All the stuff that I want to talk about but don’t want to devote an entire post to.

Digital Audio Players

As I was strolling through my YouTube recommendations, I slipped on a patch of frozen ground and ended up sliding into a ditch filled with in…you know what, forget the metaphors. I watched a video on digital audio players, and now they’ve become my latest obsession.

In common parlance, I’m talking about MP3 players. They are still around, and like vinyl, CDs, and corded earbuds, they seem to be coming back into fashion after a sort. It seems that the audio ecosystem, having lost The Masses to the ease of streaming services, have pivoted almost entirely towards high-end customers. Case in point:

Granted, these are Sony items and as they seem to be Android based, have a lot of features, but I have seen a lot of other devices from other manufacturers which push the upper price limit of these devices even further towards the stratosphere. As I have previously stated, I am not an audiophile so the main benefits of the technobabble around DAP chipsets is completely lost on me. The good news is that, in the absence of mid- to low-range consumer devices, some companies have stepped into the void with some options that seem to be very well reviewed.

The Snowsky Echo retails for about $75USD. It takes a micro SD card (up to 256GB) and uses physical buttons to control the menu navigation on the 2.39″ screen. According to The Street, it’s a remarkably competent player with fantastic sound. The upside is that all music is local. It has Bluetooth, but does not allow for the installation of apps, and has no streaming services.

Then there’s the Hiby R3 Pro II with retails for $199USD. it has a touch screen and can take micro SD cards of up to 2TB. This comes with two streaming services installed, Tidal and Qobuz (?), Bluetooth, and wifi.

Both devices have 3.5″ and 4.4″ jacks for wired headphones, and can be used as a DAC processor when placed between an external audio source and some kind of receiver (headphones, audio receiver, something else, I guess?).

Although I have yet to take the plunge, I’m leaning towards the Snowsky since it’s priced at entry level (there’s an older, less expensive version, the Echo Mini, which has a plastic body and costs $10USD less than the Echo). Hiby also has a less expensive version, the R1 ($75USD), but I like the stupidly simple UI of the Echo over the several options on the R1’s touchscreen, and couldn’t care less about Tidal and Qobuz, although the 256GB max capacity on the Echo is a consideration — even though I don’t have that much music.

Music Library Update

In preparation for, and because of, my eventual acquisition of a DAP, I spent all day yesterday — yes, all day — updating my music library. I have almost 4,000 files which I know is somewhere between “more than most” and “way less than some”, so thank gawd for music auto-tagging services.

I learned that DAPs can vary how they categorize the files; some use “artist”, some use “album artist”. Some allow for playlist generation, some don’t. I wanted to ensure that my metadata was as up to date as I could get it, so I use MediaMonkey to pass every track over to MusicBrainz, which is a community-managed database of song information. Identifying music is sometimes difficult, as songs can end up on initial release albums, then compilations, “best-of” releases, and live editions, so sometimes the identifier has trouble picking which “home” to assign to a file but for the most part everything seemed to land where it was supposed to. I focused primarily on dates, track numbers, and multi-disc set assignments from the service, and then went through and manually updated a lot of the genre information based on my own understanding or, if available somewhere else, whatever it was listed as (Bandcamp has tags for this purpose, for example). Not all data was available, and I didn’t feel like spending my entire evening looking up data across the Internet, so I have a lot of targeted release dates as only years. Also, I learned that some of my files are messed up, so my next step is to normalize file names across the entire library now that I have accurate track names and numbers.

My First Mac

Since moving back into the iPhone ecosystem, I have been paying more attention to Apple news than I have at any time in the past. I used to be one of those “PC vs Mac” die-hards, but then I grew the fuck up and realized that people should just what works for them, and what they like. I don’t care. What I do care about are new experiences, so at the release of the new M5 Macbooks, I picked up a Macbook Air.

