for submitting The Music Tapes‘ Music Tapes for Clouds and Tornadoes to freedb under the genre reggae; all the other genres I tried had a disc ID clash.
Above all, though, draw a tiny musical note on your acorn.
Author: scruss
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less than 100 CDs to go …
1492 Artists / 999 Albums / 15245 Tracks / 34.9 Days / 62.12 GB
(and here’s me thinking I had about 2000 CDs, too)CDs that wouldn’t read: 0 (so far). That’s not to say that there weren’t some difficulties (copy-controlled CDs can go die, glitching and gronking in my drives) and my oldest CD (XTC’s Skylarking, my copy of which I think has just turned 20) had a ton of retries.
Lost CDs: Thomas Dolby’s Aliens Ate My Buick is somewhere in the house, but nowhere I’ve looked.
Found CDs: My long-lost promo copy of the (Portland) Decemberists’ Picaresque, which I thought had vanished in a road trip to Missouri. It was lurking in a long-forgotten portable CD player in the bottom of a storage bin.
Pleasant surprises: that freedb is generally better than it used to be.
Peeves: copy-controlled CDs (see above); flappy cardboardy cases that only have the title on one spine; oversized CD cases (Japanese imports, I’m looking straight at you), dark blue text on a black background, idjit freedb submitters who insist on Band, The syntax or worse, submit whole albums called sdfsdf;aefhsdf; bonus DVD “premium” releases (who watches these?).
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an appropriate use of company time
$ pbmtext Hello | pnmcrop | pnmtopnm -plain | tail +3 | tr '01' ' #' ### ### ## ## # # # # # # # # # # ## # # ## ###### # # # # # # # # #### # # # # # # # # # # # # # ## # # # # # ### ### ### ###### ##
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song counts
1332 Artists / 774 Albums / 12074 Tracks / 27.1 Days / 47.34 GB
— and the sad thing is, this would barely half fill a current iPod. -
telling groceries
The person in line in front of me had:
- a birthday cake
- an “I am 5” candle
- a bottle of Advil.
I’m pretty sure I know what their day holds.
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ripping dvd audio with Ubuntu
With more than a little help from How to Rip DVD audio to mp3 or ogg — Ubuntu Geek, here’s how I’d rip audio from a DVD:
for f in $(seq 1 12)
do
transcode -i /dev/sr1 -x null,dvd -T 1,$f,1 -N 0x1 -y null,wav -m $(printf "%02d" $f).wav
done
Your track count and device name will vary. You’ll note that I caved, and used the annoying $(…) syntax instead of good old-fashioned backticks (which some youngsters will claim are deprecated, but I claim as job security). WordPress munges those badly, so we’re stuck with the ugly.
You could use livemp3 to convert to mp3s (if I remembered to upload the version that handles wav files) under controlled circumstances. -
bet they’re chuffed
The A1 Steam Locomotive Trust has just completed the first new steam locomotive in the UK for, ooh, basically ever. Not quite sure why they chose such an antiquated design, but hey, keeps them out of the way of the buses.
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emusic: where Canada still means more expensive and second-rate
I’m not going to get all Swindleeeee!!!!! about it, but I’ve noticed a few things missing in the new emusic Canada site. I lost all my MP3s in the break-in, but I thought I’d downloaded all of the ones I’d bought from emusic a couple of days ago.
Not so. For unexplained reasons, I got humming The Whole House is Singing, and I thought I needed to listen to some Alasdair Roberts. Couldn’t find it in the share, so I went back to emusic to download it again, and rats!, it’s gone. So here’s some music I’ve paid for, but now emusic (champions of no-DRM) can’t make good on their promise to let you re-download everything you’ve bought.
(I’ve also noticed that most of the Deva Premal tracks [hey, they’re Catherine‘s] have gone, but have had no compulsion whatsoever to hum them …)
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no, this is really the Sensible Bicycle
Inspired perhaps by seeing Dianne‘s very nice Bachetta recumbent last night, I went looking for the state-of-the-art — and I found it in the form of the Flevobike GreenMachine: fully enclosed chain, mudguards, hub gears, disc brakes …
I remember the GreenMachine as a concept machine in the cycling press a decade ago, but Ben has seen one, so they must be real. Only problem is the price; I’m not going to see one for under $5000 …
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track count
Up to 7470 songs on the server last night. It’s mostly down to me importing all of my emusic tracks.
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gimp windows crash
If you find that GIMP for Windows crashes frequently, try installing the GTK+ for Windows Runtime Environment. It seems to fix many of the instabilities for me.
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rockin’ the plastic: four turntables and an mp3 share
Now I’ve got the Soundbridge set up to share from my server, I’ve been ripping CDs like crazy. I’ve got two drives on my Ubuntu box, and hooked an external CD drive to my laptop, so I’m rocking four drives at once. After years of using Grip, I converted to Abcde this weekend. What I really like about it is that I can run multiple copies at once, and it very nearly things right (aka “my way”) out of the box.
By the end of tonight, I should have about 6700 tracks on my share, and a bunch of CDs in storage.
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hey, Bruce, you lose something?
It’s a bullshit story. There is no issue.
— Duncan Hawthorne, chief executive officer of Bruce Power, dismissing the seriousness of losing a highly radioactive reactor part when contacted by the Toronto Star.
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I’d pronounce it “mingus”, but …
Menzies Stringed Instruments is now open for business.
