B2 for classical collections?

[Glyn406]

As someone with a large CD collection made up almost entirely of classical music, I’m weighing up the pros and cons of becoming a Brennan owner, but before laying out the substantial amount of cash required to do so, I’m hoping that there is a Forum member with similar musical tastes who can give me advice and reassurance that I’d be able to do with it the things I would want to do.

 

It isn’t clear to me how the B2 handles the playing of a multi-track part album. For example, many if not most classical CDs will contain two or possibly more works, quite often by different composers. Sometimes one of these works is surplus to my requirements, perhaps because I have an alternative version that I prefer on another disk. Now, as I understand it, it’s not possible to do a partial upload of the CD by uploading just the desired work to the B2; it has to be an all or nothing upload, with the subsequent deletion of the unwanted work. Have I got that right, and if so is the deletion straightforward?

 

Usually the works on my CDs will have more than one movement, and each movement will occupy its own track on the disc, so if for example the first work has four movements it would occupy tracks 1 to 4, while a second, three-movement work would occupy tracks 5 to 7. When playing the CD on my CD player, if I want to listen to just one of the works it’s a simple matter to program the player so that it plays tracks 1-4 if I want the first work, or 5-7 if I want the second work, and in each case the work plays right through without needing any intervention at the end of each of its tracks. Can the same be done on the B2?

 

On the CD player, the display shows the number of the track playing at that moment. For the B2, I’m not clear whether the track numbers are downloaded from the external database, or entered subsequently by the user. Whichever it is, if in my hypothetical example I’m only keeping the second work, I’d prefer its tracks to be labelled 1, 2 and 3, rather than 5, 6 and 7 as they were on the original CD. Can this be achieved?

 

On the question of labelling: does the 64 character limit apply to the album, or to each individual track on the album? If it’s the former, is it possible to “convert” a CD containing say three works into three separate albums by downloading it three times and then deleting two of the works in rotation after each download? This would give more flexibility to the question of labelling it.

 

The final question is whether the Web User Interface can be used equally readily on a Chromebook?

 

I’m sorry to have written such a long tract, but I think that many people who have collections of classical music might find these points to be important, so it would be well worth covering them in a paragraph or two on the website.

[Daniel Taylor]

I will admit up front that I am beginning my response before finishing your message. Long story short, I'm certain that there will be some method on the B2 that will suit your needs.

In our example of tracks 1-4 being one comprising one complete work, and tracks 5-7 another, there are two ways in which you could approach this.  One would be to have the 1-4 work be it's own "album" and tracks "5-7" another "album."  That's the way I would do it.  When I want to hear a partiular work all the way through and stop, that method works for me.

You asked if such groupings could be uploaded to the B2.  Yes and no.  Yes:  You could create the "album" for each complete work on your computer, transfer the folders to a USB disk, and Import the folders onto the B2.  No: You cannot rip from the CD directly into the "albums" you would like.  You can move things around on the B2 to create custom albums, but it is not as easy as doing it on your computer.

Another way would be more work.  Each time you want to play a specific work minus tracks on the actual album that are not part of the work, you could create a temporary playlist that includes just the tracks you want.  You can keep the playlist or delete it.  But if you keep too many of such playlists, it could get crowded.

I'm now reading more of your post.

[Daniel Taylor]

When tracks are ripped from a CD to the B2, they are grouped into folders as such:  Artist folder containing Album folders for that artist, with each album folder containing its tracks:  music\Artist\Album\tracks

The tracks are named like this:  01 Artist - Song Title.wav

until they are converted to the .FLAC or .MP3 format of your choosing, whereupon the WAV file is deleted.

The track naming for classical albums is not so straight forward.  It depends entirely on what someone has entered into the CD database for each album.

I do all my ripping on my computer, where I can edit all the track names and tagging information (the B2 does not populate the tags very well), and then I Import the music onto the B2.

Your idea of downloading (I assume you mean ripping) the album three times and deleting the tracks you don't want will work if you do things in a particular order.  After ripping once, and deleting the tracks, you must rename the Album folder.  Otherwise, the next time you rip, it will overwrite the original album.  So yes you can do that, but IMO it's more work than the first method I mentioned.  Totally up to you.

WebUI on a Chromebook?  Although I've never tried it, I certainly think so.  You can use any device that connects to WiFi with a browser.  Phones, Tablets, etc.

