For sale: Pioneer CMX-5000 Twin CD Player

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Note: This was originally posted Apr. 29th. It’s still up for grabs, so I’m moving the post to today’s date for more visibility.

Pioneer CMX-5000

Asking price: \$300.00 SOLD.

Lightly used, but in excellent condition, this unit was purchased new for \$1300 three years ago, but has sat nearly untouched in the two years since I’ve moved to Seattle and stopped DJing. I can’t say anything but good things about this piece of equipment — it’s one of the best DJ units I’ve had the pleasure to work with.

Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end, as as I’ve hardly touched it in the two years since I’ve been in Seattle, it’s time to see if someone who can get a little more use out of it is interested. I’d prefer if someone in or around Seattle who can swing by and pick it up from me bought it (I’m in the lower First Hill area, close to Downtown), as I don’t have a car and shipping would be a major pain. I can accept cash, checks, or PayPal.

Keep reading for technical details from Pioneer’s site (I’d link directly, but they’ve gone Flash…):

Features:

[![Pioneer CMX-5000]]Auto Mix Play** Armed with an original search system, the CMX-5000 measures a track’s BPM and beat timing and then automatically changes the speed to the designated BPM, thereby realizing smooth mixing even for tracks on a single disc that have different tempos.

Three Playback Methods are Available:

  • Track Mode: Performs mixed playback alternating between tracks from discs in both decks.
  • Disc Mode: Performs mixed playback of track on a single disc in numerical order.
  • Program Mode: Performs mixed playback of tracks in any designated order.

Track Playback Time is Adjustable:

  • Short Time Change: Switches the track at a shorter time.
  • Instant Change: Switches the track at the DJ’s preferred time.

The Auto mix function is very effective in the following situations:

  • At times when there no DJ is present in stores, malls, etc., such as an weekdays nonstop background music can be played in DJ style using the establishment’s favorite selections to help creative a more active atmosphere.
  • In bars, restaurants or pubs where the staff work as DJs, the Auto Mix function results in considerable labor saving allowing the staff to devote more of their time to customer service.
  • When DJs playing at clubs, etc., need to take a short break to deal with urgent business or emergencies they can use the Auto Mix function to keep the music rolling.

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– In case of no beat music, smooth mixing cannot be performed because the BPM or beat timing of certain songs can’t be measured correctly.

**In the case of tracks on the same disc, cross fading cannot be performed.

***The CMX-5000, while revolutionary with Auto Beat Mixing capability, does have its limitations just like any electronic device. There are certain variables, that if present, will cause the Auto Beat Mixing function to not function properly. A few things must be in order for it to Auto Mix:

  • Music must be within a +/-16% ratio. If it is not within this range, not only will it not mix, but the beats will not match as well. The BPM’s will stay the same (even with the BPM sync pressed).
  • There must be a steady consistent beat in the beginning of the song. A song that starts with just vocals or off beats rhythms will not mix.
  • Any +/-16% range BPM should mix if it is has a CONSISTENT beat.
  • You must wait a few seconds for the next song to cue up, before hitting “Instant Change”. The player does have to calculate the beats of the next song. It needs just a few seconds to cue up. You will be know that it ready to go when:
    • If the next song programmed is on the other side, an orange colored “dash” going in a semicircle around the display appears.
    • If the next song programmed is on the SAME player, the autocue button quits blinking.

    The “Instant Change” button must be pressed IN TIME. If you decide to use the “instant change”, it must be done in time for it to automix.

DJ Operating Functions The CMX-5000 incorporates and upgrades the functions of Pioneer’s world-renowned DJ-use CD player — the CDJ 700S/500-II — and also boasts a number of brand new functions.

Clear Jog Dial Although the player is a rack mount component, this design results in a larger jog dial and display which together realize higher operability and easy visual confirmation of the current playback status.

Quick Start This feature permits virtually instantaneous playback with a time lag of less than 0.01 seconds from the pause condition.

Cue Functions (Cue Point/Back Cue/Auto Cue/Cue Paint Sampler) Set your own favorite playback points using the above functions. For example, with Auto Cue, you can set the start point of each track automatically.

Tempo Control The playback speed can be adjusted within three kinds of range. +/- 6/10/16%.

Master Tempo With this feature, you can change the playback speed without altering the music’s pitch.

Loop Functions (Seamless Loop/Realtime Loop/Loop-Out Adjust/Re loop) Uninterrupted sound loops can be easily arranged, and with the Re loop function you can return at any time to a previously set loop.

Playing Address The playing address allows you to check the current track’s playback situation visually in paragraph units.

BPM Counter This counter measures and visually displays the current song’s BPM (Beats Per Minute).

