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Is there any reason to have autorun "on" in the first place ? One of the first things I do when I set up a system is disable it. I would like to choose which app to use, not rely on the OS to decide. I saw a previous story about the new Velvet Revolver CD having copy protection. I came home after buying it, popped it into my CDR, and burned it to MP3 for my car player. I would have never known it was copt protected until I saw the story. BTW I have never had a DRM disk that would not burn in CDEX

Cactus... Germany... hmm.

Somewhere in my CD collection is a VNV Nation (I'm pretty sure it's VNV Nation... could be some other german electro-industrial type act tho) CD with this Cactus thing on it. Can't say I had any problem ripping the CD using Cdex. This could be off-topic, but I'm just sayin... they can call it copy protection if they want but if it don't work... More on topic: they're taking away my fair use rights -- screw that.

a technology with little corporate backing, no mainstream supporters, and not built into any native OS distributions... is there anyone that crazy?

• Abiword - Word processor, supports .doc, .rtf, GPL.
• Open Office - Whole Office suite, including a database frontend and BASIC macro language.
• Perl - Scripting language
• Python - Scripting language
• Cygwin - UNIX emulator. Can create Windows programs, reliant on a cygwin1.dll.
• MinGW - Port of some of the UNIX utilities (BASH, gcc, vi...) to Windows.
• djgpp - UNIX emulator for DOS.
• Mozilla, Firefox, Thunderbird - Web browser, e-mail client, IRC client, lots more.
• Filezilla - FTP client.
• xchat - IRC client.
• putty, pscp, psftp and others - Telnet/SSH clients.
• Gaim - Client for IRC/Yahoo/MSN/ICQ/AIM and more.
• gzip - Compression (usually better than .zip).
• tar - Extracts/Makes tar archives.
• bzip2 - Totally ace compression (usually better than gzip).
• Info-ZIP - Support for .zip. Good free substitute for Winzip.
• 7-zip - Support for multiple compression formats.
• frhed - Hex editor
• Ext2fs - Several programs for doing Ext2 under Windows.
• Antiword - Converts documents out of the proprietary .doc format.
• MySQL - RDBMS.
• Apache - Web/Proxy server
• sendmail - Mail server
• squid - Proxy server
• freeamp - Audio player
• winlame - MP3 encoder
• cd-ex - MP3/OGG encoder?
• gimp - Very detailed graphics program.
• imagemagick - Graphic manipulation. Provides the 'convert' utility under UNIX.
• freeciv - Civilisation clone.
• gnuplot - Plotting package.
• TightVNC - A fork of VNC, with enhancements.
• RealVNC - The original VNC.
• rdesktop - Access Windows Terminal Services and Remote Desktops.
• Nmap - Well known port scanner.
• John the Ripper - Password cracker. Does NT and MD5.

OpenOffice
Crimson Editor (programmer's editor; free, not open source)
Audacity (WAV editor)
CDex (ripper)
Firefox
Thunderbird
Navicat (MySQL admin tool)
MySQL Snap (MySQL backup tool)
Top Style (CSS Editor)
Photoshop (Gimp ain't ready for primetime yet. Sorry.)

That's 10. Next up: WinAmp, WS-FTP, AdAware, and 17 million IE/Win patches.

I haven't *downloaded* any of those files in ages though. Anyone know where one can find good ones?

The Mod Archive, Scene.org and Nectarine Radio are good places to start.

Though I recently converted much of my mod/XM/s3m/IT collection to mp3 format, since it will play in my car/portables that way.

I'm trying to do the same to transfer my entire module collection to my iPod. Question: What do you use to do it? I'm currently outputting the tunes to WAV with Modplug because it's a fairly accurate player (but not 100%) and the wav writer is of pretty good quality. This is a bit of a headfuck because there is no batch converter and I have to reselect the options every time. I then have to convert everything to MP3 with CdEX. There must be a more straightforward way to do this... any ideas?

I never download music anymore. When I want the latest CD I go right to my local library and rip it with CDex. No P2P software required!

This won't be useful for the original question since it isn't Mac OS X, but it is worth mentioning because its the best, simplest, cheapest (free!) solution for doing ripping on windows, and it works with multiple drives (just fire up a new instance). It supports FreeDB/CDDB, a ton of encoding formats (WAV, MP3, OGG, VQF, APE)... makes playlist files, and it works as an audio format converter in addtion to ripping from CD (I do WAV->MP3 with it all the time).