I believe the limit on names applies both to files and folders.  Last I remember it was specified as 74 characters.  I would limit it to just 70 to be sure.

You should be aware that the B2 can have trouble with some non-standard characters, which are more likely to turn up in classical pieces.  You can rename files to replace characters with inexact approximations that are more standard.  Dvorak comes to mind.  I don't have the proper characters on my keyboard to do it correctly.  I think you get the idea.

[Rearwing]

To pick up and expand on Daniels point, accurate tagging is possibly the most important aspect of curating music collections for digital playback. How a machine created the tagging on one machine will not always fit in with another machines software. Most of the answers you are looking for can be achieved, but only with input from yourself in ensuring that the tagging needed for your purpose is accurately applied to the music that you wish to store.

The Brennan is relatively inexpensive for something so sophisticated, especially in comparison to other hi-fi products, but it is in essence a low powered computer attached to a storage device that can retrieve and play files at your command. The retrieving of files is entirely dependent upon the tagging that has been applied, so, the more sophisticated you want the retrieval to be, the more information has to be available to the machine. Which is a long winded way of agreeing with Daniel that it is often better to collect and collate your files on a Mac or PC before transferring to the B2.

[Daniel Taylor]

The reason I add and edit the tagging information is so it will be there if I ever have to use my Brennan hard disk with some other piece of equipment that uses that information.  The B2 does not use the tagging information.  It uses the names of the Artist and Album folder and the filenames for the tracks.  The tagging information is entirely ignored on the Brennan.

[Iain Bell]

Following on from the comments above I can add a few of my own based on my experience of having had a B2 for about 6 months and which I am using to store my (mostly classical) CD collection.

First of all I would mention that apart from a few minor problems (which I think I can put down to me trying to run before I could walk), I have found the B2 to be a great way to easily see what works and performances I actually have, particularly so when a lot of the sets I've bought in the last few years have been artist box-set compilations . I have my CD collection currently lined up a) alphabetically by composer for individual CDs and b) by artist/performer for the box sets/compilations. With the grey matter playing up at times I needed a way to be able to quickly see which works were in the artist box-sets. Before diving into what I knew would be a lengthy process of ripping and tagging the CDs I read a lot of the posts on this forum and have found them very helpful in helping me avoid pitfalls that I would otherwise have made had I jumped head-first into ripping my collection.

I started off ripping my CDs directly via the B2 CD drive, but having read Brennan's own recommendations and other voices on the forum I then decided to rip them on to a USB memory stick via my laptop and an external CD drive. This makes the whole process much faster and saves wearing out the B2 drive for those future occasions when I might need it. I also acquired the dBpoweramp software (for about £30/ 40€ / $40) which has proved a godsend in making the whole naming/tagging process almost painless and even more importantly alerting if there have been errors when ripping - I've ripped over 1000 CDs so far and had about 6 or 7 which needed to be reripped, so all told, not too bad a percentage, but could be a problem if you dispose of the CD after ripping without listening to the rip. The software also takes care of converting the ripped .wav file to .flac or .mp3 a lot faster than the B2 itself. (There is another bit of software called Exact Audio Copy, which does the same kind of thing and is free, but personally I find it more difficult to get to grips with than dBpoweramp).

When it came to organising works I eventually settled on the following system which suits my needs (at least, so far ;-)):

1) I have given most individual works their own title to which I add the performers at the end to be able to differentiate, so that e.g. this is one album: Beethoven - Symphony No.2 - Columbia SO, Walter . I have other performances of this work and then I just replace Columbia SO, Walter with e.g. CSO, Solti or BPO, Karajan (In the event the performers have recorded it more than once I just add the year of recording in brackets e.g. Beethoven - Symphony No.2 - CSO, Solti (1974))

2) In the example I gave above the Artist is Columbia SO, Walter and all recordings by them end up in the Artist folder "Columbia SO, Walter" on the B2.

3) When it comes to tracks (file names), this is where it can get messy due to the different ways the tracks are listed by different databases e.g. the first track in "Beethoven - Symphony No.2 - CSO, Solti (1974)" is listed as follows by SonataDB (via dBpoweramp):

Symphony No. 2 in D, Op. 36: I. Adagio molto-Allegro con brio

by iTunes (incorrectly) as 

Beethoven: Symphony #2 In D, Op. 36 - 1. Poco Sostenuto, Vivace. 

