Morning Coffee 155 - Dueling Conference Edition

• If you don't want to watch the video of yesterday's MIX keynote but still want a sense of what happened, check out Tim Sneath's keynote liveblog. (via Sam Gentile)
• Other announcements from Mix day one keynote that I missed (all via Tim Sneath)
  • Windows Media Services for WS08 released last week. Additionally, the IIS 7 Media Pack adds web playlists (CTP) and bandwidth throttling (GoLive beta) to the baseline media streaming platform.
  • The source code (and unit tests) for all the built-in Silverlight 2 controls is available for download. I'm not a lawyer, but it doesn't look like a "reference-only" licence like the .NET Framework source code is released under. Very cool.
  • The Seadragon technology for smooth navigation of mutli-gigabyte sized images over the network will be emnedded in Silverlight as a feature called DeepZoom. You can see a cool demo of DeepZoom on the Hard Rock Memorabilia site and Scott Hanselman posted a walkthru of using the DeepZoom Composer preview tool build your own DeepZoom experience.
  • Apparently the .NET client roadmap isn't all perf and working set improvements. WPF is getting shader support. I couldn't find anything on this besides the announcement itself, but I'll be interested how much overlap there is with the DirectX / XNA shader language.
• Quick side note - Installing Silverlight 2 in order to check out the DeepZoom Hard Rock demo was smooth, fast and easy. It's hard to believe there's a whole CLR in there.
• Now on to public stuff I saw @ TechFest:
  • One of the problems with touch screens is that your fingers obscure what you're trying to touch. Lucid Touch solves this by having you touch the back of the device, while rendering a virtual shadow of your hand - a technique they call "pseudo transparency". You really need to watch the video to "get" this. It's not currently feasible - the prototype uses a webcam on a foot long boom to track hand and finger position. However, they expect a future version will have some type of imaging sensors embedded in the body of the device.
  • The Berkeley Emulation Engine version 3 (aka BEE3) (video) is a high powered hardware simulator. Apparently several orders of magnitudes faster than conventional simulation. Frankly, most of this demo was over my head and I'm not really a HW guy. But it sounds really fast.
  • BLEWS or "what the blogosphere tells you about news". Given my interest in political blogging, it's not a surprise I was interested in this project. This tool categorizes news stories according to their reception in the political blogosphere. It provides a visualization showing not only how many links from a given ideological sphere there are, but how strong the emotions are running. Kinda like Memorandum on major steroids.
  • Music Steering (video) is an "interactive music-playlist generation through music-content analysis, music recommendation, and music filtering". Sort of like LastFM + Pandora on your Zune.
  • In-Depth Image Editing (team site) showed some cool photo editing software that reminding me of Microsoft Max.
  • MashupOS (paper) is a set of abstractions to improve the browser security model, allowing for isolation between blocks of code from different sources while still allowing safe forms of communication.
  • MySong (paper, video) "automatically chooses chords to accompany a vocal melody, allowing a user with no musical training to rapidly create accompanied music". Karaoke singers rejoice! Actually, it's pretty cool. You can adjust sliders to adjust characteristics of the generated music like "Jazz factor" and "Happy factor". Actually, I just want a happy factor slider in all my software.
  • I saw some cool projects from the Socio-Digital Systems group and MS Research. My wife is a sociologist and always says there's no way she could ever get a job in the big house. Maybe after she checks out this team, she'll stop thinking that.
  • The Worldwide Telescope booth was so crowded that I couldn't get anywhere near it. From what I could see from standing in the back, it looked fantastic. It's not live yet, but you can check out the video from the TED conference to get a sense of it.

Wired for Sound

One of the cool things about my house is that it has built in speakers in four rooms and the back deck. Shortly after we first moved in two years ago, we had a combination house warming and Rileyanne's christening party. As you might expect, one of the top priorities for said party was music, so I hooked up both my main surround sound receiver plus an old receiver I've had forever and we had tunes pumping everywhere except the dining room (which no one was in anyway).

Then, sometime this past winter, I got tired of NOT having surround sound for my HDTV so I redid the sound system. You might be surprised that it took me over a year to get to that, but remember the part about above about "Rileyanne's christening"? I had other priorities. Anyway, I hooked up the surround sound, including the set of built-in rear speakers in the TV room, and banished the old receiver back to the garage.

