March 10th, 2006
Music, free software list + Skobee, Skype, Writely and Thumbstacks
Just like watching these old promo-shots of rappers (the one of Bushwick Bill is beautiful), I’ve been getting into The Arcade Fire, Harold Budd and an old Pharcyde-single. Music makes you lose control.
In relation to that, I read this big list of free software (mainly for Windows). Thanks to it, I first snagged AudioShell, a very small installation that enables you to see your music-tags through Windows Explorer like this, then got into ripping music again.
“Ripping music” means you convert what’s on an audio media, e.g. a CD, to digital media, for instance MP3 and FLAC. For this, true audio-nerds use EAC, which is free. Usually, I just use CDex, which is quite simple to use for ripping. When I convert audio to FLAC, I do that through foobar2000 which is dead simple. When it comes to EAC, the super-nerdy part comes here: here are suggestions for LAME-settings, and here are is a little tutorial on how to convert an album to an image with FLAC.
I just installed Skype, paid a little money and called my little Filipino friend who’s living in the USA. I love abusing The Queen’s English, and this way I did it very cheaply, even though I called her mobile phone over the Internet. Hey, isn’t Skype meant to mean free calls over the Internet? Sure, it still is, but I called her physical mobile phone, which means somebody (i.e. me) has to pay for it. Calling from computer to computer using Skype is still free.
Writing of social software, I’m trying to get people ot use Skobee, which is a site for people who plan meetings online. To do this, one simply sets time and date (and you can even pick a “fuzzy” date, like “sometime next week”) and details who gets invited to this meeting. The site looks nice, and doesn’t seem to be designed to snag members, but of course (…) I signed up and arranged a little meeting on Saturday. We’ll see how many mates of mine care to show up, especially as there’s little time left. Some, like Jesper, who’s having his first child with Marie within a week or so, are excused…
I’m going to try out Thumbstacks, a free way to create and share online presentations. Mm, MS PowerPoint-killer. Interesting; now that Google has bought Writely, the Office-suite-world is rocking. I just hope they all (Microsoft definitely included) are going to leave their beta-shells soon.
March 11th, 2006 at 14:27
EAC isn’t very hard to use, once it’s configured correctly, though. It’s just like CDex in everyday use. But there are a few important settings. Here is my setup:
Read mode : Secure with NO C2, accurate stream, disable cache
Read offset correction : 98
Overread into Lead-In and Lead-Out : Yes
Read offset is varying with your drive. My Plextor has +98, and you can check out your drive’s settings here: http://www.accuraterip.com/driveoffsets.htm
I find this EAC guide very useful: http://calonet.org/forum/index.php?topic=127.0
March 12th, 2006 at 17:53
Thanks! Now I’m using EAC and will do. The guide and the read offset page worked like a charm. I FLAC’ed an album with no problems, and EAC is very simple to use when one wants to create a one-file-album with a CUE-file. Sweet.