The first album I mentioned "Beethoven - Symphony No.2 - Columbia SO, Walter" has: 

 

Symphony No. 2 in D major, Op. 36- Adagio molto - Allegro con brio  

There doesn't even seem to be consistency within each database so this is where a bit of manual adjustment is necessary if you want to have some kind of consistent naming of tracks/file names which will appear on the B2 display or UI or as Daniel mentions for playback on other equipment using the data stored on the B2. (For my purposes, I can live with differences such as whether a work is listed with No. 2 or No.2 (no space) or # 2 - the main thing for me is to be able to locate a work via the B2 UI and as long as the exact same title (excluding the performers) is used there is no problem. If I want to see what recordings I have of Beethoven's 2nd Symphony I can type "Beethoven - Symphony No.2" (without quotation marks) and get a results list to click on as follows:

Beethoven - Symphony No.2 - BPO, Abbado

Beethoven - Symphony No.2 - BPO, Cluytens

Beethoven - Symphony No.2 - BPO, Karajan (1977)

Beethoven - Symphony No.2 - Columbia SO, Walter etc etc

One other point is that with dBpoweramp and Exact Audio Copy you don't have to rip the whole CD twice if there are two works on it - all you need to do is select the tracks for one work (album) and then rip those and then deselect them and select the rest. This is particularly useful where on some compilations you might have up to 10 different shorter works that you want to have as separate albums e.g Debussy's piano works.

[Glyn406]

Thanks Daniel, Rearwing and (especially) Iain for your very helpful comments.

It seems to me now that the only obstacle is expense, which takes two forms. There is the obvious one of cash, to which I've already alluded. Pace Rearwing, I'm not suggesting that the Brennan is overpriced, but to be realstic its price would represent a substantial chunk of my discetionary spending for the year. But the other, perhaps less obvious cost, is that of time. I don't want to seem morbid, but there are a lot of miles on the clock, and there are many other things still clamouring for attention in whatever time I have left. It would take a lot of domestic diplomacy to take this additional project on!

We'll see...

Glyn

[Iain Bell]

Glyn,

I sympathise with your concerns re time spent on getting the B2 loaded up with music - this is one reason I would recommend ripping through either Exact Audio Copy (which is free) or dBpoweramp (which you can try out free for a few weeks). The ripping and compression process takes a fraction of the time that it takes the B2 to do the same thing. To help you in your deliberations, it takes my external CD drive (just a  regular Asus model) on average about 2-3 minutes to rip and verify each CD and end up with compressed .flac files - from memory when I started ripping directly on the B2 it could take at least twice that amount of time and then I would have to leave the B2 on overnight to compress the files. 

(As an aside, having initially not been too bothered about downloading the original artwork for each album, I've started to enjoy tracking down the covers on various websites (Discogs,Ebay etc etc) and add these to the B2 - using the UI or PC to browse my collection then becomes a kind of trip down memory lane, back to the days when record shops and record libraries still existed and you could spend many a happy hour just examining the artwork on different records (vinyl, that is). I think now I spend as much time looking at the various covers before deciding which one to download as I do on the ripping, compressing and transfer stages. On recordings from the 50s and 60s it's really interesting to see the different artwork that was used in different countries for the same recording - some are real works of art, others definitely of their time and place!)

My solution to the longer-term time problem is to try and set aside 15 minutes in the morning in front of the PC, when I can rip 5 CDs, have a coffee and scan the newspapers online at the same time - using dBpoweramp there is sometimes some editing of titles, artists etc required, but copying and pasting from previous rips of a particular work title/artist cuts this down, so that on average I can do 5 CDs inside the 15 minutes. I do the same in the evening, so that I can rip 10 CDs on average a day, which would mean 300 CDs/month or 3600 CDs /year. Real life sometimes gets in the way, but if I miss a session then I'll try to catch up over the next few days if possible.

Good luck with your diplomatic mission!

All the best,

Iain

[Glyn406]

Iain

After your last message. I decided that to download dBpoweramp and take advantage of its free trial period to see how I got on with ripping some CDs. I reasoned that if I could reach the stage where I can do it as speedily as you do, I'd be able to deal with a decent number in the trial period. Not only would this then justify buying the software,it would also strengthen my hand in the necessary diplomatic negotiations still to come. But though Installing and setting up the software, using the excellent installation guide supplied, was quite straightforward, I've got into a tangle with the labelling.

