Alex Hopmann’s Blog

I’m still looking for a better way to manage my music collection. I currently have several copies of my collection on a server in my house. All the music I buy on CD I rip to WMA-lossless, and I also get a fair amount of high-bitrate MP3 files from eMusic. These files tend to be fairly large so I like to transcode them into 3 other directory trees- one with WMA variable bitrate that is about 192kbps, one with WMA variable bitrate that is around 64kbps for small capacity mobile devices like my phone, and a last directory with 128kbps MP3s for devices that don’t like WMA.

Currently I use the “Windows Audio Converter” that was part of the XP Plus Pack to do the conversion. It lets me specify a source directory, destination directory and audio configuration and it goes off and converts the whole thing (skipping already converted files). The only problems with this scheme is that this is only a GUI-based app and I’d really prefer a command line version that I can script and trigger automatically every day. So far I’ve been unsuccessful finding anything that meets this goal so email me if you know of something or leave a note in the comments.

I’ve been posting over on the Launch21 blog about the CouponLooker vertical-search engine that I’ve been doing for Judy’s Book. Interesting stuff- this is one of the more fun projects I’ve done in a while. I suppose I should be embarrassed to admit that I did about zero research into how search is supposed to be done. Still, the results seem pretty good and its fun to share some of the techniques that I’ve developed so far.

On another front I’m interested in tracking the evolution of hard-drive prices. Here are the current top price/performance figures for 3.5″ drives-

400GB = $97 = $.243/GB
500GB = $119 = $.238/GB
750GB = $240 = $.32/GB
1000GB= $413 = $.31/GB

500GB is still the sweet-spot. The 1TB drives aren’t really available yet so the 750GB drives are still priced at the “highest capacity available” premium. I’d expect once the 1TB drives become easily available the 750GB drives should drop quite a bit quickly.