At this point I should probably mention the fact that Lydia had (somewhat obsessively) knitted a scarf for My Coxon, which she was intending to give to him at the gig. Now I'm not totally convinced she would have actually given it to him, but seeing as he was currently in the same pub as us, Sarah and me thought she should go for it, go up to him and give him the scarf. Which, one gin and tonic and a large amount of calming down she did!

He seemed slightly taken aback, or perhaps just surprised, but he seened to like it, and we all had a somewhat brief but very cool chat with him about the virtues of Fibbers and his missing drummer. (At which time I attempted to make some terrible joke about him having to do an acoustic set - it was the best I could come up with considering the circumstances!) After he'd thanked Lydia again and gone back to his band, we managed to sufficiently calm Lydia down (again!) and get to the gig.

Now I must admit that I had heard very little of Graham Coxon's solo work, apart from the current single Freakin' out, but the gig was good. The support act, Bloc Party were in a similar vein to Grahm Coxon's own recent work - loud, guitar-driven pop-rock, whose sound almost seemed to big for the venue. In fact the only crictism that could be levelled at them was that live, and in a venue of that size, there was almost too much going on in their music.

The arrival of Graham Coxon at 9:30 brought with it a certain smugness, what with having met him little over 2 hours before! I could pretend that I knew the songs we has playing, but to be honest, as previously mentioned, my knowledge of his work is a little thin, suffice to say he certainly was the 'rock' portion of Blur. The size and intimacy of the venue, as well as the packed crowd created a brilliant atmosphere, and the gig was topped of by it being Graham's birthday that day, with the audience even starting an inpromptu chorus of Happy Birthday (allegedly started by our very own Lydia!)

Graham rounded off the night (and the encore) with the current single, which possibly got the biggest response of the night - there was much jumping to be seen, reminding that fibbers really needs a higher roof. It was also a riminder to me of how great the gig was - not only did I get the chance to see the excellent lead guitarist of Blur in such a small and intimate venue, we even got to meet him! A thoughly 'rockin' gig, at York's official #3 place to rock. After friday, I'm pretty sure it should be at least #2...

(I apolgise now for the condescending laymans speak / confusing technical babble - I was so impressed I felt the need to do a writeup of this program, and as such hope non-techies will appreciate the quality of Captive. anyway, I digress...)

What does it do?

You see, Captive allows Linux to read Windows format NTFS partitions. If you have a recent version of Windows installed on your hard drive (Win 2000 or XP), chances are it will store your files on disk in a format called NTFS. Linux stores it's files in a different format (comonly a format called ext3).

So What's the big deal?

These two formats (NTFS and ext3) are like two different languages, Japanese and German if you like. Now while the ext3 format is fully documented, NTFS is a proprioritary format invested by Microsoft, and so it is very difficult for other operating systems like Linux to understand it and read.

To give an example, imagine you are an english speaking person (difficult, I know), and you want to read a essay written in German. Now if you got hold of a German -> English dictionary, you could translate each word literally, and get the basic meaning of the essay. Now imagine the essay is in Japanese, and no-one will sell you a Japanese dictionary. Or offer to teach you Japanese. This is basically the problem faced when trying to read NTFS disks in Linux. The meaning of NTFS is only known by Microsoft, and although work has been made in being able to read NTFS, Linux cannot write files in NTFS format. (The language anology holds here: while you could probably work out what the Japanese essay said, given enough time and other pieces of writing that have already been translated from Japanese to English, writing it would be a much more difficult task)

So where does Captive fit in?

How it works

I said above that Linux can read NTFS files, but cannot write them. Well now it can, with the help of Captive. What captive basically does is allow Linux to use the Windows NTFS driver itself, so it can read and write NTFS disks.

To do this Captive has to do three things:

1. Get a copy of the Windows NTFS driver
2. Act like Windows so it can use the NTFS driver
3. Pass the information it gets via the NTFS driver to Linux to use

The first of these tasks is achieved in quite a clever way - it uses the existing read only NTFS support in Linux to search the Windows hard disk for the driver files. This is relatively easy, but unlike many other Linux programs, Captive pretty much does this for you.

The second task is basically the hardest. Pretending to be Windows is very difficult; Windows is a huge and complex program, with over 40 Million lines of code in Windows XP. Fortunatly a number of other programs already go some of the way to pretending to be Windows, and so Captive's author's had a framework to start on. However a large amount of work was required to pull this all together - see the author's site for a technical description.

The net result is that Captive creates a mini-version of Windows running inside Linux. This mini-version of Windows (or a Sandbox to use the correct term) deals with the actual process of reading and writing the information from an NTFS disk, and then passes it to the normal Linux file handling functions. As Captive uses the 'real' NTFS driver, it's support for NTFS is complete.

