%album%\]$ifgreater(%totaldiscs%,1,Disc %discnumber%\,)[%tracknumber% - ]%title%[' ('%track artist%')']

... or, allowing for multiple artists:

[$if($meta_test(album artist),$meta_sep(album artist,', ',' And '),$meta_sep(artist,', ',' And '))\][%album%\]$ifgreater(%totaldiscs%,1,Disc %discnumber%\,)[%tracknumber% - ]%title%[' ('$if($meta_test(album artist),$meta_sep(artist,', ',' And '),)')']

ColumnsUI Album Column Display

[%album%]
[ ' ('%album subtitle%')']
[' ('%discname%')']
$if($greater(%totaldiscs%,1),[' ('Disc %discnumber%')'])

Run Service > Album Art

"C:\Program Files\AlbumArtDownloaderXUI\AlbumArt.exe" /artist "%artist%" /album "%album%" /path
"$replace(%_path%,%_filename_ext%,)folder.jpg" /sources "GoogleImage,Album Art Exchange,Amazon (.com)"
/minSize 450 /maxSize 650 /sort size-

Run Service > MP3Gain, 97dB Track Gain

"C:\Program Files\MP3Gain\mp3gain.exe" /r /d 8 /c /t /p /s s "%_path%"

Links

• My website : http://www.synthetic-soul.co.uk/
• Tag
  • My version : http://www.synthetic-soul.co.uk/tag/
  • Case's original : http://www.rarewares.org/others.html
• Wapet
  • My version : http://www.synthetic-soul.co.uk/wapet/
  • Case's original : http://www.rarewares.org/others.html
• foo_cuesheetcreator : http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=26276
• Diskwriter With Cuesheet Support : http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=35275