In a world where anything media-oriented has to be "skinned" it looks refreshingly like an actual windows app and not the usual regurgitated fruit salad that everyone seems to want to shove down my throat and call a GUI. :) WHY, Mozilla, WHY?

It doesn't perform the burning, but I personally prefer using a separate program for that anyway... Nero does the job for me and it came free with my burner.

Or get CDex for free.

"I'm buying a new mid-grade laptop computer, which I plan to dual-boot between Windows XP Home and Mandrake 9.x. Before its arrival in a few weeks I'm trying to think of what 'essential' software I'll need to make a usable home system. In general I'd like to spend as little money as possible (free is good). As far as my needs, think 'typical family PC' without an emphasis on gaming. I know I can get something like Open Office for word processing, presentation, etc. needs, but is there such a good thing as a good free virus checker? A good free email client? A handy web browser? What would you consider the top 10 (or so) pieces of software for a new home system, bearing in mind that I need software for both the Windows and Linux side of things?""

These are the files I keep on my "Esential CDs" that I bring around to help out other non-techs (Windows users) people. (Of course because they are financially broke after paying $200 for their Operating System, they want everything else to be free.) ;-)

Anti-Virus: The best free antivirus program I have found AVG Anti-Virus 6.0

Office Suite: (Word Processing, SpreadsThe quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.
The quick brown fox jumped off the edge. The quick brown fox ran off with all his toysheet, Slideshows, etc.)
Open Office 1.1

CD/DVD data/audio Burner: (and doubles as a CD image creator .ISO and .CUE)
BurnAtOnce 0.99a

CD/DVD image loader/emulator (perfect for people who often misplace their CDs): (loads .ISO, .CUE, .CCD, .CDI etc. files without burning them)
DAEMON Tools 3.41

MultiMedia Player (Mpeg, Mp3, AVI, etc.)Winamp Classic 2.91

or for audio only Foobar 2000 0.7

Zip Extractor:Ultimate Zip or7 Zip 3.11

Download Accelerator:Star Downloader v1.42

Internet Browser: (other than IE) Mozilla 1.4 or Opera 6.20

System Statistics: (Motherboard, Memory, BIOS, Video, Software info, etc)AIDA32 3.80

E-mail (other than Outlook Express)Thunderbird 0.2 or Pegasus Mail 4.12

Spyware/Adware killer:Ad-aware 6 or Spybot Search & Destroy 1.2

Pop-up Killer/Browser Enhancer (for IE)Google Toolbar 2.0.102

PDF document reader:Adobe Acrobat 6.0

FTP program (other than IE and the command line FTP)Winsock FTP LE 5.08 or FileZilla 2.2.1

Internet Chat Programs (other than Windows Messenger)Gaim 0.70or Trillian Basic 0.74E

Firewall Software:ZoneAlarm 3.7.211

or if you have Highspeed Internet, a spare 200mhz PC, and two network cards laying around...ClarkConnect 2.0

CD Ripper / MP3 Creator CDex 1.51

Graphics Editor (other than Paint) The Gimp

Graphics viewer (other

Software I think deserves to be on your list:

• Mozilla Seamonkey Suite Your "classic" mozilla install
• Mozilla Firebird. The smaller Mozilla browser, but still damn good
• Mozilla Thunderbird. Mozilla mail, smaller yet. Complete with built in spam filtering :)
• Winamp 2.x. Can't beat a classic
• Sun J2RE 1.4.2 Probably not necessary, but best to get it installed and out there.
• RealOne Player BASIC. Despite what you think about Real, RealOne isn't such a horrible player, and RV9 isn't a bad codec. Their marketing department needs to be hit with a giant stick though, so make sure you disable all the "automatic options" in realone. Link is to a direct download of the Realone basic player, no hunting for the free version :) CDex Damn good ripping software for windows, and one of the easiest ways to get Ogg on windows.

Irfanview image viewer. Reads almost every image format known to man, and so much better than having IE pop up every time you want to view a JPEG or GIF! Also performs most every basic image edit (rotate, crop, sharpen, resize) that a basic home user would need, short of PaintShip Pro or Photoshop.

