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Wednesday 24 October 2012

Ipad 4

Ladysolly has decided to get the iPad 4, and soon. The main effect of that, is that I'll inherit her iPad 1.

I already inherited her old iPhone. And I got a cheap Android tablet, just to explore and see how it compared.

Well, it doesn't. I can tell you definitely that the tablet that I got is pants. You only find out when you try to use it; the problem is that it's very unresponsive to clicks and swipes. So I'm looking forward to the iPad.

That gave me a bit of impetus; I wanted to work out how to hook it into my network. Almost the first thing I do with any computer, is hook it up to the network, because then it can use all the great stuff I've got already hooked up. The secret trick is to use Samba, so I googled "Samba iPhone" and found FileExplorer.

I installed the free version of FileExplorer, gave it a username and password to use, and told it the name of the server to access. It was in like greased lighting - very easy. And now I'm playing Boogie Woogie, the files are on my file server downstairs, and I'm playing it on the iPhone.

And where did those Boogie files come from?

Well, several years ago, I had a collection of CDs. I kept them in a big carousel CD player, and I could tell it "Play number 325" with the remote, and it would. Then the carousel part of it stopped working, leaving me with just a CD player, and a big box of CDs to riffle through..

So I fed the CDs, one at a time, into the CD drive of a PC, and copied the data on them, onto a server. That gave me humungous WAV files, which I compressed into mp3 and ogg files. Ogg because mp3 was (is?) encumbered with a patent, so sometimes you find you can't use it, because someone didn't pay the licence fee. Ogg isn't encumbered, and it's just as good.

I still have the CDs. They're in a box somewhere. Probably in the shed. I can't remember. I haven't seen them for years. What I actually use, is 30 gigabytes of music files, with a couple of backups, of course. And I can play my music anywhere in the house.

And now I'm playing some Chas 'n' Dave ...

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