Noulakaz

The blog of Avinash, Christina, Anya and Kyan Meetoo.

Technology

Dream HiFi setup: Audiolab and Dynaudio (Take 2)

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One of the “exercises” I love doing is imaging my perfect audio setup.

Two years ago, I thought that my dream combination would be a Nad integrated amplifier and Dynaudio speakers and, since last night, I have changed my mind. I now believe that my dream setup for listening to music would be:

The amp retails at £600 and the speakers cost £500 a pair. So £1100 or about Rs 50,000 at today’s exchange rate. Quite steep but, bear in mind, that this is not an expense but more of an investment for years and years to come.

Pity I don’t travel to the UK much or else I would have got the components today itself.

FM radio stations available in Mauritius

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Here are the various FM radio stations which can be listened to in Mauritius. The indicated frequencies are those which I use in Quatre-Bornes (i.e. the centre). I have also added a “separation” column, which is simply the difference in frequency compared to the immediately above radio. For example, the frequency of NRJ Maurice is 3.1MHz more than that of Radio Plus.

Separation Frequency FM radio station
– 87.70 Radio Plus
3.1 90.80 NRJ Maurice
2.4 93.20 Radio France Internationale (RFI)
0.8 94.00 Taal FM
2.1 96.10 Planet FM
1.2 97.30 Kool FM
1.9 99.20 France Inter (Réunion Island)
0.2 99.40 Best FM
1.4 100.80 Radio One
2.4 103.20 Wazaa FM
1.2 104.40 Top FM

While doing this calculation, I realised that France Inter (which is broadcasted from Réunion Island and which therefore has a weak signal) is just 0.2MHz distant from Best FM (which has a very strong signal). Personally, I believe that this 0.2MHz might explain why when I am travelling towards the University of Mauritius, for example, France Inter is slowly “covered” by another station. This might well be Best FM…

Anyway, from this post on Frequency Modulation, FM Sidebands & Bandwidth, I have learned that 0.2MHz is the minimum acceptable frequency separation. Their exact words are: “To take the example of a typical broadcast FM signal that has a deviation of ±75kHz and a maximum modulation frequency of 15 kHz, the bandwidth of 98% of the power approximates to 2 (75 + 15) = 180kHz. To provide conveniently spaced channels 200 kHz is allowed for each station.”

Maybe I should offer a small advice to MBC and MTML: Change the frequency of Best FM to 100.00MHz and everyone will be happy :-)

Disable tracker in Gnome if you do not need it

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According to its website, “Tracker is a filesystem indexer, metadata storage system and search tool.”

“By using Tracker, you no longer have to remember where you’ve left your files. To locate a file you only need to remember something about it, such as a word in the document or the artist of the song. This is because as well as searching for files in the traditional way, by name and location, Tracker searches files’ contents and metadata.”

That’s great I guess for some people.

For me, Tracker is a massive pain as I have a lot of files, some of them huge and a lot of them being binary files (think images and photos, music files, videos, LibreOffice files, PDF documents, etc.) On my Fedora Linux installation, which is now running in a virtual machine on a brand new MacBook Pro, the Tracker extractor and indexer uses a lot of CPU resources. Too much in fact for something that I never ever use.

You see, I am an “informatician” (i.e. a computer scientist — a very bad designation — think calling a surgeon a scalpel scientist) and, as such, I make it a must to properly save all my files in folders and subfolders. I also name the files very consistently with dates, sensible use of words, etc. for proper sorting and, hence, searching.

So I don’t need Tracker as I pretty much can narrow down to the single file I need in a few seconds.

How to disable Tracker in Gnome

I found the following set of commands online which disable Tracker:

    gsettings set org.freedesktop.Tracker.Miner.Files enable-monitors false
    gsettings set org.freedesktop.Tracker.Miner.Files ignored-files "['*']"
    gsettings set org.freedesktop.Tracker.Miner.Files crawling-interval -2

Looking at the source code of Tracker,  the -2 indicates that Tracker should be disabled. The next step is to kill all current Tracker processes:

    pkill tracker

and, finally, clear the Tracker cache

    rm -rf ~/.cache/tracker