I like AirPlay.
I have a couple of Apple Airport Express units connected to HiFi units and use AirPlay to take audio from iOS devices to them.
AirPlay is also supported on Mac computers but not on Windows computers.
This is where TuneBlade comes in. It intercepts the audio to your PC sound output and sends it to an AirPlay device.
The free trial was enough to very quickly convince me it was worth paying £7.99 for.
Basically it "just works".
The (necessary) disadvantage is that it installs "Bonjour" on your computer (if you don't already have it from an Apple piece of software) but that doesn't seem to have been a practical problem.
All in all, highly recommended.
http://www.tuneblade.com
Saturday 12 October 2019
Saturday 7 September 2019
The "Maplin" LAN Disk and Windows 10
My first steps into Network Attached Storage (NAS) drives were the Maplin LAN disk.
I've moved on to "greater" devices since but the old LAN Disks were still in the cupboard.
One had a fairly decent (by previous standards) 500GB disk and I thought I would fire it up to see if it still worked (with Windows 10).
The short answer is that you need to give it a static IP address (by reservation in my case) and create a share (I called it "share" ) via the Web interface but once you have done that it is possible to map a network drive using 192.168.x.xxx/share (as appropriate) in the "This PC" part of file explorer.
Result !
I've moved on to "greater" devices since but the old LAN Disks were still in the cupboard.
One had a fairly decent (by previous standards) 500GB disk and I thought I would fire it up to see if it still worked (with Windows 10).
The short answer is that you need to give it a static IP address (by reservation in my case) and create a share (I called it "share" ) via the Web interface but once you have done that it is possible to map a network drive using 192.168.x.xxx/share (as appropriate) in the "This PC" part of file explorer.
Result !
Tuesday 27 August 2019
The ( Roland ) Edirol UA-25 and Windows 10
There are times when I discover something in the process of getting a piece of technology to work and feel the need to spread the news, this is one such occasion.
The Edirol UA-25 us a good quality sound card with (for me) the key feature of an analogue limiter built in.
You can thus feed a signal into it close to digital peak level without the risk of clipping.
However there isn't a Windows 10 driver.
A thorough Googling leads you to some excellent instructions for overcoming this at:
http://forum.cakewalk.com/Getting-your-devices-to-work-with-Windows-10-m3267234.aspx#3267234
I can confirm that this worked fine on my 32 bit Windows 10 installation.
I found that just updating the unknown device with the driver (once modified) and accepting all the unsigned driver warnings was enough to overcome the problem.
I didn't need to do the switch for unsigned drivers command.
Use your Edirol UA-25 on Windows 10 and enjoy !
Sunday 25 August 2019
A new life for a Dell Latitude 10 ST2 with Windows 10
I write about things that have caused me problems but I take my hat off to people who toil with challenging computer problems and when they solve them, document the solution for the assistance of others.
One such writer, to whom I shall be eternally grateful is the author of this article on upgrading a dell Latitude 10 ST2 tablet to Windows 10.
http://blog.asiantuntijakaveri.fi/2015/02/windows-10-install-from-usb-to-dell.html?m=1
The Dell position is that this isn't supported.
Actually, if you can overcome a few hurdles that Dell place in the way the tablet will run an early version of Windows 10 extremely well.
Also, and to my relief, the Windows 10 install seems to have an acceptable licence by virtue of the previous Windows 8 or 8.1 install.
Fantastic !
One such writer, to whom I shall be eternally grateful is the author of this article on upgrading a dell Latitude 10 ST2 tablet to Windows 10.
http://blog.asiantuntijakaveri.fi/2015/02/windows-10-install-from-usb-to-dell.html?m=1
The Dell position is that this isn't supported.
Actually, if you can overcome a few hurdles that Dell place in the way the tablet will run an early version of Windows 10 extremely well.
Also, and to my relief, the Windows 10 install seems to have an acceptable licence by virtue of the previous Windows 8 or 8.1 install.
Fantastic !
Sunday 19 May 2019
The Barix Exstreamer 100
The Barix Exstreamer is a hardware audio stream player.
https://www.barix.com/audio-products/exstreamer-family/barix/Product/show/exstreamer-100-105-110-120/
I bought a Barix Exstreamer second hand "as sold".