Legato Link Conversion for High Quality Sound Equipped with Pioneer’s original wide-range technology Legato Link Conversion the CMX-5000 is capable of reproducing sound frequencies above 20kHz which are lost during normal CD format playback.

Vibration-Proof Memory and Construction The CMX-5000 boasts excellent vibration-resistant characteristics and prevents sound jumps with the double protection afforded by a maximum 8-second vibration proof memory and a special vibration proof construction.

Slot In Thanks to this system, swapping discs is smooth and rapid, and you can say good-bye to worries about damaging the disc tray.

Mix Out The CMX-5000 incorporates a Mix Out terminal that allows use even in cases where there is only one input system, the setup is restricted to a single amplifier, or there is no mixer input margin.

Multi-Read This function plays back not only CD’s and CD-R’s but also CD-RW discs that are impossible to play on a conventional CD player.

Headphone Monitor This handy monitor function enables versatile sound monitoring.

Digital Output The CMX-5000 is equipped with a digital output terminal.

Fader Start Play/Back Cue Play Using the CMX-5000 together with a Pioneer DJ mixer, you can use the mixer’s fade, to control playback operations such as track start and return to cue point.

[Pioneer CMX-5000]: https://michaelhans.com/eclecticism/2003/04/graphics/cmx5000-2-thumb.jpg {width=”150″ height=”107″}

New TypePad features

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Three new features for TypePad weblogs have been announced today at Everything TypePad:

  1. TypeList Sort Options: TypeLists can now be sorted alphabetically or by rating, in addition to ascending or descending by date added.

  2. Photo Album .zip Uploads: Rather than adding photos to photo albums one-by-one, you can now upload a .zip archive with multiple photos, which will be automatically decompressed and added to your photo album.

  3. More Privacy Options: You can now choose between no password protection, password protection for your entire site, or password protection for individual weblogs and photo albums on a case-by-case basis.

People sleep…cigarettes don't

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Fire! Fire! ...cat?

Wow — scary stuff. Apparently there was a fire at James and Stacy’s apartment complex in Anchorage yesterday afternoon. Marc was kind enough to let me know about it in a comment here.

Thankfully, according to Stacy, everyone is okay, including the cat.

Anyways, aside from being just another exciting day in Anchorage, Alaska, we’re doing okay. […] The fire marshal called us and was pleased to tell us that our apartment was not the source of the fire. He couldn’t talk any further about it, but I suspect my neighbors are going to get sued because they left a burning cigarette on their back porch that happened to catch a cardboard box that was holding their ashtray. There was also a propane canister explosion. […] It was the explosion that woke James up, but the fire was already filling our apartment with smoke and the fireman ordered him out before he could get the cat. But THE CAT SURVIVED!

I’m just glad that everyone is fine. You all know that if you ever need a floor to crash on, my place is always open! Oh, sure, there’s that little matter of me being 3,000 miles away and all…but the offer stands anyway. :)

Also, a PayPal donation account has been set up courtesy of ShyWickedPixie. As James and Stacy may have just lost everything in their apartment, I’m sure they’d appreciate the odd buck or two tossed their way! I only had \$3 in my account to send off, unfortunately, but it’s something. :)

(Thanks to OccipitalDruid for pointing out the PayPal link!)

Dead Milkmen tour diaries

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How very, very cool. Dean Clean, drummer for the Dead Milkmen, is posting his tour diaries from the band’s first days of touring back in 1985.

This site contains tour diary entries written by Dean ‘Clean’ Sabatino of the band The Dead Milkmen. We stopped touring back in 1994, but through the magic of modern day computer technology I can tell these stories again.

[…]

I was 23-24 years old when I wrote these diaries. I certainly wasn’t planning on publishing them when I wrote them; so reading them now either makes me laugh, cry or cringe. I will not make any claims to being a gifted writer or diarist, but the aim here is to give the reader some sense of what it was like to tour across the USA in a van with a punk rock band in the mid to late 1980’s. Some say this was the heyday of independent rock music and the college radio scene. I would bet we worked harder and played many more shows than many of today’s ‘alternative’ rock bands will play in their short-lived careers.

(via MeFi)

Amazon linking techniques

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According to onfocus, Amazon has changed the way they link to wishlists, breaking current wishlist links in the process. I believe (after checking my code) that TypePad is using the correct form of link, but you may want to check your code to be sure!

Disclaimer: All link examples in the following quotes have been altered to use my Wishlist ID and Amazon Associates codes.

Public Service Announcement: If you link to your Amazon Wish List on your site, you may need to change that link. I’ve noticed that standard Wish List links are not working lately—but you won’t know whether or not it’s working if you have the Amazon cookie.