Now, it's summer again. We spend lots of time outside and on the back deck, but now sans tunes. So I'm re-configuring the sound system again, this time so I can get both surround sound and music in the house. Given that it's a fairly custom speaker setup, I don't think there's an affordable off-the-shelf solution that works for this house.

In the long run, I'm thinking of building a custom amplifier that can drive four sets of speakers (one of the sets in the house is the back surround sound speakers, so they're already taken care of) plus some type of UPnP AV client device. Gainclone chip amplifiers look fairly simple to build - three resistors, two capacitors and the chip itself times eight + a power supply. As for the AV client, I haven't really investigated yet, but whatever solution I go with has to have high WAF.

Of course, building a custom amplifier takes time, so I figured in the short run I'd dust off the old banished receiver and use it to drive two sets of speakers. I also have an old laptop with a bad battery circuit. It can't roam, but it can sit there by the TV and pull music off my loft computer and play feed it into said old receiver just fine. It's not a high WAF solution, but it's something I could put together with parts I had at home + one 1/8" to RCA cable from Radio Shack. I figured I could get this up and running over the weekend. Almost, but not quite.

I hit one snag with WMP 11 for XP. My office machine and my laptop are both running Vista. All my music is on my office machine, but I use WMP 11's media sharing capabilities (previously known as Windows Media Connect) to make that media available on my Xbox. I figured I could do the same with the old laptop, using WMP 11 as the AV client. Being an old laptop it can't run Vista so I installed a fresh copy of XP instead. However, while WMP 11 XP can share media, it can't consume shared media the way WMP 11 Vista can. Best laid plans and all that.

The workaround is to expose the media via file sharing. Simple enough, except now you have to make sure the security is correctly configured between the two machines. Since it's a single function device, I hadn't bothered to set up a password for the default user. Now, in order to access files off the network, I guess I'll have to.

Once I fix this little file sharing and security problem, I think I'm going to start by looking for a better AV client solution. I know I need a custom amplifier if I want to drive all my speakers, but with my old amp I get music in the kitchen and on the back deck which is where we want it most. On the other hand, the AV Client is the main user experience, so perhaps I should pay it more attention. I'd love to have a solution that is drivable on the TV via the remote while also isn't built on a seven year old slightly busted laptop.

Any suggestions?

Morning Coffee 83

• Dottie Shaw - PM on Rome - has a post on Durable Messaging and why she cares. Needless to say, I care about durable messaging too, for all the same reasons...
• PDC07 has been "rescheduled". Feel free to theorize amongst yourselves the reasons why.
• Friend and ex-boss John deVadoss speaks on Software+Services @ the Enterprise Architect Summit. He finds time to present, but his blog remains quiet...
• JD Meier announces a p&p twofer: beta 1 of both their TFS Guide and their Perf Testing Guide. The TFS guide looks like a packaged doc version of their VSTS Guidance Project wiki.
• Facebook announces their Facebook Platform and Microsoft is supporting it with PopFly and Silverlight. TechMeme has much more.
• Pandora on the Go delivers their service to Sprint cell phones for $3 a month. Raging deal, but where's the support for Windows Mobile phones? (via Knowing.NET)

My Wife, YouTube, MySpace and All Day Sucker

My wife was poking around on YouTube and found two videos she wanted to show me. The first was a music video from a band called okgo where they dance on treadmills. Interesting for about 60 seconds. Unfortunately, the video is three minutes long. Still, it is currently #8 on YouTube's Most Watched All Time list. The other was a much funnier video called Stick Magnetic Ribbons on Your SUV (sung to the tune of Tie a Yellow Ribbon 'Round the Old Oak Tree). The song is by the Asylum Street Spankers and the video was produced by Devil's Night Productions.

Among Devil's Night's other work is an almost unknown movie called Matters of Consequence that stared Morty Coyle. Morty fronts a band called All Day Sucker, which was born out of the ashes of a band called THE iMPOSTERS. Back when I lived in LA, I used to go see THE iMPOSTERS pretty much whenever they played. This must have been the second half of 1996, when I was dealing with a massively broken heart. They had a regular gig every week, though I forget the name of the place. But I was there, pretty much every week. I used to carry Morty around the club on my shoulders during the harmonica solo of Rational Anthem. Wow, was that really 10 years ago?