What I'm after is exactly the sequence described in your first message: the sequence 'Composer/ Work/ Artist(s) - including conductor where applicable/Date' as the album titlle, with the tracks listed with their (accurate) descriptions as shown on the disc's booklet. However, I'm far from achieving this, as shown by the attached screenshot of my attempt for a disc containing the Bruch and Brahms Violin Concerti, played by Tasmin Little with the RLPO conducted by Vernon Handley.

Could you be so kind as to do a bit more Dutch uncle-ing and guide me how to adjust the settings to get the result I want? I'd be very grateful!

Glyn

[Ian Voce]

I’ve been using dBpoweramp this week after it was recommended on the group. I think it works well for those CDs it finds in the database but not very well when you have to enter details manually. I found the results do not always generate what I was expecting. Maybe it’s me.

I’ve started using Exact Audio Copy for those which it could not find and I find it much easier to enter the details as I would like them. Cut, copy and paste is easier. The only thing that it doesn’t do, perhaps I’ve set it up wrong, is generate the top two folders. But that is easy to do. Perhaps someone could advise if I’m missing something.

I’ve just finished ripping the Philharmonia orchestra box set of 24 CDs “Birth of a legend” and the two databases EAC uses only found 8 of the CDs so I’ve manually done the other 16.

I’ve loaded them all onto my BB1 from USB stick in batches, then ran Scan Disk every time. No problems.

Now I’ve finished that, I’ll run a backup tonight.

Hope this is of interest.

Regards

Ian

[Iain Bell]

I've sent an e-mail to Glyn with a rough guide as to how I use dBpoweramp - as there were so many screen dumps involved I didn't want to wreck this thread by posting it all online, but if anyone is interested I'll be happy to forward it to them as well. 

Best regards,

Iain

[Peter Lowham]

Good one Iain,

This is what makes this forum so good for all of the users. I know that it takes a lot of effort to prepare something like this, so well done!

Regards,

Peter.

[Charles Browne]

Ian, I would be grateful for  copy of your notes. I have just started to load my CDs onto a B2 using dBpoweramp so your advice and experience would be invaluable.

Many thanks

Charles

[Iain Bell]

Peter,

I agree - the forum is a great place for learning and getting tips on how to optimise Brennan devices - I'm still learning something everyday by scouring the daily summary, often getting ideas on things I didn't know could be done with a B2!

Charles,

I've forwarded the mail to you that I sent to Glyn - please let me know if you have any questions about the content.

/Iain

[Gerard]

Iain, I would appreciate a copy of your notes about dBpoweramp - I have just purchased it and need to rationalise my Brennan collection - a lot of it is in the mp3 format (from my Jb7i) and I want to update all to flac for my B2 & BB1 as well as tag it all properly for use with Sonos. Thank you for taking the time and trouble to rationalise it's use and consequently to help others like myself get to grips with it. I hope this message gets into the forum ok.

Best wishes

Gerard Murphy

[David Richards]

Hi Gerard,

There would be no point in converting mp3 to flac as you cannot restore the lost information. Just leave the mp3s as they are (assuming Sonos can play them) to keep the space saving.

DR.

[Gerard]

Hi David

Thanks for your reply. I would intend just to rip to flac on my pc (and thence to an external HDD) using dBpoweramp and then transfer to B2 as someone suggested above. My B2 has the highest capacity HDD so there's plenty of space for the flac's. I think I would appreciate the better sound of flac and I would just delete the old mp3 albums from the B2 - of course it's all a tall order as I have 2000 cd's (20% in flac and 80% in mp3). The mp3's were from my time with the Jb7i and I had backed them up (took several days!) and then transferred them to the B2 some years ago. Newer CD's were ripped in the B2 to wav and then flac. If I'm going to do all the above, then I'll need to be very well organised and extremely efficient with my efforts. The tagging facility would allow me to utilise the Sonos system better, in terms of actually searching for music, as presently I have to navigate the individual folders and sub-folders to choose music, which is counter-productive.

Gerard.

[Norm Glennard]

If you are using dBpoweramp Gerard, you can set the file destination to the B2 assuming that you have it set up as a NAS. That way you save the time and effort pf transferring from your pc to the B2.