I first encountered Macs back in the late 80’s when a friend whose father owned a successful Chinese restaurant hosted our junior-high history class project meetings. We looked it over and considered using it for video effects which in retrospect was ludicrous, and it wasn’t until a few years later when I had to support a handful of Macs when I did desktop support that I was actually able to use a Mac . My experience with the OS has been limited but not zero, so I figured now would be a good time to jump on this ship to complete my “operating series trifecta” experience with Windows and Linux already in the house.

I am impressed with the Air’s capabilities, considering it has no fans, is super thin, and very light. As a mobile “access platform” for web browsing and email, it does what I need it to do, albeit with a hefty price-tag. However, I loaded Blender onto this and it works way better than I expected. I tried loading Steam and downloaded Victoria 3 which has a notoriously long boot-up time on my i9 PC, and the Air just blew through it without issue. Since those tests, though, I have no games on there, mainly because I don’t know what I’d want to play on-the-go, and I haven’t actually sat down to use Blender, so I can’t speak to the long-term engagement there.

My main issue is that I am unfamiliar with the lingo of the Mac ecosystem. I have managed to find how to get context menus, but everything on the Mac is “a symbol”, so I’m still trying to internalize the symbols in place of the keystroke names. I’m also struggling to maintain understanding that, unlike Windows, installing apps doesn’t always throw files from one end of creation to another, making uninstalling apps more confusing — for me — up front, but at least I don’t have to play “wilderness tracker” to remove files from the dark recesses of the OS. One really difficult time I’m having is finding apps that I am familiar with, or analogues that I might want to use. I now get why some people deride Macs for a lack of software compared to what the PC has available. From another perspective, the PC is basically a software dumping ground, and the apps that are available for the Mac are there for a reason. I just have to look a lot harder.

Right now, I’m finding the Air comfortable, but I’m also not using it daily. I bring it upstairs with me at the end of the day and use it for on-demand browsing or whatnot. I like that I can use Messages and FaceTime with my daughter, and if we end up going to Ireland in June it will be coming with us. Until then, though, it’s sitting next to me while I try and figure out if it has a place in my daily life.

The Usual Star Citizen Outro

4.7 might be dropping this week; if so, i expect that it won’t be until the end of the week so as to give CIG the most time for last second polish.

I spent some time in the PTU and my concerns persist, not from a game standpoint per se, but rather from a player operational standpoint. Getting materials for crafting is going to be a massive pain in the ass for solo or small-group players like me and mine. I went out in the Prospector, looking for Hephastanite, Iron, and Aluminum, but only found the Hep and Al, and neither in quantities that would allow me to make anything in quantities that I’d need. Ammo, for instance. I would either need a team of miners searching for hours for just those three materials, or would have to spend at least a whole day doing nothing but mining to find enough to make enough product, which would probably then get lost or depleted in a fraction of the time it took to complete the entire game loop of creating them in the first place.

To close this gap, then, CIG is going to need to get the lead out and bring the social tools into the game. I know people really want corp management tools, but I think we actually need a player marketplace first and foremost. As of right now, trading is a handshake agreement between two parties and the tools for trading goods for cash isn’t robust enough to avoid exploitation. I don’t know off the top of my head if CIG has mentioned anything concrete about player markets, but I believe that they have either said or alluded to the idea that all markets would be local, forcing players to travel somewhere to look over goods in person. While I applaud that, being a refugee from both Ultima Online and Star War Galaxies, I would like there to be a global shopping experience that players could link their wares into and allow others to purchase through. Buyers would then need to travel to the market location to collect their goods. I could add a bunch of caveats to that idea, courtesy of general anxiety, but I won’t; I’m sure you can see how such a system could go wrong or be abused.

Still, I’m anxiously awaiting the release of 4.7 because I will try to collect resources and I will try to collect blueprints where I can. I am unsure whether blueprints we collect now will follow us through a wipe — I doubt it — and I agree it would be a monumentally shitty idea that us long-time backers would get such a gargantuan head start in setting up a blueprint library…but I also kind of want that for myself.