Anyway, you check out a few songs from of All Day Sucker on their MySpace page. Some of the songs – Heavy Weather and Rub It In – date back to the iMPOSTERS days. Their album is available from CD Baby and from Zune, Rhapsody and iTunes. (No direct link for artists on Zune?) Check them out.

It's amazing how small the world seems when you run across old friends online like this. Especially when the recent wind storm and power outage two weeks ago served as such a rude reminder of just how big the world really is, regardless of how it seems.

More on XSFP

Lucas Gonze left me a comment indicating they had in fact investigated using RSS for XSFP instead of starting from scratch. Good to know they considered the possibility. Unfortunately, it looks like they were using RSS 1.0 so it has all the extra RDF stuff which really hasn't caught on. The document doesn't really go into the reasons they chose to go a different way, though Lucas does say the following:

RSS didn't make sense for a lot of reasons. We were paving cowpaths, and RSS for playlists was very much not a cowpath. Playlists are about sequence, while RSS has no concept of sequence except reverse chronological order. We needed abstractions to deal with the fact that music and movies frequently don't have URLs, and RSS didn't have them. If not starting from scratch was critical, HTML preceded RSS and would be the default to work from.

I'm not sure I get Lucas' point about sequence. Both RSS and XSFP have sequence. Sure, RSS is typically describing web site content, thus it's a reverse chronological order. But the RSS spec doesn't mandate and specific meaning to the items in the feed. In fact, the items typically have a pubDate element making the order in the feed somewhat irrelevant. According to the spec, XSFP uses the order of the tracks in the file as the implicit playback order. Why that wouldn't work with RSS is a mystery to me.

As for the "needed abstractions" missing from RSS, I'd be curious to know what those are and why they couldn't be added via RSS extensions.

Lucas, please don't take these comments as criticisms. I'm new in this space and I'm trying to get my head around stuff. Furthermore, if the success of RSS proves anything, it's that number of users matters a lot more than the perceived technical merit of a given approach.

Reinventing the List

Marc Canter seems pretty excited that Songbird is going to support XSPF. While Marc has written about it many times, I had no idea what it was. It's the XML Shareable Playlist Format (pronounced "spiff"). It's designed to be simple and open and built on XML. Typically, that's coolness but while reading the spec, I had a strong sense of deja-vu. XSPF defines a list of songs for a playlist, much the same way that RSS defines a list of blog entries.

So that begs the question, why didn't XSPF just use RSS instead of starting from scratch? RSS is simple, open, built on XML and is massively popular? Remember when Adam Bosworth that pointed out that RSS and Atom are "both support a base schema that provides a model for sets". I'm all for a simple, open and extensible playlist format, but I'm not excited that XSPF has gone of an reinvented the concept of "list" in order to do it.

Great Support from Napster on the Bleeding Edge

As I have written several times on this blog, I am using Napster 2 Go with my Creative Nomad Zen Micro. Unfortunately, the N2G compatible firmware from Creative is still in beta. Everyone in a while...not sure what the repro steps are...the Zen Micro would lose all the N2G music licenses. They've released new firmware (2.11.02) that is supposed to solve this problem.

However, while the new firmware will eliminate this from happening in the future, it doesn't help you with songs that have lost their license. So you have to delete them off the device and reload them. Simple enough to do w/ WMP10. However, the music you download from N2G has a set of license restrictions, including a limit for the number of times you can transfer it to a portable device per month. I think the limit is three. I've reset my device a few times experimenting with it, so about half my N2G songs had reached their limit. Major bummer.

However, I dropped a quick email to the folks at Napster and the next time I synced my device, suddenly all the songs had their transfer count reset. So I was able to resync even the songs that didn't work before. I had figured I wouldn't get those songs back until next month, so I decided to download some other stuff to tide me over. Having the older songs transfer was a very pleasant surprise.

Bravo Napster Support!

Dino Rocks so now I can Rock and Roll

Last weekend, I tried in vain to install a PIE GM9-AUX in my Chevy Blazer. The GM9-AUX converts the CD changer port on the stock CD player that came in the car to a standard RCA jack, which I can plug any one of my four Nomad media players into (though I imaging 99.9% of the time, it will be the Zen Micro) via a standard miniplug to RCA adapter cable. This weekend, my neighbor Dino helped out and we got it installed. He did most of the dashboard removal work and I did the cable installtion and threading it thru the dashboard to somewhere accessable from the driver seat. Thanks Dino!