The unit has a neat feature that it speaks the IP address from the audio output (thus avoiding any challenges of finding the IP address out). Having found the IP address and got to a point where I could look at it (a spare broadband router was handy to get a 192.168.192.xx network), I pointed a browser at it hoping for a setup page. My guess is the unit had been set with a static IP address suiting the network it had been used on.
Sadly all I saw was a password screen:
It didn't seem to have any obvious default passwords and was probably protected for its former application.
Fortunately the Exstreamer 100 has a way of regaining control when you are presented with a problem like that, you can reflash the unit with stock firmware using serial.
One of my older computers has a "proper" serial port so I got hold of a crossed 9 pin serial cable (null modem) and the required firmware.
I used streaming_client_kit_vb230_20120921 and a Google should find you a set of similar software.
It is all available (after registration) from the Barix website but I found that the registration email turned up in my spam filter so sourced the firmware elsewhere.
What you need is in the folder called update_rescue so look there.
Assuming you have com port 1 as your serial port click on the serial1.bat file and is should start.
You then connect the serial cable to the Exstreamer 100 and power the unit up.
Something similar to the above should be seen. Eventually (all being well) the replacement firmware should be on the Exstreamer.
It reboots, and once it picks up an address by DHCP, you should see the status page.
They have a "test"streaming service so my unit started to produce music.
Unit fixed !
There is a very handy Yahoo Group for the Barix Exstreamer which has old posts you might find helpful and a file collection which includes the required software.
https://www.barix.com/audio-products/exstreamer-family/barix/Product/show/exstreamer-100-105-110-120/
I bought a Barix Exstreamer second hand "as sold".
The unit has a neat feature that it speaks the IP address from the audio output (thus avoiding any challenges of finding the IP address out). Having found the IP address and got to a point where I could look at it (a spare broadband router was handy to get a 192.168.192.xx network), I pointed a browser at it hoping for a setup page. My guess is the unit had been set with a static IP address suiting the network it had been used on.
Sadly all I saw was a password screen:
It didn't seem to have any obvious default passwords and was probably protected for its former application.
Fortunately the Exstreamer 100 has a way of regaining control when you are presented with a problem like that, you can reflash the unit with stock firmware using serial.
One of my older computers has a "proper" serial port so I got hold of a crossed 9 pin serial cable (null modem) and the required firmware.
I used streaming_client_kit_vb230_20120921 and a Google should find you a set of similar software.
It is all available (after registration) from the Barix website but I found that the registration email turned up in my spam filter so sourced the firmware elsewhere.
What you need is in the folder called update_rescue so look there.
Assuming you have com port 1 as your serial port click on the serial1.bat file and is should start.
You then connect the serial cable to the Exstreamer 100 and power the unit up.
Something similar to the above should be seen. Eventually (all being well) the replacement firmware should be on the Exstreamer.
It reboots, and once it picks up an address by DHCP, you should see the status page.
They have a "test"streaming service so my unit started to produce music.
Unit fixed !
There is a very handy Yahoo Group for the Barix Exstreamer which has old posts you might find helpful and a file collection which includes the required software.
2022 Update:
The Barix Yahoo Group (and Yahoo Groups in general) has gone.
The Barix Yahoo Group (and Yahoo Groups in general) has gone.
Barix have an area on their website to get firmware etc.
Wednesday 16 January 2019
Getting the data off a dead Buffalo Linkstation.....
Perhaps unsurprisingly given my "recovering a Buffalo Linkstation" post from September last year, come the start of January I have a dead Buffalo Linkstation HS-DH750GL as it died again.
After the September experience I had instigated fairly regular "Sync Toy" runs to back up the Linkstation HS-DH750GL to a WD MyCloud and a Synology NAS DS216se.
The way I worked, the Linkstation HS-DH750GL was my "working" store so when it broke I was only a few days of data lost but it was unfortunate.
Investigation suggested that the drive was OK and when I put it in a USB caddy and connected it to my Raspberry Pi, to my immense surprise the data partition "mounted" and all my files were there.
The drive isn't easily visible on a Windows machine as it has a Linux format and partition scheme.
I had a spare 1TB drive (the WD Blue that my PC seemed to not like) and so bought another Synology NAS case (a DS115j this time) and fitted it to that.
