I've never even heard of it before... but will likely try it soon!
Thanks for the tip! |
Have you ever tried cold extracted coffee? During the summertime, that is probably my drink of choice. Basically, you let about 9 cups of water sit in a pound of ground coffee for about 24 hours, and then filter it several times--Toddy makes a device that simplifies the process. Put a couple ounces in a tall glass, fill up with milk, and its a great drink. It is a concentrate, however, so a little goes a long way. Funny thing is that with the cold filtering process, none of the acids leech into the coffee, so you actually get a really good coffee flavor. |
I will, FWIW you should check out the Jura Capresso's, they will make coffee as you like, I personally only have 2 cups in the AM (OK 4-5 on weekends) and do the as small doubles, so they are almost large expresso's. My wife can't drink them that strong, so she does a strong, watered down single. If you like, you could do a weak single with lots of H2O, basically the 'americano' you drink.
I agree with you entirely about pressed coffee! Got hooked on it the first few weeks in Amsterdam, and can't go back to drip ever since.... That crema is like chocolate!! I love it! |
I like the idea of the coffee machine next to the bed... Maybe the thing to do is to put the espresso station in the master bathroom or something, as long as the toilet is in a separated area... Hmmm...
I actually don't drink that much in the way of pure espresso--my g/f gets cappucinos and I drink americanos. Basically a strong cuppa joe--double shot of espresso topped off with a bit of water. You still get some nice crema on top and the flavor is better than drip joe. The pressure system actually somehow contrives to extract w/o the acids present in a gravity drip. The most important part, however, is getting a good roaster. Luckily, I've got a shop nearby that does a nice full city roast w/o the burnt flavor you get off of anything starbux makes.
Good luck weathering the storm. Remember to unplug the stereo gear. |
Well, this is my third anniversary, and some how the ring cost 1/3 the engagement ring... hope that trend continues.... by 10 year, it will be very practical, but I doubt I'll have that luck...
The Salvatore's are very nice, but aren't they only espresso? The J/C do both. I agree with you, the idea of having it plumbed is nice, but you will need to have the water filtered, and have the filter accessible or you will need to decalcify frequently..
As for the grindeer, the J/C does that automatically, and you can adjust grind and amount of coffee per cup it makes (as well as water amount too).
Well living if the Tampa/Sty Pete area, and with Wilma in the gulf, my kitchen is halted. The electrician is on hurricane duty testing all the generaters that where bought this year, so they can't raise the ceiling in case he can't do his part as it would predispose my house's roof to blowing off in a storm (good thing they thought of that) so I guess I have just witnessed me first construction delay... not bad, they made it 2 1/2 days before they bailed...
I currently have a refridgerator and some blue painting tape where my island will be, or could be as we found extra room, almost a foot. I knew they wouldn't estimate the one corner right... all that concrete did make it difficult though...
BTW my J/C machine is currently in the master bathroom... FWIW it's pretty cool having it so close to bed, I don't even need to don a robe to get some joe!! It will, one day move to it's old home though.. |
I'll agree with you on the built-in espresso machines--never saw one that I wanted. I'm running a Salvatore semi-auto. I manually fill it and manually empty the tray, but think the whole plumbed in lines thing would be cool... I just want a little dedicated area for it.
BTW, if you don't already have one, a good dosing burr grinder is a must have.
Kitchen sounds great. You have my sympathies on the trips to Tiff's--I got engaged back in May (cha-ching!) and will be getting married next May, so I'm bleeding money to wedding vendors... |
I am going with Cambria (Quartz) countertops, couldn't imagine being organized enough to seal granite regularly.
As for the coffee machine... We use a Jura Capresso E8, far outdoes the built in (friend has the Miele, doesn't do as good a job and far less flexible) FWIW filling the water resevoir isn't such an ordeal, and it will save you the hassle of replacing the built in when (I would say should, but have already lost one after 2 1/2 years) it dies.
As for the $$ of the kitchen... you are right, I have managed to buy a new , well actually 2 pairs of new (to me) speakers this month, and went to Tiffany's for the anniversary today (OUCH!!! Speakers are cheap!!)
I went with stainless, and will deal, or the maid will deal with the fingerprints.
As far as fridges go, if I had seen it before I might have gone with the Kitchen Aid 48" built in (28 ft cubed) but in stead took the KA counter depth side by side @ 25 CF... I would have like bigger, but after more than doubling my estimated budget (OK, I guess it is like stereo) I decided I would be OK with that.
Besides, I frequently go and buy what I am going to cook the day of. I have a great Dane, so nothing that allows entrance to the garbage is acceptable, I agree with the outlets, but will limit mine to 1 per 3 feet, and am going to have two pantries (I can see the merite of a walk in, but the floorplan of my kitchen wouldn't allow it)
BTW I finished my first 470 CD's in less than three weeks.... |
I didn't actually use iTunes to rip, but EAC has something I'm guessing is similar--"Various Artists Naming." FBOW, it drops the tracks into the same artist/album/song.wav format, but that results in a large number of directories that are populated with one folder with one song.
Redoing the kitchen can put buying stereo equipment to shame... Next time, I'm skipping the stainless (too hard to keep fingerprints off), going for a bigger fridge (new fridges allow you to keep lots in the doors, but try refrigerating a turkey while its brining in a large stockpot), building a separate espresso machine area with plumbed in lines and built-in knockbox opening over a trashcan, putting an outlet every foot on the splash, and definitely going for a walk-in pantry. The concrete countertops came out nicely tho'.
Good luck. |
Ed,
iTunes allows you to list compilations as such, it is a check box in the general preferences.
Hope this helps.