Slight Issue

I've discovered one thing about my Nomad/Napster To Go/WMP combo that I don't like. Napster is wholy inconsistent when it comes to tagging their music. For example, I downloaded Denis Leary's Merry F'n Christmas album, but half the songs are tagged that they come from the Merry F#%$in' Christmas album. This specific example only appears to be an issue in WMP, but I also had issues with the tagging of Chris Rock's Never Scared album. One song shows up as part of the "Never Scared" album, but the rest show up as "Never Scared [Bonus DVD]".

I think WMP adds to the difficulty here because of the sheer amount of metadata it tracks. Artist and Album Artist for example. Good idea, but it's really easy for those to get out of sync (check out this website for more info on that). And because these files are all DRM protected, you can't edit the metadata in the file itself, only in WMP's library. But I can't figure out how the metadata & file structure on my computer corrisponds to metadata structure on the Nomad with 100% certanty.

However, even with that, I still recommend Napster to Go highly. This is a very minor issue that I think highlights a few of the remaining rough edges in a consumer scenario that involved Microsoft, Napster and the media player manufacturer. Plus, I'm anal about things like album names.

(One other side note - deleteing and rebuilding your WMP library causes all the songs on the device to be retransfered. Woops. Had to reformat the device, but since there's nothing on it but my Napster music, it was no big deal.)

You Never Owned Any Music

"I just tried out Napster to Go with my iMate and while I still am not sure that I like the idea of music rental, but I would pay a monthly fee to Apple if I could get access to any piece of music anytime even if just for a while after using Napster for even a few days.  The software experience needs work, but it is a lot better than I ever expected it to be.  Napster has something here actually, but most people don't realize it yet because Microsoft and the industry is doing a piss poor job at showing just how interesting life can be in this model." [Lenn Pryor]

While Lenn admits that "Napster has something here actually", I guess I have never understood the issue some people have with "music rental". You don't own the music and you never did. You've always owned a copy of the music. You "rented" the music in perpetuity (that's legalese for "a long ass time") for a flat fee. You can argue that the record labels have kept more than their fair share of said flat fee, but it doesn't change the fact that you never owned anything but a copy.

Personally, I like the Napster model much better. I am paying $15 a month in perpetuity but I get access to pretty much everything that comes out. Actually, I'm not even paying yet - I'm still in my 14 day trial period. But I've downloaded nearly 3GB so far including a variety of stuff that I was going to buy on CD anyway when I got around to it. Life is certainly more interesting under this model.

Inital Thoughts on Zen Micro and Nomad to Go

After using the new 2.1 firmware for my Nomad Zen Micro for a couple of days, I can see why they haven't upgraded all their players en masse quite yet. It still has a few rough edges. Red Chair Software, makers of the awesome Notmad Explorer that I use to manage my other Nomads, advises that you use the older 1.x firmware "you have a specific reason to switch". Of course, I have a very good reason to switch. The 2.1 firmware is actually beta - something I think Creative should make a little more obvious on the website (not that I wouldn't have downloaded it anyway). For the less adventurous, the 2.0 firmware also supports Napster to Go and isn't in beta.

The place where I notice the rough edge the most during song transition. When I push next or previous song, sometimes it happens right away and sometimes it takes 4-5 seconds. It doesn't happen when it's playing back a set of songs - what ever the Nomad is doing (verifying licenses I'm assume) it must do it for the next song before the current song ends, so the lag only occurs when you're jumping around manually.

That's really my biggest complaint. Napster to Go works really well. They haven't upgraded their help files to the new 3.x version of Napster - for example, all of their screenshots have a separate library function within Napster, but on my machine it just uses WMP's library - but it's pretty easy to figure out. I've configured NTG and WMP 10 to auto sync any Zen Micro with any songs I've downloaded from Napster (about 1GB in the first 24 hours I've used it!). The only complaint there is that autosync works by playlist. If you download a Napster compilation, autosync will transfer the music but not the playlist.

And that reminds me of a feature I'd like to see on the Nomad (all of them). I want to be able filter the list of album to exclude the ones that only have one or two songs. When you download a compilation, you get around 25 songs from different artists. Great for discovering new music, but it adds a bunch of noise to the list of albums. So why not exclude albums that only have a few songs downloaded?

My Fourth Nomad

I just got my hands on a Nomad Zen Micro. That makes four Nomad's so far - I also have a IIc, Zen Xtra, and a MuVo NX. While I like my other Nomads, the Micro blows them all away.