If this is technical jargon is hurting your head, let's go back to our language analogy: Captive is basically kidnapping a Japanese-speaking person, getting them to read the Japanese essay, then taking the raw thoughts out of his brain so he can understand them (OK, my analogy is falling apart a bit, but it gives you an idea of the complexity of this program!).

So how is it so easy to use?

Well all you as a user of Captive have to do is install it, and run it's setup program. It does all the necessary searching for the NTFS driver, setting up it's Sandbox to talk to the Linux operating system, and even finds and makes available all NTFS disks you have on your PC. it literally took my 30 seconds from starting the install to browsing all my Windows files

Cool! So who wrote this then?

A single random guy called Jan Kratochvil, coding in his spare time.

A quick browse of the merchandise revealed a load more of bold, brash Hail to the Thief based merchandise, which although looks great on the front of an album, it looks less good with me wearing it. Anyway, I've already got enough Radiohead T-shirts, so we gave them a miss.

The first (and only) support act was Asian Dub Foundation. I hadn't really heard much of their stuff before, but I think they are best described as an Asian version of Rage mixed with the Beastie Boys. They were reasonably good, but not a good choice support act for Radiohead - the crowd didn't really get into it, and ADF's MCs were quite keen on that sort of thing. They finished their set around 7:20pm, giving the roadies about 20mins to sort out the kit, and scale the stage to get the best seats in the house.

The 'head came on about ten to eight, and if the crowd had been subdued for Asian Dub Foundation, they soon rectified that when the band came on. Kicking off with the now customary There There, they immediately had the crowd jumping and singing along. Thom Yorke, dressed in a somewhat hobbit-like jacket and waistcoat, kept the crowd banter to a minimum, while they gave stunning perfomances of half the songs off Hail To The Thief, and an excellent selection of older material, including a soulful Fake Plastic Trees and a huge, album perfect rendition of Paranoid Android. This was contrasted brilliantly with the beautiful Sail to the Moon, only slightly spoiled by a bunch of people who can only be described as dicks, who insisted in shouting Go Thom or words to that effect through half of the song.

At this point the lignting should mentioned. The band had a series of vertical lighting set up (the same ones they had at Glastonbury), which could light up in sections to almost give a giant pixellated video wall behind them. Along with a load of 'normal lights', this gave them a great setup, which I'm sure Mr. Cowley would be proud off.

The band continued their voyage through the last five albums, playing such tracks as Climbing up the Walls, Exit Music (For a Film) and Idioteque. The set was finished off with Idioteque, which is definitely a track to hear live, espcially when you get to see Thom's unique dancing style (look out for ThomTwitch.com, coming to an Internet near you soon.)

After getting a huge applause, the band came back for the first encore. While The Gloaming and Go to Sleep were well received (partically the eerie green backlighting during the gloaming), it was the Bends, which got the biggest response of the night. Bathed in a brilliant swath of orange light, and striking 'rock' poses, Thom sneered has way through the song (where do we go from here, the words are comong out all weird...). Anyone who says Radiohead are depressing obviously hasn't seen them live.

How to follow up the title track of their second album? By playing the ultimate track of that same album. If the bends got the loudest reception of the night, then Street Spirit came in a close second. Perfectly selected to finish off the encore, here was a band who just have such a diverse and high quality back catalogue, they can quite easily play a different set every night, and still have the crowd eating out of their hands.

The band left the stage for the second time of the night, but it wasn't long before they came back, to rapturous applause, to play their final selection of songs. A Wolf at the Door is another great album finisher, and it got a rare live outing. Karma Police, another crowd favourite briefly raised the crowd close to a bends-esque level of euphoria, before they concluded with the opener of Kid A, Everything in Its Right Place. This was extended out and accompanied by a scrolling purple backlight, as each band member left the stage individually, clapping the audience and having clearly enjoyed themselves. As the last two, Ed and Jonny left the stage, the funky purple lightshow had been changing to the message F O R E V E R. We can but dream.

(^*Yeah I know it's called the MEN Arena or something, but I'm an old skool Manchester kid, and Nynex is so much easier to say than M.E.N.)

Background

Apple's 2nd Gen iPod

Although I've never owned a Mac, I've always admired them from afar - the asthetic design, the simple-yet-works-properly-with-the-hardware operating system, and the slightly cool aura that Apple manged to project onto their products. I'd toyed around with them when the opportunity arose, but it wasn't until approximately one year ago that I got my own bit of Apple hardware: The iPod.

