Be Excellent To Each Other

USB stick or even better Micro SD slot if it has one, that's what I did. Just dropped all my beats onto a memory card and it lives in the stereo.

I've been toying with getting one to sit in my living room to pipe music to my stereo. It has a USB but it would ruin the aesthetic to have something sticking out of it and I think the control would be easier from a console than fiddling with the remote.

I still have a Raspberry Pi sitting underneath it as part of my plan last January to build a media streamer that would do something similar. I never got round to it when I realised I could just play BBC Sounds from my phone to get the same result.

Of course, if you are in the market for an audio player, there's always this one .

That is what I did, as my latest car does not have a CD player. Although most of the time I have spotify or podcasts.

Oh, dear lord...

https://www.astellkern.co.uk/sp2000.html

"Stainless Steel and Copper body finishes for the best acoustics"

Introducing Astell&Kern’s new flagship... Is it a side hustle

I wish!

Although it sounds more like a vaudeville act.

Thus ended a promising partnership.

But it's got a Reference Clock Jitter of only 200 Femto Seconds!

I always loved the absolute bollocks written in What Hi-Fi and Audiophile magazine by high end hi-fi kit makers.

I copied all my purchased/downloaded music from my iPod to a USB stick easily enough and the car media player plays them and shows the titles, artist and album details.

So far, so good.

Unfortunately, that's only 278 songs out of 3307 on the iPod. All the others were either ripped from CDs or recorded off-line via Audacity and hidden away in the iTunes Library, but I haven't worked out how to copy them on to my Windows PC, which still has iTunes working on it. All the others are also in the Music app on my MacBook, but for some reason they won't drag and drop on to the USB drive. There must be a away around this, I jut have to keep looking for it.

I've now got a slightly fiddly solution for copying all my songs off my iPod classic on to a USB stick and retain the meta data in the process. I put the iPod in 'disk' mode and copied all the music folders on to my PC. I then copied them on to a USB stick and just have to rename all the files as the song titles are changed by iTunes into random four character names. They are also randomly assigned to folders, so that an album’s songs may be contained in several folders, so as well as renaming the files with the song names, I’ll have to create folders for each album and move the songs into them.

So it’s going to take quite a while to rename and reorganise 3000 song files, but at least I will have them in a usable format.

Have a look at downloading MusicBrainz Picard. That might do it for you.

I last tried Picard ~10 years ago, back when I had a big collection of MP3s from various sources. I was never able to get it to work as automatically as I hoped.

Maybe you should just get a new car that supports your old ipod

Warhead and Malia need to found the Media Anachronists' support group.

Thanks very much for this, it looks like it's exactly what I needed.

I've just installed it and it successfully renamed all the files in the first folder I tried. I haven't looked at all the other functions so I don't know whether I can also arrange the tracks into the correct album folders, and then the albums into artist folders, or maybe I don't need to do that to be able to play individual albums from a USB stick. I just need to spend a bit of time finding out what it's capable of, but it's going to save me many, many hours I would have spent on manual file renaming.

I had a cd delivered only this week!

Tbf I've recently started scratching around for mini discs after rediscovering my old mini disc player.

I need in, and some help.

My Ma and her partner have these ancient iPod shuffles with music they transferred from their CDs. Now they want to wipe the black one and copy the music from the pink one to it, but neither are connected to iTunes and as far as I can work out you can’t set the iPod shuffled to open in disk mode. Any ideas on how I bypass this rubbish?

Sadly I can't give you anything concrete as it was quite some time ago I did this but I do recall it was a major PITA to do stuff like this. I had to try a bunch of different software and a lot required payment (which i was reluctant to do, just in case it didn't really do what I wanted).

I did manage to get songs off an iPod classic but they came out all in jumbled orders of sub sub folders, metadata and labels all missing.

Gah. Thanks anyway. It was my fault for leaving it until
the end of the visit before having a look at what she wanted. I won’t see her for a few months now so I’ll carry on trying to work it out for when I see her next.

Something near my house is making a beeping sound. It sounds like a watch alarm but louder, or the noise a fire alarm makes when the battery is low. It's somewhere near the border of about 4 gardens, in an overgrown bit and I can't find it. It's very annoying.

Is it one of those fox scarer things? There’s one on a road nears ours that’s constantly going off (luckily nowhere near close enough for it to bother us where we live but I bet their neighbours must be livid).