As for the release dates, I'm not to worried about that, and I hope using AIFF isn't going to limit me in the future....... I considered .WAV, but being a MAC guy went with AIFF.
FWIW I am doing this to have good access to all my music, and I started it to have it convienently at my disposal while cooking. Ironic that now that I have ~500 titles on the HD, they started demolishing my old kitchen today!
They say a month.....I suspect it will be longer. |
If I had to do it over again...
1. I think I'd be more diligent about filling in album release date information when ripping.
2. While I organized later rips as:
[Drive:]/My Music/[Artist]/[Album]/[Trk_Title].wav
I really should have done:
[Drive:]/My Music/[Artist]/[Date]/[Album]/[Trk_Title].wav
3. When ripping compilations, I really should have put them in a separate /compilations directory--the large number of Artists I have with only one song makes the directory structure ugly.
Good luck! |
Tell me about it! I started on 9/17 and only have 400 or so disks in... And I have been pretty diligent about putting them in, and in, and in... |
The ripping to .wav files took months. The mac just finished converting the .wav files to .aac--took about 100 hours... |
Ed,
I am curious how long it took...
I am now 2-3 weeks into burning my music collection onto a new SATA 400 G HD in AIFF with error correction (would've have been done by now without..)
I am up to up to the P's.... excluding an entire CD book of compilations..
Ken |
Its been running now for about 42 hours and is slightly less than half done... |
Ed,
How long did it finally take??
KT |
Kennyt-
Thanks, but I figured out what the problem was. If I log into the server before starting iTunes, the "!"s don't appear. Its only if iTunes starts before its logged into the server. I started AAC compression of all the files last night at about 7PM, and I figure it will take about 3-4 days to convert all 15000 songs. I don't think I've ever had a computer processing anything for 85 hours straight... |
Ed,
Why not try clearing the iTune files that catalog your tunes (in the music folder for the user and also the files relating to iTunes in the user/library/preferences *itunes.plist for mac)
Then Just drag the folder from the server and drop it in the library of the i
Tunes window (I hate calling them that on a MAC but...) iTunes will the recreate the files that keep all the music info. If you have your preferences set to keep your music on the server, then it hopefully will now recognize them all.
DO NOTE. This will not erase your music, just iTunes files it uses to find the music.... it will take a minute to recatalog, but might solve the problem. You will however loose your playlists in so doing this.
If you are using a MAC server, and have it still under their warranty, and have some patience, they will fix almost anything. If the server is PC.... I am unclear, but I would still suspect clearing the iTunes files and restarting iTunes (after you clear the reference files iTunes will open like it has never been used before and recreate all these files. If you are careful, and remember/write down where you got them all from, you could easily reverse this process as well. |
Well, I pieced it together. There is a line item under one of the top menu selections that previously read "Convert to WAV", but I found that if you go into the advanced preferences, you can change the preferred encoding the "mp3" or "AAC" or whatever. That is great, I can mass convert a bunch of selected files.
In terms of references to multiple libraries, why not just use the playlist feature as a sorting mechanism? I took the library of WAVs and turned it into a playlist called "All WAVs." I'll go back to the whole library when its finished converting to create a second playlist called "All mp3s." Rudimentary library management, but it should work.
But, I have another problem! Since all my files are on a server, iTunes puts a "!" in the library next to each file name until you double click to play the file. Its like some cautionary note that it doesn't know whether the file exists or not. If you double click to play it, iTunes will use the password on your "keychain" to pull it off the server, and the "!" goes away. The problem is that for whatever reason, asking it to convert does *not* cause iTunes to use the keychain to get to the file, and it simply ignores files with the "!". Any idea whether there is a simple way to force iTunes to verify access to the file? Playing all 15K songs will take me (according to iTunes) 40 days. |
Kenny, thanks for the advice. Can you provide more information, or a link, about the itunes plugin for Macs that allows reference to multiple libraries. I think I might need that!
Thanks, Peter S |
Hmm. I was hoping there was a way to do it with iTunes, but I couldn't find that option. Are you using iTunes 5.0? Half the problem is that with Apple's overscan, I can't see the menu bar on the top. I had that fixed for a while with Panther, because it gave me a new "no overscan" option when it recognized my TV/monitor, but then I hooked the whole shebang up to an HDMI switcher, Panther decided my display was no longer a TV, and the "no overscan" option disappeared. Aie. Anyway, maybe I didn't get the choice b/c I didn't have anything selected.
Yeah, I agree about the conversion times. It took 45 mins for Applescript to convert the directory info into tags, and mp3 compression is going to take even longer. I figured I'd start it up and let it run for a couple days. The mac doesn't get much use beyond running iTunes anyway.
Hadn't thought about the management of the files. I was going to put them on a separate directory on a file server I have. I thought, for some reason, you could have them in the library but choose to "show" only mp3s or wavs as the case may be. In any event, thanks for the help. I'll dig through iTunes once again. |
You could very easily do so with iTunes, select all your music, then under advanced choose convert to (whatever you like AAC,MP3) it will make a copy of everything selected as the other format. The problem is how to independently manage them. Their is a MAC plug in to allow you to run multiple libraries from one user account, but I do not know if anyone has make such a plug in for PC's. The other option is to make a second user account and then have iTunes sort all your library by type and cut and paste all the compressed files into another user's music folder and they 'load' then into iTunes by dragging the file into the library.
DO understand you are looking at a lot of processor work, and HD access time.... I would start the comression before going to bed, or out of town.... I have no idea how long it will take to compress and store that much data, but I will need to do the same thing soon....
I am currently re-burning all my and my wifes CD's in AIFF on a seperate user account titled 'Music Server' and then just let the wife and I share that users account, both of our own libraries are compressed. |