I won't go on about how good this simple yet brilliant music player is; suffice to say that it's quite simply the best mp3 player out there. Full stop. When Apple released the Windows version, I had it ordered within the week, and was quite in awe of the hardware when it (finally!) arrived. Unfortuneately, Apple had decided to ship it with what can only be described politely as a piece of shit: MusicMatch jukebox. While I've managed this past year (mainly by using other software), the thought of having a decent music player that played nicely with my iPod was the main motivation for giving the Windows version a test drive.

Installation

Much has been made of iTunes's apparent incompatibilities, causing all sorts of problems. As far as my experience went, I suffered no problems at all. Installing iTunes on a moderate to low spec machine by today's standards (Celeron 900 with 320MB Ram, GeForce 3 gfx card running Windows XP) caused no more difficulty than the obligitary reboot Windows requires after installing virtually anything. The install process also installs Quicktime 6.4, which iTunes uses for all it's audio in/out, with version 6.4 bringing support for, amongst other things, Advanced Audio Coding (AAC), or MPEG-4 - more on this later.

(Update - Apple have released version 4.1.1 of iTunes for Windows, which apparently fixes many of these problems - get it from the Apple website.)

Running iTunes

iTunes running on Windows XP

If you're ever used iTunes before on a Mac, then you'll have no problem at all getting around the interface - it's exactly the same. If you're never used it before, then you'll also have no problem using it - Apple are the kings of UI design :-) However, a brief overview will be necessary for any 'newbies'. The main interface window is divided into two panels: the source list on the left, and the browser on the right, which is used by each source to show you what they contain. The play controls sit on the top left, and a multi-function info panel in the top center is used to tell you what is currently playing, the progress of CD rips, the spectrum analyser etc. Finally in the top right corner is the search box, which allows you to perform a search in your current source.

The different components of iTunes, such as the library, internet radio, playlists etc are listed in the source list on the left hand side. As these neatly divide the functionality of iTunes, it seems sensible to describe each one in turn.

The Library

Library view

The source that opens on startup, and the one you'll probably use the most is the Library source. This shows all the music on your PC that iTunes knows about, and allows you to view information on all this music in countless ways, from the obvious (Artist, Album, Track) to the completly obscure (Beats per Minute, for all you budding DJs). A browser can be toggled by clicking on the browse button in the top right. This adds 'Artist' and 'Album' lists to the top of half of the track list, allowing easy navigation by these categories. This browse button becomes a multi-function button; depending on the source being viewed it is used to burn CDs, import music and other tasks specific to a source.

To start playing a song simply double-click on it. Right-clicking on a song gives you a menu, which along other things allows you to view the info on a track. The information is split into four tabs: Summary, Info, Options, and Artwork.

Song info showing auto-complete

The first tab gives comprehensive information about the track, such as size, format, bit-rate, play count, and where the file's located on disk. The second tab allows you to view and/or edit your id3 tags, such as artist, album, track number and track name. Cunningly all the fields feature auto-complete, based on the rest of your library, so iTunes will auto-complete as you type if you have, say, another song by the same artist.

The third tab allows you to set all sorts of obscure volume and equaliser presets, while the fourth tab allows you to edit any artwork, such as album covers associated with the track.

Here you start to see some of the cosmetic differences between iTunes for Windows and it's older mac sibling. Windows iTunes uses native widgets in most (but not all) of it's dialogs, which although perfectly normal in a Windows environment, somehow look out of place alongside iTunes' otherwise Aqua/Metal interface. Maybe Apple want to remind us of the advantages of the 'proper' version?

Radio

Wolf FM - you love the Wolf!

The iTunes radio allows you to listen in to internet radio. However, while this seems quite a good feature, it is somewhat limited: you cannot add your own stations, and you can only listen to stations that use a streaming method that Apple approve. In short - you can't get any BBC radio stations, which makes it pretty much useless for me. But if you're into random American radio stations, it's quick and easy to use...

Music Store

Ahh, the much vaunted iTunes Music Store (iTMS). Well, it's only available in the USA at the moment, but before you dismiss it as some useless Yankie crap, it does serve a purpose - as it gives you a free 30 second preview of all 400,000+ tracks in it, it's a great way to sample music, either to try and check if that new song you heard is actually by Electric Six, or to get a sample of the new Strokes album. However, I'm not gonna go into it in any more depth, as that's about as much use as it is to us Europeans at the moment.

CD playing and Ripping

As you'll have gathered by now, playing and ripping CDs is intrgrated into iTunes and is very simple: Insert your CD, wait for the CDDB lookup to get your track names, and click Import in the top right. iTunes will rip your CD and encode it according to your chosen settings in the preferences. The speed of ripping is quite impressive - of course it is very hardware dependent (CD-ROM speed, CPU speed etc), but I managed 8-10x speed using a 40x speed Pioneer CD-ROM, ripping to 192Kbps mp3. It also will quite happily do this while playing the same CD, which is one better than a lot of other music jukeboxes.