Is it Jeremy Beeple lying in wait for his next excellent prank?

That is soooo annoying. Our neighbour has an 'electric perimeter fence' for their dog, and lately is has been doing a similar thing, just beeping and beeping with no end.

If it is a fox scarer type thing then we also have one and it started going off nearly all the time when the battery was about to go at a more audible pitch (to me)

So either maybe wait it out, or you can alert the relevant neighbors if you CAN identify them to change the battery?

Is it a Beep...Beep...Beep or more of a beeeeeeeeeep?

It's a beep-beep-beep-beep. I'm going on a grand tour of the neighbourhood later to try to track it down.

Success! It was an old carbon monoxide alarm that had ended up in a hedge and was telling the world it was short of power!

I like the idea of someone being annoyed with their CO monitor beeping and instead of changing the battery, ditching it in a hedge

"Dammit! The endless beeping of my CO alarm is making me dizzy and nauseous, and is giving me a splitting headache. I'm going to throw it out!"

To be fair, my CO alarm has a built in single-use battery thats meant to last for 10 years and can't be changed, it might have been one of them.

I am going to plaster one into a wall a year before I decide to move house

Loads of bands that I have seen and really like are playing six miles away on a really good venue and I can't go due to calendar clash. Booo.

The saga continues. Sometimes, when I use Picard to rename the tracks on an album the metadata somehow screws the process and I end up with the tracks split over more than one album, but sometimes with the same album name. It seems to assign tracks to different versions of an album, so maybe some will be shown as belonging to the original UK release, sometimes it will show a track as being on a re-release, or even a greatest hits album. I've tried looking at the metadata to see if I can edit the fields that identify which album the track came from, but it seems to make no difference, I still have what appears to be two or three albums with the same name containing only a few tracks each.

I've also stopped copying albums to a USB stick, putting them on a microSD card on my phone instead, so I can just play music via BlueTooth in the car or on my earbuds. Even that has proved problematic, as the phone started reporting a read/write error when I copy files across, and also it arbitrarily decides that the Samsung Music app can't play some M4A files. It finally said it just couldn't write to the card at all and advised a reformat, which I did, but it still says there's a read/write error, so I'm going to have to get a new micro SD card anyway.

Never had this problems with cassette tapes.

Taylor Swift's online shop has fallen over, which is an issue as I need to purchase a CD to then get access to the tour pre sale tickets.

Boom! Sorted!

You've bought a CD player?

It's been a while since I used Picard - I found that when it worked well, it was great, but when it didn't work well I'd end up wasting more time trying to fix it than if I'd just manually edited all the tags in the first place. Very hit and miss, in my hands.

I stopped collecting MP3s a long time ago. It was something I spent ages on but then i just..... stopped.

My insurance provider gave us some money back, which is nice, but they sent a cheque in the mail and my bank doesn't have any branches around unless I drive for 45 minutes.

It's not a lot of money, and it's better in my account than theirs.... and yet, I can't really be bothered to do it.

No banking app with cheque scanning in the southern wastes?

WAT

I have never heard of this. I don't even know if the ATMs can be used to pay cheques in.

I realise it may not apply to your bank, but this is sounding more like a "not heard of it" than a "not in Australia" thing: https://www.nab.com.au/personal/online- ... ue-deposit

Midnights is unlikely to trouble many lists of "5 best Taylor Swift albums". It's very barren. Bejeweled and Antihero are stand out tracks, but I'm not feeling it.

Not checking the size of something has failed me again.

But wait!

I have used this as a Habitat for Lego Matt Damon in my stop motion remake of Andy Weir's The Martian.

Are you sitting comfortably?

Then I'll begin my long tale of O2 woes.

I'd been on O2 Pay and Go, paying £10 per month for aeons, getting unlimited texts, 150 minutes, and 500mg data and I very rarely need to go over the £10 min top up.

I had to call customer services at the end of March about a problem I was having (but I can't now remember what the problem was) and they persuaded me to change to Pay Monthly for £5pm to get unlimited texts, 500 minutes, and 1gb of data, but have to pay by direct debit.

Got my new SIM on 3 April, successfully swapped it over, retained my old number and got confirmation of the direct debit being set up.