It'sso much easier.

Norm

[David Richards]

OK, it wasn't clear to me what your intentions were. I just didn't want you to waste your time for no benefit. Instead of deleting your existing mp3s I hope you've still got a backup of them as you never know when you might want them. Good luck with your enterprise.

DR.

[Iain Bell]

Gerard,

I have just sent an e-mail with the notes I made based on how I use dBpoweramp - having seen Norm's suggestion about ripping directly to the B2 as a NAS, I'm going to give that a try at the weekend - would eliminate an unnecessary stage if I can get it to work ;-)

Best regards,

Iain

[Daniel Taylor]

If you rip on your computer with dBpoweramp (and probably other programs as well) you can edit before you rip.  Then when the rip is done, all your track names will be as you want them and the tagging info will be too.  Once I found out I could edit within dBpoweramp, it saved me a lot of time.

[Norm Glennard]

As long as you have set the destination as Y:\ or however you have mapped the B2, then its easy peasey but remember to 'wake it up' on your File Explorer first otherwise you will get error message because it can't find the path.

Norm

[Gerard]

Thank you all for your helpful suggestions and Iain for his notes on dBpoweramp - I'll let you know how I get on.

Best wishes

Gerard

[Gerard]

Altho' I now seem to have lost Iain's notes but I do have the dBpoweramp jpg screen images numbers 025 to 036. Iain, I would appreciate it if you could send me the text again. Sorry for any inconvenience.

Gerard

[Iain Bell]

Hi Gerard,

Have just resent the notes with images again.

Best regards,

Iain

[Gerard]

Iain

I got it this time - notes and images - difficulty was likely at my end but resolved now thankfully.

Thanks for all your help

Gerard

[THW]

Iain, Coming upon this discussion a bit late, I would nonetheless very much appreciate a copy of your "Rough Guide to dBpoweramp," if it's still ready to hand.

Thanks very much.

T. Wilson

[Iain Bell]

THW, I've just sent my notes - hope they can help. Since jotting them down I've now ripped about another 1500 CDs and have found that dBpoweramp returns an error message on some tracks on a small number of CDs. If this happens I reclean the CD - in some cases it seems to be just a rogue thumbprint which causes the problem - but there have been about 10 or so cases where it just refuses to rip a track. I have then retried ripping that track via EAC and in each case I have managed to get a good copy. In some cases EAC will say that it has detected a possible error, but it gives the timings for such errors so that you can listen to the ripped flac file and hear if anything is wrong. (From what I understand it can sometimes be down to different pressings, although I would have thought that would apply to the whole CD rather than individual tracks.....) So far, there is not one rip which sounds off to my ears :-)

[Paul A Bristow]

Having a large classical collection I found these discussions very helpful.  It sounds like the

"Rough Guide to dBpoweramp,"   

may tell me even more useful info on using dbPoweramp with a B2.  Is would be really useful post this document on the group conversation as an attachment (paperclip icon)?

Never mind the size, that's what the internet is for!

Thank you.

[Andy Snapper]

Iain,

I am brand new here, as is my B2 which I want to fill with Classical Music. 

Peter has guided me to this thread and so I too would be grateful to have your 'Rough Guide to dBpoweramp' to stop me reinventing the wheel or more likely, making an unholy mess.

Thank you.

Andy

[Iain Bell]

I've just replied to Paul and Andy and attached the notes I've made - I've been having some PC problems recently so have missed some things - will try and upload the notes on to the forum tomorrow (as an attachment) if anyone else would like to have a copy.

BR, Iain

[PMB]

Hi Iain,

Yes, that would be helpful.

Paul

Brennan Support.

[Andy Snapper]

Thank you to Iain for taking the time to pass this on despite your own current difficulties. I will see if I can follow it through. 

Thank you Paul for checking up that all is still well and trying to make me understand what has happened. I will now see if I can get the concentration to see how Iain has approached dealing with Classical Music.

Cheers

Andy 

[Iain Bell]

I'm attaching a pdf copy of the notes I've sent out individually - please excuse the formatting!

All the best, Iain

[Paul A Bristow]

Thanks for that - looks very helpful.  (I'm liking dbPowerAmp - apart from the price, but worth it).

