Updates on the Wolverine MVP 60GB Portable Multimedia Storage and Player, converting M4P files and more.
As you might have guessed, the Wolverine MVP 60GB Portable Multimedia Storage and Player we reviewed a couple of weeks ago is a candidate for creative hacking.
We found a posting complete with screen shots on the Digital Photography Review Storage and Media forum on how to upgrade the Wolverine’s hard disk. The posting’s thread is quite long, going into topics such as how to change the battery and how to mount the Wolverine as a USB drive under various operating systems other than Windows.
While all of that is good, still we’d like to see ways to modify the Wolverine’s operating system so it can be improved and extended. Oh, and sorry, but we mistyped: The Wolverine MVP 60GB is available for around $300, not $200.
Another correction: Reader Scott Stanton pointed out that we made “two references to television ‘standards’ … neither of them correct.” Indeed so, although we must defend our technical knowledge as the expansion of the acronyms PAL and NTSC we originally used were mangled in the editing process.
Stanton points out that “PAL is Phase Alternating Line [and] NTSC is National Television Standards Committee.”
He also notes that NTSC “actually has never been formally accepted as a standard. It is a recommended standard (SMTP RS-170A) only. In television engineering circles it is also known as Never Twice the Same Color because color carrier phase is set at the receiver by the user (the “Hue” control) who, as we all know, is clueless.”
Regarding our question about converting M4P files (Apple’s Digital Rights Management [DRM] protected format) to MP3, reader George Pasley suggested using a utility called dBpowerAMP published by Illustrate.
DBpowerAMP is a great piece of software that can transcode between a tremendous number of formats, but unfortunately cannot handle M4P files.
A technique we have seen proposed is to use iTunes to play the M4P music files and use a tool such as TotalRecorder from High Criteria.
TotalRecorder is one of many utilities available that substitutes its own audio driver in Windows and relays the audio output it receives to the real audio driver. As it performs the relay, TotalRecorder takes a copy of the data and saves it in whatever file format you like. Voila! A DRM-free version of your own legally acquired music for you to use on the music player of your choice.
As far as we can tell this is legal. According to Apple’s iTunes Music Store Terms of Service: “You shall be entitled to export, burn (if applicable) or copy products solely for personal, noncommercial use.”
After reading the Terms of Service, it would appear that as long as you are playing by the rules, transcoding by copying or burning is OK. Exactly what those terms mean could well be up for debate.
The downside of this method? You have to let iTunes play each file so your transcoding will take at least as long as the duration of the music. Ugly but effective if you have a spare PC and the time.
There is, however, another downside to using TotalRecorder: You won’t automatically get the MP3 tags set up because the track data isn’t available to external programs – for that you’ll need to jury-rig a naming system and that just seems too painful.
The best solution we can find still seems to be to burn a CD and then rip it using a ripper that supports interrogating of Gracenote to get the track data. To improve on this would require a virtual CD burner so that you could have iTunes write to a virtual CD from which you could rip your MP3s. Automate this solution and you’d have the problem licked.
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