robcee.net

The enbloggening.

Ripping CDs with foobar2000 in Windows 10

(non-existent third party commentator) Hold up. Are you really going to spin 2000 words on ripping CD music? In 2020? In the middle of a global pandemic? me: yes. Yes I am. NETPC: Dude, just use iTunes/Windows Media Player/whatever. me: Those apps use dithering and error correction on the music you’re ripping. They’re not bit […]

Multi-room audio with the HiFiBerry DAC+ Pro and Volumio

The old amplifier's faceplate.

After my kitchen stereo project, I’d been thinking about the next stage in my multi-room, RaspberryPi-based audio setup: The Living Room! I had, in a box, unused for probably ten years, an old NAD C272 stereo amplifier. A pair of Paradigm Atom bookshelf speakers were gathering dust down in the basement that used to belong […]

HiFiBerry Amp 2, Vintage Koss Speakers and Volumio

I’ve been a Sonos user for probably five years now. Initially, they were something of a marvel of integration and software polish, providing ease of setup and room filling sound for … they are not cheap. Their closed ecosystem was another sour note for me, but I pushed past that in favor of convenience. The […]

Syncing Playlists with the Fiio X3 (or X1 or X5)

Awhile back I wrote a review of my portable digital audio player, the Fiio X3 2nd generation (Amazon US, Canada). The summary of that review was that this is a bare bones audio player, with a simple UI, that is beautifully-built with an attention to sonic quality. It sounds fantastic but has a few UI […]

Ripping CDs Without iTunes (on macOS)

a CD or “Compact Disc”, is a small, shiny round surface containing optically-readable, microscopic bumps used to encode music or data. They are an obsolete technology that existed in the latter quarter of the twentieth century and enjoyed a brief metamorphosis into the DVD (“digital versatile disc”) and Bluray formats at the beginning of the twenty-first […]