(The whole structure still looks daft for classical music - and for 'pop' it doesn't credit the composer, librettists, support musicians etc. The only photo you get is the cover. But when CDs were invented, the ubiquity of metadata and proper databases wasn't predicted :-( )

[Andy Snapper]

I am not doing very well with this. I used the dbPowerAmp to rip some files to a USB stick and then imported into my B2 and despite trying to be careful ended up with a set of duplicate files on the B2. Furthermore the duplicates did not have the 3 dots alongside where you can select to rename or delete. So I went instead to the global Delete Music and tried that instead. But I am still left with these rogue files appearing on my UI. I have refreshed the page so they are still there. I am attaching a screenshot to show what it looks like.

I haven't got to grips with NAS yet so I am none too sure how to get rid of them now, or understand how I created them!

Any ideas?

Andy

[Daniel Taylor]

Do those extra files have orange (or gold) icons next to them?  If so, that is the listing of what is on the USB disk.  Once the USB disk is gone, those listings will be gone, too.

[Andy Snapper]

That is exactly right Daniel. They do have Gold/orange silhouettes. So they are not duplicates on the B2 hard drive? So I did not need to delete. 

Daniel, what is the conventional way to now remove the USB stick? Will it be to save and power down the B2 and then remove? Or is there another way?

Andy

[Andy Snapper]

I have read on the old notes that it

  You can hot­plug USB mass storage devices ­ that means USB disk drives and memory sticks can be plugged in and out while B2 is turned on but other devices like the Bluetooth and Wi­Fi dongles must only be plugged and unplugged while the unit is turned off.   

[Daniel Taylor]

I think what you say is probably true.  Those with a bit of OCD, like me, always plug or unplug USB devices on the B2 with power off.

[Andy Snapper]

Having pulled the USB out of the Brennan and plugged back in to my computer then the two times I have done that the Windows OS wants to do a repair on the USB stick. At the moment I am experimenting in small batches but will probably adopt the tack of powering down when pulling out of the B2. I certainly always 'eject' out of the computer. I might try I at least remembering to save on the B2 before pulling out.

[Daniel Taylor]

That message you get when you plug in a USB disk that has been in the B2 is because the B2 does not unmount the disk - at all, ever.  It doesn't matter if you power down first, you'll stil get that message when you plug it in to your computer.  It took me awhile to convince myself to not worry, but now I just ignor the message and go on about my business.

For those who are way more OCD than me, there is a long tedious solution.  Log into the B2 via SSH and type in the command to unmount.  I don't know the exact syntax.  If you really care, you can look it up.

[Linda Ericson]

I just want to give a great shout-out for the advice on how to do classical recordings. I started my ripping with mostly jazz or pop stuff because it fits mostly the basic artist/album/track format. But I never (or way later) would have found or figured out the special stuff you should do with classical recordings. So thank you, thank you, thank you...Linda

On Saturday, June 27, 2020 at 12:58:37 PM UTC-7 Daniel Taylor wrote:

When tracks are ripped from a CD to the B2, they are grouped into folders as such:  Artist folder containing Album folders for that artist, with each album folder containing its tracks:  music\Artist\Album\tracks

The tracks are named like this:  01 Artist - Song Title.wav

until they are converted to the .FLAC or .MP3 format of your choosing, whereupon the WAV file is deleted.

The track naming for classical albums is not so straight forward.  It depends entirely on what someone has entered into the CD database for each album.

I do all my ripping on my computer, where I can edit all the track names and tagging information (the B2 does not populate the tags very well), and then I Import the music onto the B2.

Your idea of downloading (I assume you mean ripping) the album three times and deleting the tracks you don't want will work if you do things in a particular order.  After ripping once, and deleting the tracks, you must rename the Album folder.  Otherwise, the next time you rip, it will overwrite the original album.  So yes you can do that, but IMO it's more work than the first method I mentioned.  Totally up to you.

WebUI on a Chromebook?  Although I've never tried it, I certainly think so.  You can use any device that connects to WiFi with a browser.  Phones, Tablets, etc.

I believe the limit on names applies both to files and folders.  Last I remember it was specified as 74 characters.  I would limit it to just 70 to be sure.

You should be aware that the B2 can have trouble with some non-standard characters, which are more likely to turn up in classical pieces.  You can rename files to replace characters with inexact approximations that are more standard.  Dvorak comes to mind.  I don't have the proper characters on my keyboard to do it correctly.  I think you get the idea.