After an hour of Synology initiation "stuff" it was all up and running with an empty 1TB drive. Unlike the old WD Blue 650GB there are no S.M.A.R.T. error reports on the 1GB drive so it seems OK to use.
The Synology NAS drive was seen by the Raspberry Pi as a server and by copy and paste I set the Raspberry Pi to clone the ex Linkstation 750GB drive (about 600GB of stuff) to the Synology NAS.
It isn't fast (about 48 hours) but is doing it..
Once I've got the data all on the new Synology, I'll have another go with the Linkstation HS-DH750GL but I think the PSU might be on the way out. There is a bit of a "capacitor" smell to it.
After the September experience I had instigated fairly regular "Sync Toy" runs to back up the Linkstation HS-DH750GL to a WD MyCloud and a Synology NAS DS216se.
The way I worked, the Linkstation HS-DH750GL was my "working" store so when it broke I was only a few days of data lost but it was unfortunate.
Investigation suggested that the drive was OK and when I put it in a USB caddy and connected it to my Raspberry Pi, to my immense surprise the data partition "mounted" and all my files were there.
The drive isn't easily visible on a Windows machine as it has a Linux format and partition scheme.
I had a spare 1TB drive (the WD Blue that my PC seemed to not like) and so bought another Synology NAS case (a DS115j this time) and fitted it to that.
After an hour of Synology initiation "stuff" it was all up and running with an empty 1TB drive. Unlike the old WD Blue 650GB there are no S.M.A.R.T. error reports on the 1GB drive so it seems OK to use.
The Synology NAS drive was seen by the Raspberry Pi as a server and by copy and paste I set the Raspberry Pi to clone the ex Linkstation 750GB drive (about 600GB of stuff) to the Synology NAS.
It isn't fast (about 48 hours) but is doing it..
Once I've got the data all on the new Synology, I'll have another go with the Linkstation HS-DH750GL but I think the PSU might be on the way out. There is a bit of a "capacitor" smell to it.
Monday 14 January 2019
Repairing a Behringer DSP9024
I have a Behringer DSP9024.
For those unfamiliar with the unit, it can be considered a "poor mans Optimod" as it does split band audio dynamic range reduction.
While I wouldn't consider it suitable for use before an A.M. transmitter, for taming audio before a web stream it is ideal, and that's what I use mine for.
Unfortunately it broke with what I now know is a common failure mode (all the lights on the front panel flash and it "hangs" half way through booting).
A google suggested that the PSU capacitor C65 which seems to do a logic rail is the common fault. It is 16V/2200uF and mine looked like it might have been previously replaced.
I replaced it with a recommended 25v/3300uF and to my great relief the Behringer DSP9024 is mended.
Even now, a second hand replacement would cost £80 on eBay and there is nothing obvious for less than 4 figures that would do a similar job. Behringer make a 2 band unit but I suspect the DSP9024 does a better job (if less easy to set up).
The perfect unit would be a combination of the Behringer DSP9024 and a Shoutcast server.
Orban make something like that but it costs about £5k.
Anyway, the Behringer DSP9024 is mended for now.
Good luck if yours breaks.
For those unfamiliar with the unit, it can be considered a "poor mans Optimod" as it does split band audio dynamic range reduction.
While I wouldn't consider it suitable for use before an A.M. transmitter, for taming audio before a web stream it is ideal, and that's what I use mine for.
Unfortunately it broke with what I now know is a common failure mode (all the lights on the front panel flash and it "hangs" half way through booting).
A google suggested that the PSU capacitor C65 which seems to do a logic rail is the common fault. It is 16V/2200uF and mine looked like it might have been previously replaced.
I replaced it with a recommended 25v/3300uF and to my great relief the Behringer DSP9024 is mended.
Even now, a second hand replacement would cost £80 on eBay and there is nothing obvious for less than 4 figures that would do a similar job. Behringer make a 2 band unit but I suspect the DSP9024 does a better job (if less easy to set up).
The perfect unit would be a combination of the Behringer DSP9024 and a Shoutcast server.
Orban make something like that but it costs about £5k.
Anyway, the Behringer DSP9024 is mended for now.
Good luck if yours breaks.
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