Just ordered one of these - Now received update

[Jake]

Just trying to make room for more toys got a Fender Strat that needs to go on a stand and thinking of getting a Gibson Les Paul as well

Well that pretty much refuted my theory!

 

[RogerS]

Just trying to make room for more toys got a Fender Strat that needs to go on a stand and thinking of getting a Gibson Les Paul as well

Well that pretty much refuted my theory!

Not quite..it's still valid

 

[Russell]

got more hair than me! :lol:

 

[TrimTheKing]

.....
The PC management thing is all well and good, but what about when the machine doesn't import the album or track names correctly (as happens ridiculously often with ALL music players/software)? How do you modify them? How long will this take?

That's what really puts me off this product even for pop and jazz music. As far as I can see all you can enter is album name and track which to my way of thinking is pretty naff. Even for pop. Surely you'd want to select by pop group? True, they say you can use the album field for the name of the group but then where do you put the name of the album? Plain daft, if you ask me.

[Waits for someone to tell me that i've got it all wrong.....]

Right chaps, I have just read through the tech specs and the FAQ'a.

Roger, you need to look again (if you care :wink: ), there are apparently 10 searchable database fields, including artist, they just don't make it easy to find on the site.

Russell - You need to look again. The default is to use MP3, so the largest will hold 3200 CD's. If you want lossless then you have to choose it for each CD on an individual basis and the largest capacity one will hold only 420 CD's, so for your 700 discs you will need 2 of them!!!

Here's the data from the site (had to put - in as the formatting goes bonkers)

*
How many CD's can you store at the various bitrates and what about lossless or uncompressed?

-------------80G-----160G-----320G

128k-------1200-----2500-----5000

192k-------800------1600-----3200

320k-------500------1000-----2000

Lossless---105------210------420

N.B. 192k is the default setting - normal compression.

EDIT : I still like it, but it clearly has its limitations. One of them being even though it has a USB port, you still need to buy (yes BUY) update CD's for the CD Database from them on a monthly basis if you don't want to spend the time cataloguing any new CD's yourself using the remote! That's just stupid!

But I still like it :roll:

 

[Russell]

You can choose for each cd whether to use loss less or not so for the important ones you choose loss less for the others the ones where it doesn't matter you choose MP3 its the flexibility I like. I have about 100 cds I listen to loads where I want an exact copy of the cd the others it don't matter. I have had a play with one and had a listen and played through my own kit and not just on their speakers so very happy with my choice.

I agree on the data base cd but I would probably only get one once a year or so if I had a lot of new additions

 

[TrimTheKing]

You can choose for each cd whether to use loss less or not so for the important ones you choose loss less for the others the ones where it doesn't matter you choose MP3 its the flexibility I like. I have about 100 cds I listen to loads where I want an exact copy of the cd the others it don't matter. I have had a play with one and had a listen and played through my own kit and not just on their speakers so very happy with my choice.

No probs Russell, and I'm the last person who would try and talk someone out of a shiny new purchase, just wanted to make sure you knew all the details before you dove in.

I thought from your OP that you wanted to rip ALL your CD's at lossless, hence the post.

I'll leave you alone now...

 

[RogerS]

.....
The PC management thing is all well and good, but what about when the machine doesn't import the album or track names correctly (as happens ridiculously often with ALL music players/software)? How do you modify them? How long will this take?

That's what really puts me off this product even for pop and jazz music. As far as I can see all you can enter is album name and track which to my way of thinking is pretty naff. Even for pop. Surely you'd want to select by pop group? True, they say you can use the album field for the name of the group but then where do you put the name of the album? Plain daft, if you ask me.

[Waits for someone to tell me that i've got it all wrong.....]

Right chaps, I have just read through the tech specs and the FAQ'a.

Roger, you need to look again (if you care :wink: ), there are apparently 10 searchable database fields, including artist, they just don't make it easy to find on the site.

........

Mark..can you please point me in the direction where you found this. All i can find is..

Albums and tracks both have names up to 64 characters - including spaces. There is no formal structure for extra information like artist, genre, year, composer but you can put anything you want in the album and track names and edit them as many times as you want

The fact that it gets its' data from freedb..well, i just had to go and take a look at freedb and it's even worse than CDDB for classical. Also, looking at the display of the Brennan, they seem to append composer name in front of the 'album' which is pretty useless as you then have to wait and scroll (I guess to choose which Brandenburg). Wait ..it gets worse. I have, for example, 7 different versions of Mahlers' Resurrection Symphony. No way that i can see for being able to select which one easily.

I see from the brennan website that Gramophone thought it was the DBs but unfortunately the source for this does not appear to be in the Gramophone archive and so may have been taken out of context or the reviewer had his milk-bottle bottom glasses on that day.

As you may have gathered, lack of support for classical music in MP3 type players is one of my hobby-horses and I am not alone.

 

[TrimTheKing]

.....
The PC management thing is all well and good, but what about when the machine doesn't import the album or track names correctly (as happens ridiculously often with ALL music players/software)? How do you modify them? How long will this take?