First off, it's tiny. It may only be 5GB compared to the Zen Xtra's 40GB, but it's also around a third the size. The touch pad is a little funky to get used to, but it sure looks nice. And unlike the Xtra, it pulls power from the USB connector. It doesn't even have a separate power connector - the AC adapter that it comes with actually plugs into the mini USB slot. Cool

Haven't had it long enough to talk about battery life or the interface, though the interface at first blush seems much better than the Zen Xtra. For example, if you're listening to a song you can jump to that artist in the library. I've wished for that feature many times with the Zen Xtra.

Of course, the first thing I did was flash the device to the new 2.1 firmware. The 2.x firmware adds support for Plays for Sure subscription services like Napster To Go. And I signed up for my 14 day trial on Napster about 10 seconds after I updated the firmware. I've downloaded about 1GB of music from Napster - I figure that's a good start.

(Note to Creative - the fact that I got a Zen Micro does not let you off the hook for updating the firmware of the Zen Xtra. I expect to be able to use that with Napster To Go as soon as possible.)

Napster to Go Got Going

With their Super Bowl ad yesterday, I guess Napster to Go is out of the closet. They have some new compatible devices, including the iriver H10 that Jeff likes so much. Alas, my Nomad Zen Xtra is still out in the cold. So far, it looks like only portable media centers and a handful of 5GB players (the H10, Nomad Zen Micro, Dell Pocket DJ, Gateway Photo Jukebox) are supported.

I'm wondering if older devices will ever be supported? I mean, it's a new protocol and technology, I wouldn't be super suprised if the older devices just couldn't be upgraded to support the subscription service. But if that's the case, I wish they would simply announce it and move on rather than leaving it in limbo. This post on the Creative Europe forum makes it sounds like the firmware will get upgraded, but with no idea of a date. So, in other words, I don't know when or if I'll get to use Napster to Go to fill up the other half of my 40GB Zen.

Connecting To Your Windows Media

I started reading The Nears after Sean linked to his comparison of Media Center Extenders. Today, there's a great comparison of Media Center Extenders to Windows Media Connect devices. Very cool stuff. I'd love to have all my media on a central machine and then be able to listen to or watch it all over the house. The Nears linked to the Roku SoundBridge which plugs into your stereo system. Supports wired or 802.11b/g wireless in as well as analog, optical and coax audio out. Controllable via remote control or web app. Of course, what would be truly killer is web services support. Prices seem pretty reasonable. There are three different models with the same functionality - the only difference is the size and quality of the display. I think I need one or two of these...

Napster To Go

Apparently Napster to Go is old news, having been launched in beta months ago. They don't appear to be marketing it - the only mention of it I could find was on the page of compatible devices. I'm guessing the reason is the page only lists five devices compatible with the Napster to Go service and all of them are portable media centers. I wanted to search for other devices compatible with Windows Media Digital Rights Management 10 but the PlaysForSure advance search isn't working. There's new firmware for the Zen Micro that supports WMDRM 10, but nothing yet for the Zen Xtra. On the plus side, I discovered the Nomad SDK and FriendlyNomad C# wrapper for the SDK. Not sure what I would write that accessed my Nomad - I which I could customize the playback experience but Red Chair Software's Notmad Explorer provides a great PC expereince.

Portable Media Devices and Subscription Services

I just read this interesting article on subscription services and portable devices. Apparently, Napster is going to be offering an upgrade to their current unlimited streaming service next year that will support portable devices. For $5 more a month (a grand total of $15 a month) you can transfer an unlimited number of Napster's 700,000 tracks to a compatible portable device. Major Cool. In Napster's CEO's own words:

You can fit 10,000 songs on [a top-of-the-line iPod], but to do that would cost you $10,000 if you bought the songs from Apple. With our plan, customers can get 10,000 songs on their device for $180 a year. It's an enormous value.

I had the Napster streaming service for a while, but the inability to take the music on the go was the major reason I canceled it. My 40GB Nomad Zen Xtra is only 55% full - I would re-subscribe to this service in a second if I could use it to fill up the remaining 17GB. Unfortunately, according to the article, the Zen Xtra isn't one of the six devices that works with the new DRM technology...yet. Creative is supposed to upgrade their Zen Micro (again, according to the article) early next year. I would expect that Creative would upgrade at least their jukebox media players - if not the entire line - to support the new technology. I've been a happy Nomad customer for years now (I own three Nomads - the Zen Xtra, a IIc and a MuVo) but my brand loyalty would plummet if I had to buy a new player to use the new service.