[…]

To link directly to your Wish List so others can see it, change wishlist in the URL to registry, like so:

http://amazon.com/o/registry/1P4IU0ESEJFTS

Later in the comments, this interesting tidbit of information was posted:

I stumbled across a post in the AWS discussion boards that basically said this was the officially good way to do a wishlist link (because it also includes your associates tag):

http://amazon.com/o/redirect?tag=[ASSOCIATETAG]&path=registry/[WISHLISTID]

All this reminded me of an important note from Jason Kottke regarding linking to items on Amazon with your Amazon Associates ID from last February:

I’ve noticed lately that when I browse items at Amazon, the URLs now take one of two forms:

http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0684868768/ http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0684868768/

The former URL style has been around for some time, but the latter is relatively new. If you’re an Amazon Associate, the proper way of linking to an individual item (per their linking guide) is to append your Associate code (mine is “0sil8”) to the first URL style, like so:

http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0684868768/djwudicom-20

But if you run across an item at Amazon with the second type of URL, this won’t work:

http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0684868768/djwudicom-20

Good tips all, and worth keeping in mind.

My G5 is an insomniac

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I’m having some odd issues with my G5 that I’m having trouble pinning down. I’ve just tossed a plea for help out in an Apple Discussions thread, but I wanted to put it up here also in case anyone else out there has seen similar behavior.

I’ve been having an odd issue (actually, two, but they may be related) with my G5 (Dual 2.0Ghz) that I haven’t seen anyone else mention, so I thought I’d toss it out here. Unfortunately, I’m having trouble narrowing down exactly what’s going on, so this may be a tad vague.

Issue 1: My G5 appears to be an insomniac. If I leave the computer alone, it never seems to go to sleep. The screensaver will kick in, but after a while at some (apparently) random time, the screensaver kicks off as if I’d just bumped the mouse. Because of this, the machine will only go into Sleep mode if I tell it to via the Apple menu.

Issue 2 (this is the one I’m having more problems diagnosing): At some point, I lose the ability to choose some of the commands in the Apple menu: ‘About This Mac’, ‘Force Quit…’, ‘Restart…’, ‘Shut Down…’, and ‘Log Out [username]…’ are all non-responsive. All other commands in the Apple Menu work fine. Most of the time this isn’t a major issue, but when a time comes when I do need to restart the computer (for instance, after installing a Software Update), the only way I can do it is to execute a ‘sudo shutdown -r now’ through the Terminal.

I’ve tried choosing ‘Log Out…’ occasionally after a restart to pin down when the menu commands stop responding, but am having difficulties determining just what the cause is. So far, it hasn’t seemed to be related to any particular application or sequence of events.

I have noticed that it appears to happen sometime after letting the computer go through its bout of insomnia for a while. In other words, if after restarting the machine I manually tell it to Sleep, then when I wake the computer up again, I can still access all Apple Menu commands without a problem. However, if I leave the computer alone and it fails to sleep automatically as it should, at some point after that I lose the Apple Menu functionality.

Unfortunately, at this point, I can’t get any more specific than that.

Has anyone else out there seen behavior like this, or am I alone with this particular glitch?

Roy Disney resigns from Disney

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Wow. Okay, so it’s been fairly obvious that Disney isn’t what it once was (how many recent Disney movies can you think of that were really worthwhile that weren’t Pixar productions with the Disney logo stamped on them?), but this is still a fairly amazing development. Roy Disney himself has left the Walt Disney company, and includes a call for Michael Eisner’s resignation or retirement in his letter of resignation.

It is with deep sadness and regret that I send you this letter of resignation from the Walt Disney Company, both as Chairman of the Feature Animation Division and as Vice Chairman of the Board of Directors.

You well know that you and I have had serious differences of opinion about the direction and style of management in the company in recent years. For whatever reason, you have driven a wedge between me and those I work with even to the extent of requiring some of my associates to report my conversations and activities to you. I find this intolerable.

…I believe your conduct has resulted from my clear and unambiguous statements to you and the Board of Directors that after 19 years at the helm you are no longer the best person to run the Walt Disney Company. You had a very successful first 10-plus years at the company in partnership with Frank Wells, for which I salute you. But since Frank’s untimely death in 1994, the company has lost its focus, its creative energy, and its heritage.

[…]

In conclusion, Michael, it is my sincere belief that it is you who should be leaving and not me. Accordingly, I once again call for your resignation or retirement. The Walt Disney Company deserves fresh, energetic leadership at this challenging time in its history just as it did in 1984 when I headed a restructuring which resulted in your recruitment to the Company.

I have and will always have an enormous allegiance and respect for this Company, founded by my uncle, Walt, and father, Roy, and to our faithful employees and loyal stockholders. I don’t know if you and other directors can comprehend how painful it is for me and the extended Disney family to arrive at this decision.