That's what really puts me off this product even for pop and jazz music. As far as I can see all you can enter is album name and track which to my way of thinking is pretty naff. Even for pop. Surely you'd want to select by pop group? True, they say you can use the album field for the name of the group but then where do you put the name of the album? Plain daft, if you ask me.

[Waits for someone to tell me that i've got it all wrong.....]

Right chaps, I have just read through the tech specs and the FAQ'a.

Roger, you need to look again (if you care :wink: ), there are apparently 10 searchable database fields, including artist, they just don't make it easy to find on the site.

........

Mark..can you please point me in the direction where you found this. All i can find is..

Albums and tracks both have names up to 64 characters - including spaces. There is no formal structure for extra information like artist, genre, year, composer but you can put anything you want in the album and track names and edit them as many times as you want

The fact that it gets its' data from freedb..well, i just had to go and take a look at freedb and it's even worse than CDDB for classical. Also, looking at the display of the Brennan, they seem to append composer name in front of the 'album' which is pretty useless as you then have to wait and scroll (I guess to choose which Brandenburg). Wait ..it gets worse. I have, for example, 7 different versions of Mahlers' Resurrection Symphony. No way that i can see for being able to select which one easily.

I see from the brennan website that Gramophone thought it was the DBs but unfortunately the source for this does not appear to be in the Gramophone archive and so may have been taken out of context or the reviewer had his milk-bottle bottom glasses on that day.

As you may have gathered, lack of support for classical music in MP3 type players is one of my hobby-horses and I am not alone.

I read it somewhere but couldn't find it again, I will go searching.

Have you watched the videos on the left hand side? It has quite a neat little search facility using the remote which shows how many tracks match what you have typed, so I guess it will be around that somewhere but would need more playing with to see what it can really do.

 

[TrimTheKing]

This might help for a start...http://www.brennan.co.uk/play/quick_search.flv

 

[TrimTheKing]

Sorry Roger, I misread another piece of text, I was wrong about the 10 fields.

This link will give you the why's and wherefore's of what it can/can't do. And this is the user manual.

It looks like it can store what you want up to 64 chars, but you are at the mercy of the db software or cataloguing it yourself.

 

[RogerS]

Sorry Roger, I misread another piece of text, I was wrong about the 10 fields.

This link will give you the why's and wherefore's of what it can/can't do. And this is the user manual.

It looks like it can store what you want up to 64 chars, but you are at the mercy of the db software or cataloguing it yourself.

Phew..I thought my streetcred had taken another bashing for a moment :wink:

 

[RogerS]

I was intrigued to see a quote on Brennans' website from The Gramophone extoling JB&'s virtues. So I tracked down the original review and also the subsequent follow-up in a later issue. It was a very thin and disappointing review and totally missed what i think is the major problem from a classical perspective.

But as far as the website quote is concerned, talk about taking things out of context! In fact, I couldn't find anywhere in the Gramophone archive the quoted text published on the website. I could give some alternative quotes taken from the article....

'Things thicken up a bit when using the standard speakers for large-scale classical music'

'the JB7 isn't the highest of fi and will be shown the door by modest CD players'

I just love marketing.....well, I should do...I were one once

:wink:

 

[BigShot]

Roger, I'm a young upstart and all that, but I'm not a dolt with my musical tastes - by radio pre-sets include Classic Fm and it's one of my most listened-to stations.

Since I've never tried to put classical music on an mp3 player I'm puzzled...
...what exactly is so bad about classical in these formats?

I never would have imagined it'd be so different from other kinds of music.

I don't doubt what you're saying, I just can't get my head around it.

 

[RogerS]

Hi BigShot...no problem. The problem, IMO, lies in the fact that the whole iPod/iTunes architecture is designed exclusively for pop. I can understand why - there lies the largest potential market.

The underlying data architecture is predicated on Artist > Album > Track. This is great for Pink Floyd > Dark Side of the Moon > Breathe. It also meant that the tiny screen on the iPod could, with a judicious bit of scrolling, combine Artist and Album as a line item in the menu of Playlists.

Now consider classical music. At its' basic level, it is not unreasonable to want to index or retrieve music by composer and work. For example, Shostakovitch - Symphony No 13. So how to enter the data? There is a data field in iTunes called 'Composer' and that would be the logical place to put 'composer'. Only that field is not visible on the iPod. So we have to contrive some sort of mapping but we only have three fields.

OK - map 'composer' to 'Artist, 'work' to Album and 'track' to 'track'. It's a bit clunky. If I have an iPod with all the Mozart symphonies - then trying to find Symphony 27 is a bit hit and miss. I access the list of Playlists and all I see is Mozart -Symp. So I wait until it decides to scroll, ahah...Symphony 12. So scroll down a bit, try again...and again...and again. It won't help if I have been untidy in my data entry and called one Symphony No.2 and another Symphony No 3. That extra dot and that extra space screws up the alphabetical indexing and throws out the filing aka retrieval system. But that last point is fixable as long as I am careful entering the data. I will return to data entry in a moment.