CDex MP3 ripper. IMO the best MP3 ripper out there. Uses the LAME codec. Also encodes to OGG, VQF, APE... And completely open source.

Editpad text editor. A replacement for the terrible Windows Notepad. Opens unlimited numbers of documents into a tabbed format. And has some nice little features, like header and footer options for printing, timestamps, ROT-13, etc. Also available for Linux...

Irfanview - hands down the best image viewer out there for Windows. Free. Windows only (but will run under Wine if you want)

Gimp - if you want to edit images. Free. Linux and Windows.

MAME - for games, period. Free. You can buy some ROMs, or *ahem* ask around. Windows and Linux. (Xmame)

CDex - for CD ripping in Windows. Free. Windows only, but several good ripping programs are available for Linux. (search freshmeat)

GNUWin - a collection of free apps for Windows. Worth the download.

Audacity - if you want to create/edit sound files. Free. Linux and Windows.

Winamp - for listening to audio files. Free. Windows only. I like XMMS for Linux over Freeamp.

Opera - web browsing, email. Free. Windows and Linux. I prefer it over Mozilla, but not by much.

I did the same last month for a band who I really like and want to support (they're not that popular and IMHO make very good music). While it did have the 'copy protected' or whatever logo on it, I was happily able to rip it with CDex and am now listening to it pretty regularly on my iPod. Insofar as my experience goes, I haven't really noticed any difference from regular cd's (yet).

While it's possible that the copy protection on it could be different from the one that everyone's talking about, I doubt it. There hasn't really been any mention of multiple copy-protections schemes from where I sit. That still sucks that you're not able to listen to the cd you bought, but it certainly isn't unethical (or probably illegal) to rip a cd which you own for your own purposes.

Yes, as opposed to other (non-commercially produced I guess) software where the support is non-existent (you know where the source is, there's comments too, maybe).

I've had "problems" with three or four open source software products. I put scare quotes around "problems" because in most cases my "problems" amounted to feature requests.

In each case, the "problem" was resolved with an email to the programmer.

I noticed some example SQL in the postgresql online manual had some minor inaccuracies. I sent an email with corrections, the corrections were incorporated in the manual, I was credited. End of problem.

CDex, an excellent MS-Windows CD ripper, had some problems incorporating extremly long ID3 tags into ripped MP3s. I emailed the programmer, Albert Faber, and in a matter of a few days, a fixed version was available for download. End of problem.

SciTE, the best programmer's editor I've found to date, didn't respond correctly to my mouse wheel settings. I emailed the programmer, Neil Hodgson, and (since I had access to the source) indicated some lines of code I thought responsible. Mr. Hodgson went so far as to download updated versions of the MS drivers to his own machine, and got back to me in about four hours -- despite a nearly 12 hour difference in our time zones. I was able to compile a private build with a fix, and the programmer's fix was available a week or so later in the standard build. End of problem.

MP3BookHelper, a truly phenomenal ID3 tagger, had no problems, per se, but I wanted additional features. Over the course of several months, the programmer, Vlad Skarzhevskyy, incorporated all but one of several features I asked for, usually producing a beta within 24 to 48 hours of the request. (The one feature rejected involved a user interface default value; Vlad correctly decided my proposal was at odds with MP3BookHelper's user interface standards.) No problems.

In two of these cases, I was able to look at the code myself and figure out, at least in general terms, where the problem was. In the other two cases I could have done so, but didn't need to -- but felt empowered knowing that I could assist in fixing the problem myself.

In all cases, I made a point of thanking the programmers for their hard work and quality products, and of asking for, rather than demanding, a fix, while giving what I hoped were useful clues as to the origin of the problem. And in all cases I got what I wanted far faster, and with far less frustration, than any tech support line could provide.

Please let me know what closed source software gives this sort of problem resolution, and how much the support contract is.

Did you ever notice that all legal MP3 encoders in the US are adware?

What about CDex ?? It's what I use for encoding and it is not adware. Now if it is completely legal I don't know for sure, but I think it is.

http://www.cdex.n3.net

Tried Real Jukebox that came with my Yamaha CD-F1, wouldn't recognize the disc in the drive. "Hmm..."