Slight Nomad Issue Solved

I've had my Nomad Zen for just over a month now. I've loaded almost 6500 tracks from 525 albums and it's only about half full. However, I did have a slight issue with it. Walking across campus the other day, I tripped over my own damn feet. Luckily, the Nomad broke my fall :(. I ripped the protective case and scuffed the LCD screen, but otherwise it didn't seem any the worse for wear. However, when I fired it up on the flight to Sydney it wouldn't work. It would boot and claim to be playing, but no music came out. If I selected a new song, it would freeze and needed a hard reboot or battery removal in order to shut down. I tried the reset button and reloading the firmware, no luck. Today, I searched Creative Labs' knowledge base, searched for "zen xtra crash" and found an article on the Zen's Rescue Mode. This allows you to Clean Up, Format All and Reload OS. Clean Up took a while - around 15 minutes - but it did the trick. I guess the rapid deceleration caused some temporary issue to the internal hard drive, but there don't seem to be any residual effects. Even the song that I was listening to when I fell is fine.

Of course, no device is perfect. In addition to "Make Rescue Mode Easily Discoverable", I have two minor quibbles with the device. First, it doesn't draw power from the USB connection. With Red Chair's Notmad Explorer, I can play the music from the Zen thru my computer's speakers. I also use Notmad Explorer to convert my music from WMA lossless to WMA 96k when it transfers to the Zen. In both of these cases, the Zen is connected to the computer for a long period of time. It would be nice if I didn't have to plug in both power and USB. Second (and more likely to be addressed as it's a software issue) is that when you're listening to a song, you can get it's track details, displaying the artist and album names. It would be nice to be able to jump directly to the artist or album in the music library from the track details screen.

Minor quibbles aside, this is an awesome device.

New Toy

I just picked up a 40GB Nomad Zen Xtra. I know everyone is all ga-ga for the iPod, but I have all my media in WMA I found the Nomad for almost half the price of a 40GB iPod. I also picked up Notmad Explorer which is much cooler than the built in software. I especially like the Xtreamer capability which allows you to play music stored on the Nomad thru your computer speakers. So far, I've only filled up 1/3 of the storage - I guess I need to rip more of my CD collection!

SHN2WMA

I rewrote the script that I blogged about over the weekend to convert shorten files to WMA 9 lossless format. You've got to have the shorten utility on the path and have Windows Media 9 Encoder installed.

Download the SHN2WMA script.

BTW, I claimed that the WMA lossless format was half the size of shorten's format. Turns out that the ratio varies widely. For the concerts I've converted, I've seen as reduction percentage between WMA and shorten be as high as 55% and as low as 12%.

Pat Mcgee Band and the Live Music Archive

My brother called earlier this week to let me know that the Pat McGee Band, a band he introduced me to, has a new album "Save Me" and a new EP "Drive By Romance" with four live tracks. I picked up both on Napster last week. Also, they will be in Seattle on May 4th. Most of the bands my brother introduces me too are local to the east coast, so I rarely get to see them.

If you want to know how good Pat McGee is live, you can head over to the Internet Archive where they have archived about 140 live shows of Pat with and without his band. Pat McGee is "trade friendly" which means he lets his fans tape and trade his live concerts. Other artists up on the Live Music Archive include the Grateful Dead (over 300 shows!), Little Feat and Toad the Wet Sprocket.

The only issue with the the Live Music Archive is that the songs are mostly in a lossless compression format called "shorten". Unfortunately, there's no way to play shorten files in Windows Media Player (as far as I know - there is a plugin for WinAmp). What I really want is to convert these files to Windows Media format using the Lossless codec. No such utility exists, though I did find a free command-line utility to convert shorten files to uncompressed wav files. So I hacked up a little batch program to convert each file from shorten to wav and then to WMA lossless. Turns out that the WMA lossless versions of the files are about half the size of the shorten versions, so I get both playback convenience as well as a non-trivial space savings. I'd post the batch file, except that when I said I hacked it up, I really mean it. Hard-coded paths, implicit assumptions, bad code, the works. I'm going to take another pass at it, then I'll post it.