Dundee Lad

You kind of defeat the purpose of the website if you upload music but make it unplayable. What kind of fucking moron made that decision? What kind of braindead fuckwit thought nobody will mind if they can’t listen to any of the tracks first to see if they like it enough to buy it? So anyway, sorry Gary Numan but I already own 3 different copies of Replicas, and I ain’t buying a fourth if I can’t hear if the alternate tracks are different enough to worth giving you more of my money.

Damn, where does the time go? Can’t believe it’s been over 12 months since the last entry. I really did intend to make this a regular thing this time. Oh well. Shit happens.

Anyway, while I’m here I might as well add something worth adding. So I recently bought a new 2nd hand vehicle; a 2015 AWD, diesel, Ford Territory Titanium to be precise. Now this sucker has all the bells and whistles for a 10 year old Aussie-made Ford–which isn’t necessarily saying much because Ford always seemed to be behind Holden and others in this regard, but I digress–and one of those is the console Media Centre. This bastard is run by Ford Sync™2 which is fine but fuck the information for it is sadly lacking in actual details. So here’s what I’ve learnt about using this 10+ year old software in 2025 to play your tunes:

1. Do not bother trying to use a USB stick (aka USB drive aka thumb drive aka flash drive) larger than 32Gb because it can only read fat32. Elsewhere I read that it could read exfat so you could use a larger stick but when I tried it didn’t recognise the device. Correction: Okay, I was mistaken about this because it can recognise the exfat file system so it can read greater than 32GB. I think the mistake is due to me trying to play music on a 64GB USB stick that was still encoded at 96kHz. But wait, it gets even better! Not only does it recognise bigger USB sticks, it can actually recognise 128GB microSD cards when they’re inserted in a USB adapter, which is then plugged into one of the USB slots in the vehicle.
2. It does not recognise FLAC but it does recognise lossless WMA, so use that if you want the best possible sound. The size difference between FLAC & WMA isn’t that great, and the sound quality is the same. Remember, only losers use MP3
3. The bitrate doesn’t seem to matter but do not try to use a file with a sample rate higher than 48kHz. I had a number of albums ripped at 96kHz but it couldn’t recognise them and it took ages before it finally dawned on me that the sample rate was the issue. The encoder software I was using (dbPowerAmp) switched the file format to WMA but didn’t touch the sample rate. I switched to a different encoder (Xrecode 3) and it downgraded to 44KHz and all was well with the world again.
4. Good luck trying to find out any real information on the Ford AU website; one of the least-user-friendly websites on the internet.

Edited August 22nd.

Hah! Just noticed the date…cos I’m noticeable like that. Gonna post what I had here tomorrow. You’ll see why.

Flatpress. Not included with this hosting services’ Cpanel but to get it running all you have to do is copy the files to your server, and… that’s it. No need to fuck about with MySQL or any of that shit because it isn’t used; which is lucky since I’ve forgotten 99% of it, and can’t be arsed re-learning it all. So let’s see what happens with this attempt.