Toward the end of April I got a text reminding me that I needed to top up to ensure I had a minimum £10 credit. When I checked my bank account I found that there was no direct debit in place. When I logged in to my O2 account, the home page showed my number as Pay Monthly, but when I went further into the account it still showed as being Pay and Go an with less than £10 in credit). When I checked my account on the O2 app on my phone it also showed why account as being Pay Monthly, but couldn't show me my monthly allowances.

I tried to call O2 customer service to query this. The number for customer services for Pay Monthly customers is 202, but I just got an unobtainable tone when I dialled it. But I was able to get through on the Pay and Go number, 4445. They said I was still on Pay and Go. I explained that I had a new SIM and had had confirmation of the new Direct Debit. They delved deeper and agreed that I should have been changed over to Pay Monthly but for some reason the change over hadn't been completed. They promised to resolve this and that the change over should be complete within 24 hours, but in the meantime I needed to top-up manually or my credit would run out. I paid a tenner, as that's the minimum it would accept, and thought no more about it.

Toward the end of May I got a text message warning me that I needed to top up before the 27th to ensure I had the minimum of £10 credit. I'd also discovered that I couldn't send text messages, only receive them. When I checked on-line and on the O2 app, nothing had changed, I still appeared to be both on Monthly Pay AND Pay and Go. When I'd called customer services in April line was so bad and the Asian operator's English was so poor it had taken me ages to explain my problem and to understand what he was saying to me. This time I used the chat option on the O2 app. They said they'd look into it again, and gave me instructions on how to possibly solve the problem sending texts and asked me to inform them if they fixed the text problem. When I got back to them to tell them that I'd tried all their suggestions, but I still couldn't send texts, I got an auto message that they were very busy and couldn't respond right now and I should try later. I gave up for the day as I'd spent ages on the app without getting a fix for either of my problems.

Same thing happened at the end of June, except I called customer services rather than use chat on the O2 app, but once again, could only get through on the Pay and Go customer service number. This time I got a South African operator and a reasonably good line, but had to go through the whole scenario again. Once again they said the account should be fully changed over to Monthly Pay within 24 hours and they’d look into the text problem, but in order not to run out of credit I had to top up manually again.

After 48 hours, nothing had changed so I completed an on-line complaint form.

I had a look on the O2 forum to see if anyone else had reported a similar problem sending texts and one of the suggestions was to check that I had the correct number for the Pay Monthly message hub in my phone settings. This was one of the suggestions I’d had in the on-line chat in May. I’d checked it at the time, but checked it again and it was the correct number. But then I had a flash of inspiration and wondered if I could send texts if I change the hub number to the one for Pay and Go. Bingo!! I can now send texts.

A couple of days after sending in the complaint I got a notification from my bank that a new Direct Debit had been set up for O2, so I was hoping that this meant they’d finally fixed everything. No such luck. The home page on-line still shows my number as Pay Monthly, but the allowances page still shows it as Pay and Go. The only change is that the payment date has changed from the 27th of the month, which was the Pay and Go date, to the 3rd of the month, which was the new Pay Monthly payment date. And the O2 app still shows an error when trying to show my allowances.

Fuck knows if they’ll ever get this fixed.

That sucks. It sounds like a massive, massive pain in the bum! I hope you get it sorted soon, and some compensatory free minutes.

If they don’t sort it, move to GifGaff!

Basically if I had even 1/2 of that I'd have ported my number and moved , and even if I really really wanted to use just O2 then I'd have moved and then ported it back to O2 - "Hello I am Mr daehraW and I'd like to join up"

I really don't need any additional free minutes as I very, very rarely make any calls, other than via WhatsApp. I only occasionally got anywhere near using my half gig of data on Pay and Go, so there's no big advantage of them doubling my allowance. The only point of me swapping was to reduce my monthly spend by half.

I'm going to keep harassing them until they finally fix it.

It'll be interesting to see if I still get a top-up reminder this month, now that the DD is in place.

So if you really really only want a small amount of data there are lots of cheap options out there - and I know this was posted as a first world problem and just a (safe) place to rant but hotukdeals have regular threads and offers about cheap mobile sim deals with very little to pay and some quite reasonable limits

e.g.

https://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/lebara ... ra-4168449

£1.49 for 3 month contract and they dont have them now but for a while they had one month contracts with 3 or 5 gig of data for either 49 or 99p

And although you might not have heard of Lebara , they use the Vodafone network