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.

Decoding FLAC files to Apple Lossless

Decoding FLAC files is relatively easy.  Using XLD you can simply open the FLAC file that you download (they are all legal downloads right?) and quickly convert it into one of several available formats.  xACT support the following formats:

• Input
  • (Ogg) FLAC (.flac/.ogg)
  • Monkey’s Audio (.ape)
  • Wavpack (.wv)
  • TTA (.tta)
  • Apple Lossless (.m4a) [10.4 and later]
  • AIFF, WAV, etc
• Output
  • WAVE
  • AIFF
  • Raw PCM
  • Ogg Vorbis (aoTuV)
  • MPEG-4 AAC (QuickTime/CoreAudio)
  • MP3 (LAME)
  • Apple Lossless
  • FLAC
  • HE-AAC (aacPlus v1/v2)
  • Wave64
  • WavPack

As you can see the list of supported formats is pretty extensive.  XLD also supports splitting large files into tracks provided a cue sheet is available with the recording.  Support is also there for using XLD as a CD ripper, allowing you to create FLAC files from the audio cd’s that you own (for personal consumption only right?).  Files can also be tagged with metadata using the freedb.org project data service.

SHN need to get the short end

While XLD is a great program in it’s own right, it doesn’t support the older SHN format.  This is not a large problem due to the existence of xACT.  xACT is an Apple-script based GUI frontend for a variety of Unix tools: shntools, Shorten, monkey’s audio compressor, flac, and cdda2wav.  The cdda2wav functions include paranoia support.

The main shortcoming to xACT is that it only supports the following decoding formats: WAV and AIFF.  While this is not always a drawback, if you have SHN files that you would like to play on a device that only supports mp3 files then you will need to use xACT as a middle-man for another program, like XLD.  iTunes is also capable of importing the WAV and AIFF formats.

xACT also allows you to write out the FLAC tags and uses AtomicParsley to accomplish this.  You can encode files using SHN, FLAC, APE, Wavpack, TTA, and Apple Lossless.  This is great for extracting content from CD directly to a lossless format.  When extracting CD content you also have the ability to create a single file, instead of individual tracks.

I hope that this will help you enjoy those awesome shows while on the road!

References

• XLD – http://tmkk.hp.infoseek.co.jp/xld/index_e.html
• xACT – http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/14246/xact

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?

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.

However, from the first I read with great interest the various accounts of successful hacks that had been applied to the AppleTV to expand it use beyond those set forth by Apple.  I was most interested in the ability to install a browser (Firefox, Safar, WebKit, etc.) and the chance to use Boxee and/or XBMC.

Initially I was drawn to the opensource atvusb-creator project, if for no other reason than the fact that it was free.  Of course, the geeky aspects to such a project were no small source of fun, as well.  However, I ended up using the ATVFlash product in the end since it tied all the various pieces and parts so nicely into a polished interface.  The ATVFlash project incorporated many of the opensource projects that allow AppleTV users to have access to external harddrives, keyboards, mice, non-Apple content providers, not to mention the ability to run Boxee, XBMC, Firefox and a host of other programs.

Along with other intrepid users I rapidly began finding ways to enhance the software with iPhone based remotes for the non-Apple programs.  Using a VNC server I was able to connect my iPhone to the AppleTV to control the mouse and keyboard inputs when browsing.  Later, ATVFlash provided the same level of access with the Mobile Air Mouse client/server architecture.  I could even install iStatPro on the device to monitor the bandwidth and process usage.

As I delved deeper into the process of using other online providers of content, such as Hulu, I began to realize that the hardware upon which the AppleTV was based limited the amount of usability that one could gain outside of the sandbox that Apple had seen fit to build.  The Boxee project was excellent at giving me access to a multitude of content choices, Hulu, TED, CW, Pandora, last.fm, and many others.  ATVFlash gave me the ability to play content types that were foreign to the AppleTV, such as avi, wmv, and mkv, not to mention the ease of installing Firefox and Flash so that I could watch NBC, FOX and ESPN360.com.

The one thing that these software projects could not do was to give the AppleTV the power to crisply deliver fullscreen Flash content to my LCD or to allow me to play Netflix movies.  There is only just so much that one can accomplish solely through software upgrades, after all.

As I contemplated these shortcomings, I realized that I needed to upgrade my hardware yet again.  The choice then became what platform do I use.  Did I move back to a Linux platform, move to Windows with MediaCenter edition (or even Windows 7), or stick with my beloved Mac platform?

As I stated in my first entry on this subject, my friend Justin was successfully using a hackintosh with the Plex project as an upgrade to his own AppleTV.  After watching the results, I settled on Plex as my software delivery system, yet I could not for various reasons bring myself to go the route of the hackintosh.  As I was unlikely to ever go back to being a complete Windows user again, and since all of the games that I wanted to play were either available for the Mac OS or could easily be played in a VMWare container, I saw nothing to compel me towards anything other than genuine Apple hardware, except possibly price.

With this in mind, I purchased a 2009 2.26GHz Mac Mini at the Apple Store at Lenox Square Mall in Atlanta this past December, where not a year past I had picked up my AppleTV.

My next post in this series will detail some of the software setup that I am currently using as well as some tips for getting the most out of your own Mac Mini home theater setup.

