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View Full Version : RMC vs RM for recording Pandora?



Anthony DePaula
06-08-2008, 12:07 PM
I would like to capture Pandora music. RMC 2.30 doesn't get many of the tags, but RM 3.0 does. Is there a difference in quaility between these 2 products?

Cheryl Wester
06-10-2008, 08:20 AM
HI

They both should be tagging the music. Replay Media Catcher is capturing from the stream itself in the native format so it is an excellent quality. Replay Music is capturing what you hear. If you are happy with what you hear you will be happy with the quality.

cain
07-30-2008, 01:45 PM
For what it is worth, I have captured hundreds of songs from Pandora, successfully, with RMC 2.30 - very rarely do I miss a song, but about 20% of the time I have to retry the tag.

I just installed RMC 3.0 today and have only just begin testing the new functionality.

Great job guys, so far, so good. (This from a 15 year Enterprise Systems software engineer.)

Update:

Testing capture with Pandora - much more reliable (so far) and much, much faster (maybe just me, but the responsiveness and capture speed seems faster.)

Andy Heinlein
07-30-2008, 01:53 PM
glad to hear it.. The reason why it's faster is because 2.3 was converting from m4a to mp3 then fingerprinting the song...

Now, since RMC can tag/lookup m4a files, it just downloads and fingerprints... much faster than the old version.

thanks for the feedback!
-andy.

cain
07-30-2008, 02:16 PM
glad to hear it..

thanks for the feedback!


As a software engineer myself (having developed commercial software for years and years) - this type of feedback is needed, I know. :)

It seems like all you ever hear about is when it is broken. :p

... or, when there is a problem, you get vague details and concise demands. :rolleyes:

Andy Heinlein
07-30-2008, 02:24 PM
haha exactly... "IT WONT RECORD. THANKS BYE"

cain
07-30-2008, 02:32 PM
First, the potential bug (and I may have just missed the change in behavior):

I first opened a single tab in FireFox 3.01, running Vista, to Pandora. Captures and conversion to MP3 were automatic, no problems.

I then decided I would be greedy, opened a second tab to Pandora, different channel.

Bug? : What I now notice is that the captures, while named, are not being converted. I checked the settings and didn't notice anything to indicate that the captures should be converted to MP3 on completion.

Moreover, the ID3 tag information that shows in Explorer is incomplete (the file has the right name, but I don't see the Artist, Album, Track, etc info like I do with my MP3's - maybe a function of the file type or something else.)

Second: The Pet Peeve

Capturing Pandora I have a slew of files left over in my capture directory. If they are converted or renamed, get rid of them! OR, if they are indeed temp files, use the temp folder and hide them from me - I don't want the clutter. ;)

UPDATE: Looks like those were left over from my capture last night with 2.30 - 3.0 renames the capture and without the conversion, there appear to be no intermediate files.

And, I now understand that conversion is not a part of the new capture process (or an option) and that M4A's are what is captured for Pandora. Not a big deal, really, I can use the converter for my non-IPod.

Tasha Heinlein
07-30-2008, 03:23 PM
Just a quick note..
I started up Media Catcher 3.0, opened Pandora and let it run for an hour and a half - It tagged EVERY SONG!!!! Very cool stuff!

Best Regards,

Tasha Heinlein
Applian Technologies, Inc.

Andy Heinlein
07-30-2008, 04:08 PM
And, I now understand that conversion is not a part of the new capture process (or an option) and that M4A's are what is captured for Pandora. Not a big deal, really, I can use the converter for my non-IPod.

Converting inside RMC was causing tons of problems for users so I took it out... M4A files are pretty standard so I just leave them as is. Since RMC isn't a converter-tool (and i don't want to take away from Replay Converter) I took out the conversion...

Overall it should be a much smoother process when capturing from Pandora.

In theory, you should be able to open 20 tabs to pandora and it should download everything fine and tag everything perfectly.

-andy.

cain
07-30-2008, 06:20 PM
In theory, you should be able to open 20 tabs to pandora and it should download everything fine and tag everything perfectly.