(via aeire)

Getting in Google's good graces

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One of the constant topics that many webmasters and webloggers are concerned with these days is Google, how to increase your site’s standing in Google’s eyes, and therefore drive more traffic to your site. I use a number of techniques on my weblog, both in the code and how I create entries, that help Google get the most useful information out of my pages.

While I’ve mentioned some in the past, the subject recently came up in a thread on the TypePad User Group, and I shared some of my methods in that thread. At the request of both Liza and Richard, who have also been posting about this topic, I’m re-posting my post (post-haste, though not post-mortem, and definitely not postpartum) here…

Still, I’m amazed to read that you had 1,000 per day BEFORE MS made you a web celeb (boo! to them). Do you think those hits came from your blogging subject or from special tactics you engaged in to increase your site traffic.

A little bit of both, probably.

First off, it’s not so much my subject, as my lack of subject. ;) Because I’ve never really focused on any specific topic for my blog, and just randomly babble about whatever crosses my mind, that gives Google a lot of potential keywords to pick up on.

Also, I’ve been at this for about three years now, so I’ve got a fairly large archive section, which also increases the probability of any given keyword turning up in a search.

As far as special tactics, there’s a few techniques I’ve picked up on over the years that seem to help (some of which you covered in your post).

  1. Descriptive headlines as a page title. The title of a webpage scores very highly in Google’s ranking scheme, so I generally try to make sure that my post titles are descriptive of what I’m posting about (“Lord of the Rings Trailer” rather than “This is cool!”), and I make sure that the post title is included in the page title.

    I believe that TypePad is set to include post titles in page titles for individual archives by default, but some weblog tools (including MovableType in its early stages, I believe, though I could be wrong) only include the site name for every page title, so instead of a site containing 1000+ differently named pages, you’d end up with a site containing 1000+ pages all named “My Weblog”, which doesn’t give Google nearly as much to work with.

  2. Setting a consistent structure for the code on each page. As HTML was designed to emulate (though not visually replicate) the structure of a printed document, it includes various structural elements such as various levels of heading. As Google pays attention to these when it scans a document, it often helps to use them correctly.

    In the past, rather than using the <h1>, <h2>, etc. elements for headlines, division markers, and so on, many sites would use <font> tags to give their subdivision headings the look they wanted. Now that the <font> tag has been deprecated and we can use CSS to style every element on a page the way we want, it’s good to return to using structurally correct markup. In addition to making a site much easier to code, it also assists Google in determining the structure, topic, and relevance of any given page.

    For each individual archive page on my site, I’ve structured it as follows:

    1. <title>: website name > post title

    2. <h1>: website name

    3. <h2>: website ‘tagline’

    4. <h3>: post title

    5. <p>: post body

    6. <h3>: trackback

    7. <h4>: trackback source

    8. <p>: trackback body

    9. <h3>: comments

    10. <h4>: comment author

    11. <p&>: comment body

    12. <h3>: comment posting form

    This gives each page a clearly delineated, easy to read structure that tells both the reader and Google which parts of the page are the most important and the most relevant to the topic of the page.

  3. Link descriptively. Simply, this involves using natural language for your links so that the link is descriptive to what it points to. For instance, saying “The new Lord of the Rings trailer is out!” instead of “You’ve gotta see this!” gives Google more information about what you’re linking to.

    This carries a double benefit, in that not only does it give Google better information about what you’re referencing, it also lets Google know more about what you’re linking to, which helps out whoever is on the target end of your link.

  4. Alt text on all images. This is important for a few reasons. First off, it lets Google know what each image is so that Google can include it more reliably in their image search feature. Secondly, though, and more importantly, it greatly improves the readability of your site for people with disabilities using specialized browsers to read the web.

    Blind users can use a “screen reader” to read websites — this is a specialized browser which translates the text to audio, and reads the page to them. Without alt text, all that screen reader can do is give them the name of the graphic, and might end up telling them something like “Image named funnypicture.jpg”. With alt text, they’ll instead hear something like “Image named Gimli falls off his horse”.

  5. Use the excerpt field to create useable descriptions. While keywords are no longer recognized by Google, another <meta> tag in the <head> section of your document still is (I think), which helps Google determine the topic of the page, and that’s the ‘description’ tag. What I’ve done is put this code into the <head> of each individual archive:

    <meta title="description" content="<$MTEntryExcerpt>" />

    I then make sure to take a moment to create an excerpt for each entry as I’m making it that relates to the topic of the post, rather than just relying on TypePad’s auto-generated excerpt (which generally just grabs the first n words of each post).

Anyway, there’s a few of the things I do which seem to help my site visibility. Mostly, though, I think a lot of it just boils down to the fact that after three years of babbling, I give Google a lot to work with. ;)