Dream Theater have recently released a new album, entitled "Train Of Thought". This is extremely amusing to The Sharp fans. Well me anyway...
The SX418 [link to official Panasonic product page] is a bare bones model CD player with MP3.
It plays CDs. It plays CDrs and CD-RW (my old player wouldn't play CD-RW and would often skip or introduce static when playing CDrs). It plays CD-RWs and CDrs with MP3s and WMAs on 'em. It has repeat, album repeat and random play. Random play does not work with MP3 play (Update: Actually, yes it does, rather nicely).
It has a "Memo" button I haven't figured out yet but at a guess it's a program button for MP3 cds to make skipping between hundreds of songs easier. Anti-skip has so far been flawless. It has a hold switch to stop accidental button presses in the pocket.
It has three EQ settings: Extra bass, Live and none. Live introduces some stereo panning and reverb, giving your music that crappy up-the-back-of-the-crowd-at-a-festival feel. God knows why you'd want this, although it can make a crappy mono live recording sound a little better. Extra bass does just that, to the point of saturation. The no-EQ option is fine, although still a little bassy although that could be my headphones. I'm also hearing a little distortion when playing some MP3s. Could be that the MP3s are recorded too loud, but also hearing a little (very minor) on some CDs. Not enough to bother me. I haven't touched the provided headphones, they're always crap.
Playing MP3s works flawlessly. All of my MP3s are LAME encoded Variable Bit Rate (--alt-preset standard or --r3mix) and it has no problem playing any of them. I've not tried anything else yet (WAV, WMA). My only complaint is that there is a pause between MP3s played, quiet irritating when playing albums that have songs that run together or live albums. It also takes a little time to go through an MP3 CD before playing, but that is forgivable.
"Albums" can be skipped by holding down the skip track album. As such there is no scanning (fast forward or backward) of MP3 tracks. Only track or album skip. An "album" is a directory on the CD. The player does not seem to read ID3 tags at all. Tracks and albums appear to be played in alphabetical order. All sub directories of a directory are played before the next parent directory.
Fairly well made but feels a little flimsy, a little too light. And I hate buttons for volume, I've always liked the volume dial and don't like it replaced. I'll live.
'Tis made in Japan.
I'd have liked an ID3 display but again, it's really just cool to have, it's not important. If I'd wanted that I'd have gone and bought an iPod or something.
Updated Notes: It plays EMI's copy-protected non-CDs without problems, although I couldn't tell you if it was playing the audio part or the WMA part. Almost certain it's the audio part. It also has a nice fast fast forward feature (audio CDs only, FF does not work on MP3s), good for skipping through 74 minute long CDs that are all one track. Bloody Fantomas.
Updated Notes 2: Resume works rather nicely for MP3 CDs, remembering the last MP3 you were on as long as you keep the CD in the player. I've now decided the overall EQ isn't that great, lacking a lot of bass and bringing the mid and trebble a little to much to the front, although this does bring out elements of songs I hadn't noticed before which I like. And there is always the Bass EQ option if you want to go deaf. I think it's MP3 decoding is a little cheap, I'm hearing MP3 artifacts when I don't hear them when playing on the PC, but that could be the mid heavy EQ speaking.
I've been listening to all of their albums recently, with my favourite definitely settling on "Great Southern Trendkill". I love almost everything on this album.
Cowboys From Hell is great but there is some dull stuff on there. There is almost nothing worth mentioning on either Far Beyond Driven or Vulgar Display Of Power and I've not given the latest album enough of a chance really (mental note, give "Reinventing The Steal" a chance... I will try to ignore the terrible cover). I've not heard the live album ("101 Proof").
The recently best of CD / DVD release would be an interesting listen / watch but it is far too single-heavy. After "Cowboys" their singles have been their least interesting songs.
Millions of people travel to the city on New Years to watch the fireworks or to party all night. All of those people are supposed to get home with an extra hour of trains. Thanks Connex. Dickheads. Nightrider buses will run every 30 mins until 4:30. Taxis will cost $5.50 more from 6pm New Years Eve. Sydney, Adelaide and Perth will have trains running all night.
And apparently I'm not supposed to be at work now. At least, Connex thinks so, running less trains during peak hour. There were hardly any cars at the train carpark so I suppose everyone else agrees. All of my usual lunch places in the city were closed too.
I'd love not to be here (work) but I have no Annual Leave left thanks to a favour I did my company. I can't wait until I'm either rewarded for my hard work over the past two years, or I'm not, and I quit, and I spill every bean worth spilling... I feel uncomfortable telling you about it until my company has had the full opportunity to make everything right. I've given them a years worth of grace. They've spread my patience extremely thin. Pretty soon I'm going to have to spliting patience atoms to make it any thinner. I'm thinking of making t-shirts...
I've always wondered why people keep using fax machines [Slashdot.org]. It's so... stupid. The only arguement I've heard is that they hold "legal weight" with signatures, but I find it hard to believe a crappy quality fax is more proof than a high quality image sent via email. Not that I want to encourage sending huge images via email... hmmm.
Maybe the best-kept secret about Faith No More - until now - is that Courtney Love was once their singer. There was a rumour going around that she once auditioned to be in the band, but Mike recalls that that's not quite true. "Courtney Love never auditioned for Faith No More," he says, laughing. "Courtney Love - we met her through a mutual friend named Deanne Franklin. She never auditioned. I'll tell you the exact story. She had the fuckin' balls to say 'I'm your singer' and she was - for six months! Because nobody else had the fuckin' balls to do it!" It seems she hasn't changed much in the last decade or so. "She was fuckin' insanely, extremely driven," Mike says. "More so than anybody I've ever met... when she was around in our band it was chaotic, it was like a tornado. And a lot of good stuff and a lot of bad stuff happened both. Obviously we didn't record with her, but I have a great video of us with her on it - it's awesome. The person that replaced her was Chuck [Moseley, who sang on the first two FNM albums]. So there's your history. At that time I remember a gig she did with us and there was this local record guy and she kept saying 'Howie, Howie, Make me a star, make me a star!' - she was fuckin' driven. She knew where she wanted to go always and God bless her she got there. But we never talk about that. This is actually probably the first time I've ever talked about it."
From an interview with Mike Bordin by Jon Ewing from vigilante.co.uk, cached at archive.org.