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.

It was, then, with no small amount of interest that I watched the procession of the Family and Consumer Choice Act of 2007, which was supposed to allow families to choose and pay only for the stations that they wanted.  While this grew out of the fervor over the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show where Janet Jackson’s experienced a “wardrobe malfunction”, I was still happy to see that I might finally get a la carte cable.  Unfortunately, this bill never made it out of committee, and as of 2008 had not yet made it to the floor for a vote.

It seems that with all of this that my best option for both saving money overall and controlling what my money went too, was to drop the big cable provider and start using DVD rentals, NetFlix and the internet to obtain the programming I wanted to see.

My first step was to procure an easy-to-use method of playing video on the TV screen.  While I already had a relatively decent DVD player, I had begun to transfer a large portion of my DVD collection to a hard drive connected to my Mac laptop so that I could switch movies more easily.  Thus, in November of 2008 I purchased an AppleTV at the Apple Store in Lenox Square Mall while on holiday to visit my friends in Atlanta.

After setting up the AppleTV and connecting it to my iTunes library, I embarked on a long journey towards completely digitizing my music and movie collection.  This combined with the ability to buy or rent movies and television shows from Apple, went a long way towards my goal of being able to get the majority of the content I wanted without a monthly fee to Mediacom Cable.

Still there was a large chunk missing: live television broadcasts of both dramatic content and live events.  My next post in this series will detail the steps I took to alleviate those holes using the AppleTV as a basis for some ingenious hacking.

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.

Regardless of all of that, the task itself is fairly straightforward and easily accomplished with a little care.

The first thing that you have to note is that this should never be attempted on a live Plex database.  Always do this on a backup.  Secondly, this is not a normal end-user type of operation. And finally, performing such an operation could easily wipe out your data if done improperly.  Also, the steps listed below require a certain amount of “non-average” experience with the Mac OS. If you are not comfortable working at the command line using Terminal, then don’t attempt this.

That being said, here ya go:

1. Make a working copy of the database to test with, never work on the original. The video information database is stored here by default:

/Users/USERNAME/Library/Application Support/Plex/userdata/Database/

2. The name of the video database may vary a little. For instance mine is named:

MyVideos34.db

3. Open the working copy using the built-in SQLite3 installation:

sqlite3 MyVideos34.db

4. At this point you will be presented with the SQLite3 command prompt:

SQLite version 3.6.12
Enter “.help” for instructions
Enter SQL statements terminated with a “;”
sqlite>

5. The first thing you should do is to determine what the database has recorded for your current path structure. This information is found in the “path” table in the “strPath” column. So enter the following command and then hit enter:

SELECT strPath FROM path;

6. You should get a lot of output that is similar to the following:

62|/Users/arfore/Pictures/Plexaeon/soundcheck/||||||
 
96|/Volumes/Movies 0001/|movies|imdb.xml||0|0|<settings><setting id="fullcredits" value="false" /><setting id="impawards" value="true" /><setting id="movieposterdb" value="false" /><setting id="trailer" value="true" /><setting id="fanart" value="true" /><setting id="imdbscale" value="512" /><setting id="url" value="akas.imdb.com" /></settings>
 
97|/Volumes/TV Shows 0001/|tvshows|tvdb.xml|A73E600F7EBB57B238351083E2FD8573|0|0|<settings><setting id="fullcredits" value="false" /><setting id="impawards" value="true" /><setting id="movieposterdb" value="false" /><setting id="trailer" value="true" /><setting id="fanart" value="true" /><setting id="imdbscale" value="512" /><setting id="url" value="akas.imdb.com" /></settings>
 
98|/Volumes/TV Shows 0001/Witch Hunter Robin/|||0DBFC8A633052B0CFE252AA91D4283B4|||

It should be plainly obvious, but in case it’s not, each column in the output is delimited by a pipe symbol “|” (no, this is not a lowercase “L” or an uppercase “i”). The first column is an id field. The second column is the path to the file.

7. Now here’ the fun part. Say I have copied all of my TV Show seasons over to my new NAS and I want to change the DB to reflect that.

Below are the two location spots:

OLD LOCATION: /Volumes/TV Shows 0001/

NEW LOCATION: /Volumes/NAS/TV Shows/

8. What you have to do is to execute an update statement using the replace function on the database (and this includes the line about the tvdb data, since that line is used to control the scrapper). Remember that this should never be done on a live db:

UPDATE path SET strPath = REPLACE(strPath, 'OLD LOCATION', 'NEW LOCATION');

Here’s the description of the replace function from the SQLite website:

The replace(X,Y,Z) function returns a string formed by substituting string Z for every occurrance of string Y in string X. The BINARY collating sequence is used for comparisons. If Y is an empty string then return X unchanged. If Z is not initially a string, it is cast to a UTF-8 string prior to processing.

9. Re-run the SELECT statement from step 5 to verify that your change took effect.

10. Quit SQLite:

.quit

Then you will need to quit Plex and backup the unaltered database file and replace it with your newly changed database file. Assuming everything worked your Plex install will now reference your new file structure.

Remember, this is not supported by me or any of the Plex guys. I just was in the same situation and wanted to see if I could figure it out. I successfully did this with no detrimental issues, but your mileage may vary.