As far as actual encoding music, you have four options: WAV, AIFF (basically WAV on a Mac), MP3 and the new kid on the block, AAC. WAV and AIFF are pretty straightforward - lossless compression, resulting in massive files but useful if you want to store a exact copy of your CD.

MP3 encoder options

iTunes' MP3 support is interesting, if not fantastic. It has three preset quality settings:

• Good Quality (128Kbps)
• High Quality (160Kbps)
• Higher Quality (192Kbps)

It also allows you to customise your own settings, with options for bit-rate, sample rate, mono/stereo/joint sereo channels, and a couple of extra options, as well as allowing variable bit rate (VBR) encoding. So far so good. However, while you can specify one of seven quality settings for VBR encoding, as well as a minimum bit-rate, this does not operate the same way that, say Lame does. Instead the minimum bit-rate 'drives' the encoding, so if you set the minimum to 32Kbps, then you'll end up with an MP3 that is 80% 32Kbps, with a small amount at 92Kbps, and a smaller amount at 112Kbps, and so on. So if you want a decent quality VBR MP3s, you've got to set your minimum bit-rate to at least 128Kbps, but then you end up encoding silence at 128Kbps, and massive files, which pretty much defeats the object of VBR - go figure!.

Visualisation

The final format, Advanced Audio Coding (AAC), is the new audio format for MPEG-4, the sucessor format to MPEG-2 (used in DVDs). AAC is supposed to give higher quality audio than MP3 at equivilent bit-rates, or, looking at it the other way, smaller files at the same quality. It's still relatively new, so while it is a standard, not many players/encoders exist yet. However it seemed only fair to give it a test.

While it does seem to sound better than an Lame-encoded mp3 at 128Kbps, I pretty much use VBR mp3 encoding, and AAC (or at least the version in iTunes 4.1) doesn't seem to support it, which doesn't make it very attractive for me. Plus I already have 8+ Gigs of music encoded as mp3s, and having a mix of two formats doesn't appeal to me, so I think I'll keep EAC/Lame as my CD ripper/encoder of choice. However, if you're starting from scratch, then AAC could be a valid choice.

iPod syncronisation

iPod sync'ing - it's so simple!

What I was really looking forward to. As it turns out, iTunes' iPod support is so simple it's genius: as soon as you plug your iPod in, iTunes pops open and syncs your library to the iPod. That's it. But that's all you want - a perfect copy of your library, including Playlists, Smart Playlists, play counts - the lot. As long as you plug your iPod into your PC to charge it it'll stay nicely in sync, and it doesn't take the half-hour to sync that MusicMatch does, or crash intermittently like Ephpod does. This may sound simplistic, but for something like this, the simpler the better.

Playlists and Smart Playlists

Creating playlists couldn't be easier: simpy drag a song from the browser to the source view. A playlist will be automatically created with the dragged song's name, and additional songs can be added by dragging them to the newly created playlist. Once you're got your playlist sorted out, you can (suprisingly) play it just like another source. If you want to burn it to a CD, you simply click the rather menacing Burn button in the top right, and insert a blank CD. iTunes can burn three types of CD an audio CD, mp3 CD or a data CD of the actual files - you select this in the preferences.

Smart Playlists

Finally, one of the best features of iTunes are it's Smart Playlists. These are basically playlists automatically generated from certain parameters you specify, for example All music by 'The Beastie Boys', or My top 25 rated songs. However, the smart playlist feature allows parameters to be combined, allowing you to create complex playlists; and ability of iTunes to do so-called Live Updating on playlists allows them to change dynamically, as you update your library, making playlists such as All 90's indie/alternative music, or 30 random song's I've not listened to in the last 2 months possible.

Conclusion

iTunes for Windows is virtually the same as it's Mac counterpart. Considering the quality of the OS X version, this is a great complement. It manages the same seamless support for CD ripping, burning, and hardware (OK, iPods), while retaining the same intuitive interface. A few minor niggles exist, such as the incostistent appearance of the interface, and the poor VBR support is quite annoying, but the many excellent features make up for it. Only one question remains: Is it too good?

iTunes was one of the 'killer apps' that Apple had on it's hardware - it certainly tempted me to want an Apple laptop - but now it's lost it's exclusivity. Apple's plan seems to be to use iTunes Music Store to push the sales of iPods, and from there more Apple computers. While this may will work in the US, until iTMS is rolled out in Europe and other parts of the world, Apple have shot themselves in the foot, by effectivley 'giving away' one of their best apps to the opposition - Windows...