Totally fair - all too often we get caught in scope or feature creep. Your decision was fair and reasonable - the performance is a welcome "compromise."

I haven't jumped to 20 tabs... yet.

But I do have Wootalyzer, a Hulu movie and 10 pandora's going... I'll watch for stability and keep adding. :)

cain
07-30-2008, 06:28 PM
Just something I noticed.

Some of these streams are being stored as MP3's - having 10 running at once for the last 15 minutes, two of the files are stored as MP3 with the rest as M4A.

Nothing wrong with that, just curious about Pandora's streaming behavior.

Andy Heinlein
07-30-2008, 07:48 PM
About 6 months ago Pandora only streamed as MP3... they switched to M4A when the new flash player could handle the format. M4A is a lossy format, but sounds much better than MP3 at lower bitrates. So now Pandora saves tons of bandwidth by using the M4A format.

I am sure what's happening is that their whole library hasn't been converted to M4A yet, so there are still some MP3 files floating around there.

cain
07-31-2008, 05:32 AM
I am sure what's happening is that their whole library hasn't been converted to M4A yet, so there are still some MP3 files floating around there.


Really good idea (on their parts) - and thank you for the insight.

By way of follow-up, I got up to 13 tabs (Firefox, Vista, 2GB RAM) with a movie downloading on Hulu.

After 15 minutes of that, my system was not so responsive ;) - but the songs were doing pretty good. The renaming started to get backed up and occasionally failed (requiring manually performing it again.)

I backed it off to 5 and left the movie capturing. About 5-10 minutes later Media Catcher (3ß) crashed (Windows dialog with Debug-Close) - not having any of the symbols or source, best I can do is this:

Fault bucket 865800323, type 1
Event Name: APPCRASH
Response: None
Cab Id: 0

Problem signature:
P1: MediaCatcher.exe
P2: 3.0.0.0
P3: 489012cf
P4: ntdll.dll
P5: 6.0.6001.18000
P6: 4791a7a6
P7: c0000005
P8: 00065a20
P9:
P10:

Attached files:C:\Windows\Temp\WER9BD8.tmp.version.txt (I forgot to snag the file, I apologize, I know this is about useless.)

This also came with:

Windows detected your registry file is still in use by other applications or services. The file will be unloaded now. The applications or services that hold your registry file may not function properly afterwards.

DETAIL -
1 user registry handles leaked from \Registry\User\S-1-5-21-#####-#####-####-1000 (Looks like an Admin SID.)

And:

Faulting application MediaCatcher.exe, version 3.0.0.0, time stamp 0x489012cf, faulting module ntdll.dll, version 6.0.6001.18000, time stamp 0x4791a7a6, exception code 0xc0000005, fault offset 0x00065a20, process id 0x124, application start time 0x01c8f294e7577508.

I'll look for the crash dump file next time, sorry.

Andy Heinlein
07-31-2008, 08:50 AM
i don't think a crash dump would help.. it crashed way down in the ntdll.dll which is one of the core system dlls...

But, that diagnostic information should be sent in a help ticket.. since most people have no idea what it means :)

-andy.

cain
07-31-2008, 01:36 PM
i don't think a crash dump would help.. it crashed way down in the ntdll.dll which is one of the core system dlls...

But, that diagnostic information should be sent in a help ticket.. since most people have no idea what it means :)

-andy.

I'll try and get it all together tonight and submit a comprehensive ticket. :D

cain
07-31-2008, 03:46 PM
I've written a journal of my experience in testing these last two hours.

... and, really reproducing the "crash" - haven't done it yet. So, that's good.

A few things I have noticed, might not be bugs, maybe they are.

1. CPU spike when the MusicDNS is being used to resolve/rename the file. When there are problems with this, there are problems elsewhere.
2. Every call to rename results in additional handles and page faults. At 2 hours I have a 19MB memory footprint, 65k page faults, 4115 handles and 14 threads with 85 user objects.

I'm capturing a Hulu movie and have 10 tabs open in Firefox to Pandora.

Maybe it was something else.