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MusicMan 2 launches at SouthWest Show this weekend

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A Rawnsley

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Feb 23, 2012, 10:55:10 AM2/23/12
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R-Comp is pleased to announce the release of version 2 of our MusicMan
CD software.

The new version is particularly exciting, because for the first time,
RISC OS users are able to enjoy digital playback of music CDs in the
desktop. This is hugely significant, as modern CD/DVD drives no
longer have analogue connections (as used by RISC OS itself, and to
our knowledge, all other CD player programs), so you simply can't hear
anything if you try and play CDs on modern USB or SATA drives.

As such, users of USB drives (eg. ARMini users, Beagleboard,
Pandaboard or other board users) or SATA drives (most VRPC users)
simply can't listen to CD music under RISC OS.

MusicMan 2 solves this, by digitally reading the audio from the disc,
and playing it back in realtime, multitasking in the desktop. Using
routines developed for the audio-extraction (aka "ripping", but we
hate that term!) portion of the program, MusicMan reads the digital
audio in, and the plays it through your computer's sound system.

As always in MusicMan, information about your CDs can be downloaded
from the internet (eg. track listings, album and artist/composer
information) and MusicMan displays this as it plays. The system has
been designed to be very easy to use, and most operations happen in
just a single click.

For users of older machines, analogue playback is still supported.
The program will attempt to autodetect the best playback method for
your machine, but you can can also chose by left/right-clicking.

Of course, playback is just one part of the equation.

MusicMan 2 now supports many more formats of raw or compressed audio.
This allows you to extract your music from CD either in uncompressed
format for editing (WAV files, or raw audio), or as smaller,
compressed files for listening later. By compressing your CDs to
disc, you can play any of your music tracks whenever you want without
having to find the CD.

As well as the ubiquitous MP3 format, MusicMan supports more open
formats like OGG, or the audiophile's preferred FLAC format. This
definately bears further explanation - most music formats (eg. MP3)
are lossy, like JPEGs for photographs. FLAC files are lossless -
mathematically identical to the original digital audio on the CD, but
compressed to much smaller sizes. This means that you can enjoy the
full quality of your CDs, without requiring huge amounts of disc
space. It is worth noting that FLAC conversion is also relatively
quick, making it a format well-worth checking it. And of course, it
plays back nicely on RISC OS machines (it isn't floating point based)
:)

But, it's even more exciting that that...! MusicMan allows you to
choose where you store your music collection, such as on a
network-attached drive. Not only does this mean your music will be
available to all your computers, but most modern NAS drives support
built-in music/media sharing/streaming. This means that your music
can be encoded by MusicMan and then streamed to your hi-fi or TV in
the living room (many modern TVs and amplifiers have network or
wireless connections which allow this).

MusicMan automatically adds information to your files so that they can
display information such as album, artist/composer and track name /
number. This now applies to all formats of compressed audio.

Finally, MusicMan 2 supports hardware accelerated audio conversators
on modern machines such as the ARMini, which can yield significant
performance boosts (eg. 4x faster).


It is quite a rush to get things ready for the show, so please forgive
us if things like web-info takes a few days to appear. The software
should be available at the show.

--
R-Comp
22 Robert Moffat, High Legh, Knutsford, Cheshire WA16 6PS
Tel: 01925 755043 Fax: 01925 757377 http://www.rcomp.co.uk
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