But not all classical music is a symphony. How about solo guitar music by Albeiz? I'd actually like to select by performer but the logical data field for that is 'artist' which we've just used for composer. So how can I do that on an iPod. The answer is 'you can't'.

Or maybe I have several different versions of Mahler Symphony No 2? I'd like to choose by conductor or even by orchestra. No obvious data fields in iTunes and even if there were, they are not viewable on the iPod.

OK - so now we've established that the database schema that underlies iTunes (and by default almost the entire MP3 player diaspora) is flawed as far as classical music is concerned, let's turn our attention to how iTunes gets' its' information when you stick in a CD to import it. It goes off to the CDDB database aka Graceland. I'm not sure which was chicken and which was the egg but the two schema (iTunes and Graceland) closely match each other and, guess what, Graceland is also pop-oriented.

But...because of the database limitations detailed above - it is left to classical fans to enter their own data into Graceland. Only, we all have our own favourite way of mapping the data. So when you get the data down from CDDB, you might find that a composer is entered by one person as Ralph Vaughan Williams and by another Vaughan Williams. iPod files things alphabetically...go figure! So what usually happens is that classical music enthusiasts all end up developing our own filing system, entering our own data etc but the underlying three field display on the iPod still remains.

So turning to the Brennan. Remember that we had difficulties finding and retrieving data with the three available fields on the iPod. Well, the Brennan goes one better (NOT!) and just has two.

It also gets its' data from freedb and, at a cursory look, the data contained there regarding classical music is, at best, risible.

So that's why I get a bit 'hot under the collar' if thats' the right word. I am resigned that it will never get fixed...just that I get annoyed with lightweight reviews such as the one in Gramophone that ignore the problems with actually using something like the Brennan for classical music.

To be honest, i can't see what the Brennan does over and above my iPod.

Lastly, if you like classical music, then give Radio 3 a try. I know that there is some stuff that I will switch off but there is a huge and entertaining world of classical music out there that gets air time on Radio 3 and not restricted to the very narrow vox pop range that is ClassicFM....IMO :wink:

 

[TrimTheKing]

Roger

I haven't read your whole post so apologies if you reference this in there, but you need an iPod Touch. No scrolling there, you can see the whole detail on the screen, would that help you with your issue?

 

[RogerS]

Roger

I haven't read your whole post so apologies if you reference this in there, but you need an iPod Touch. No scrolling there, you can see the whole detail on the screen, would that help you with your issue?

The underlying database limitations still apply and the screen still only displays the three fields AFAIK and is not tweakable.

 

[Russell]

Well I have got it now, delivered 2 weeks before the date specified when ordered so that was great. It came 2 weeks ago and just like it says it is very easy to set up, one mains lead and 1 lead to the amp. I decided to run it through my existing system Dennon amp and Kef Q speakers.

Loading the Cd,s took 12 days I have loaded 572 of which 200 were kept as original quality and the rest compressed at high quality. I have filled half of the drive up, I got the 320G version. Loading was easy just put the cd in the drive and literally press OK. The JB7 searches the data base for possible matches and then just accept the title match. each Cd took about 3 minutes to load and the most I did in one night was 62 while watching a couple of movies. The data base couldnt recognize 12 cd's so quite a good hit rate and the titles were easy to enter with the remote.

Sound quality is very good even for the compressed tracks certainly as good as what i have been listening to. I now listen to music more just turn it on when I come home where before I would put the TV on. I let it play on random and have listen to stuff I forgot I had.

I am going to start adding my vinyl next a more long winded and involved process because they are copied in real time so my 200 or so records would take approx 40 minutes each that a 133 hours so I will be a little more selective and compress them all at high quality.

The verdict so far, it does exactly what I wanted and I am more impressed that i thought I would be.

 

[wizer]

Russell, how much research into alternative products did you do? I think you're going to outgrow this very fast. It's ancient technology.

It's like when the first blackberry came out, it looked like a psion organiser from the 80's. But people went crazy for them - for all of five minutes and then astute blackberry upgraded them to align with current technology.

I do hope you don't regret the decision to buy it.

 

[Russell]

Russell, how much research into alternative products did you do? I think you're going to outgrow this very fast. It's ancient technology.

It's like when the first blackberry came out, it looked like a psion organiser from the 80's. But people went crazy for them - for all of five minutes and then astute blackberry upgraded them to align with current technology.

I do hope you don't regret the decision to buy it.

I have been searching for something that was easy to use and within my budget for quite a while. It may be old technology but it does exactly what I need. Easy conversion of my vinyl was important as was a single device to play all of my music. I didnt want anything linked to a PC and I didnt want an ipod with a docking station. I know there are far more complex solutions with remote drives I know someone who has 3 terabyte drives hooked up to a Linn system but thats way over the top for me.