Tools for adding FLAC and SHN files to your iTunes Library on OS X
As some visitors to arfore.com will have noticed I feature a list of recent etree.org downloads on my Listening page. The files from etree.org are live shows recorded by dedicated fans and concert goers. Many, if not most, of these recordings are posted in one of two lossless file formats: SHN and FLAC.
Both of these file formats are used for compressing audio files. The reason they are used is due to the fact that they are lossless formats. Lossless compression allows for the expansion of the of the file into an exact duplicate of the original recorded audio stream.
iTunes supports a different lossless format: Apple Lossless. Unfortunately, iTunes does not support playback of either FLAC or SHN files. So what is an audiophile to do? Using two different free programs you will be able to easily convert both FLAC and SHN files to a format that iTunes can use, thus giving you the ability to take those awesome concerts with you everywhere on your iPod or iPhone.
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Why the extra sugar?
As many of my friends are aware I am a big fan of honey. As the son of a second-generation beekeeper, I grew up eating honey in many varieties. I learned early on that all-natural peanut butter mixed with honey was a great combination, and I have eaten it that way ever since.
I use honey in my tea, I cook with it, and often eat it plain. In short, I really like honey.
With the major peanut butter companies getting on the bandwagon over the last few years, I am disappointed to see that almost all of them insist on mixing sugar, corn syrup or cane sugar with the peanut butter in addition to honey. Today while in Wal-mart I noticed a new variety of peanut butter on the shelf and picked it up. I was drawn to the product labeling which featured a stylized honeybee on the label. The product was “The Bee’s Knees” by Peanut Butter & Co. Upon reading the ingredients list, however, I was saddened to see that while the list was short compared to many others, it still included sugar.
I am continually amazed by all the products that use honey and yet insist on adding additional sweeteners to the ingredients. Of the four different varieties of peanut butter for sale in Valdosta, I found that all of them included sugar, molasses, cane sugar, natural honey flavor (this is NOT real honey) or some combination thereof, in addition to honey itself:
- The Bee’s Knees – Peanuts, evaporated cane juice, honey, natural honey flavor, palm fruit oil, salt
- Skippy Peanut Butter Roasted Honey Nut (Creamy and Super Chunk) – Roasted Peanuts, Honey, Sugar, Molasses, Hydrogenated Vegetable Oils (Cottonseed, Soybean and Rapeseed) to Prevent Separation, Salt
- Peter Pan Honey Roast (Creamy and Chunky) – Peanut Butter [Roasted Peanuts, Sugar, Hydrogenated Vegetable Oils (Cottonseed And Rapeseed), Molasses, Salt, Partially Hydrogenated Cottonseed Oil], Sugar And Honey. Contains: Peanuts
- Smucker’s Natural Peanut Butter with Honey – Peanuts, Honey, Sugar, Salt.
Now I must admit that the Smucker’s choice is much closer to what I ate as a kid than the others, however it still has that extra sugar involved. It seems to me that if Smucker’s has been selling natural peanut butter for so many years with the only ingredients being peanuts and salt, then it would have been a snap to just add the honey in and leave it at that. Why add the extra sugar?
Come on Smucker’s! Everyone else has joined the “natural” bandwagon that you have been on for years, so why not pave the way to a variety sweetened only with honey?
Life without cable – Part 2
In my previous post in this series, I laid out my reasons for dropping my monthly cable subscription and my initial choice of the AppleTV as the instrument for maintaining a reasonable method for my viewing entertainment.
One of the main reasons behind the choice of the AppleTV was the fact that it supported 5.1 digital surround sound through the HDMI cable output. This made it a snap to connect the device to my Sony STR-DG820 receiver which was connected to my LCD television and 5.1 speaker setup. Another compelling reason for this choice was the simplicity with which I would be able to connect my iTunes library containing rips of all of my cd and dvd collection to my home entertainment system.
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Life without cable – Part 1
A little over a year ago I joined a growing group of people that are eschewing the cable monopoly for their viewing entertainment. After many years of being a faithful, if sometimes unwilling, cable subscriber, I realized that there was no financial sense to subscribe to a channel lineup consisting of roughly 80 stations simply to enable my self to obtain the content from 8-10 of those stations.
Over the years I had slowly upgraded one piece at a time so that I had gone from a simple cable box to a home-built MythTV setup to a Tivo HD. Yet after all of these upgrades, I still felt that it was silly to be paying so much money to my local cable provider for so many stations that I never watched.
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Updating your Plex video source file paths
Today while perusing the forums on the Plex website, I noticed someone inquiring as to how they would go about changing the file paths in Plex for one of the video sources without removing the source and adding it back from the new location.
The reason for wanting to do this is to ensure that your database entry tweaks, fanart settings, etc., are not lost, which is what would happen if you removed the source and it’s library entries.
One of the more interesting parts of the Plex project at the moment is the complete re-build of the database structure and how you work with it. The existing database structure is fairly poor in it’s design. There are a lot of cryptic field names, and it is easily corruptible. The current library system is a hold-over from the old XBMC code base.
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