Look at the back of the CD case and in 4 pt font there is something about "Made with Macromedia." Now I'm mad.

First I used Clone CD to make a virtual CD image on the hard disk. This program is great, for making backup copies of CDs or allowing you to play a game with "Please insert original CD in drive D:". It is $40 well spent.(I'm in no way affiliated with elby.)

Now I had a readable image. Next I used CDEx to remove the copy protection from the image and create a Redbook compliant CD. CDEx is free from SourceForge. Hat's off to an impressive program.

Ahhh... Now I can listen to my new CD while I work. I wasn't copying to CD to copy it (it would have been more cost effective to buy another, as this process took an hour and I get paid more than $15/hr...) I space-shifted the CD so I could listen to it in the device of my choice.

I've never downloaded an MP3 from P2P, and have no intention to do so. It is very frustrating not to be able to sit down and listen to a CD that I just bought. (Actually, it was a gift from my sister.) Also, I typically make one copy to use in my car and keep the original in my home CD changer. Car CD's tend to get damaged easily.

I'm mostly a user of More QuakeWorld these days. It seems to be what most of the hardcore players are using these days. FuhQuake looks gorgeous, however. I'll be sure to give it a try.

Schwab

I highly recommend CDex. It's open source, and works as good as any other program I've used for ripping CDs. It's fairly straightforward to use, and lets you use various codecs (from what I've heard the LAME MP3 one is the best for mp3s; I don't notice much difference though).

If you don't forsee having a portable mp3 player, you might want to try out the ogg vorbis format. It has a better quality/size ratio than mp3, although I've noticed it slightly mangles the low range, though not as bad as mp3 mangles the high range. Give it a try, at least.

And by "copy all my CDs to digital form" I assume you mean compressed digital, like mp3 or ogg. Technically, CDs are already digital (and according to Darth Valenti, indestructible too!). :)

Not as cool as the blinkenlights thing, but somewhat on topic: http://zmatrix.n3.net

And, personally I think mp3 is superior in all respects.

The trade-off there is sound quality. More quantity, lower quality.

mp3 quality is much underestimated. Like any lossy compression, there is a fine art to setting the encoding options. I'll agree 128kbit is pretty poor, fine through computer speakers or headphones, but if you get a decent soundcard and wire it to a good sound system, you can really hear the difference.

However, if you use VBR with just the right settings, the sound is infinitely better. On almost all sound systems, indistingishable from CDs. Check out the r3mix website, where a lot of work has gone into discovering what these settings should be. They used professional blind listening tests in the process, and came up with something pretty damn good. The files can range from 128kbit/s for basic music, but if the music requires it (the encoder knows this), it will go right up to 260-270kbit/s. 256kbit/s has been proven to be completely indistingishable from CDs by the experiment referenced in the "Quality" page on the site. This involved 300 audiophiles, a pretty good sample group for this kind of test.

If you have the time, I'd really recommend trying it. The encoder I use is called CDex, completely free and in the quality settings, it actually has a predefined setting for the "r3mix preset". If you've seen the command line parameters to the encoder, you'd see why that's a very good thing!

I listen to music in lots of places. At work, in the car (or a plane or a train), in the kitchen, in the living room and at the computer at home. That last one is the sole mp3 friendly spot I have. And, it turns out that this place garners the lowest amount of music listening time.

That was my worry too. But it's easy to get over, for instance there are plenty of portable players you can get for either solid-state storage, or CD-R. They are the same price portable CD players were just 2 years ago. I've got a mp3 player in the car, it was pretty cheap as well, so that's covered. At home, I have a second sound card in my PC, that only winamp uses. The sound can easily be piped into other rooms, if you are up for a bit of DIY. I've hooked it up to the kitchen myself, and have a second, pretty old networked laptop in the bedroom for music there.

At work, I play the music through a web server, direct from my home machine. There is no way that CDs can compare to that. Give it two years, you'll be able to do it to your mobile phone.

And as a last resort, check out the RomeMP3 player, one of the most inspired ideas I've seen.

I don't see a big advantage to mp3s.

Are the type of person who likes to make compilation tapes, or your own CDs? If you just like listening to complete albums, then the random access nature of mp3s won't be of much use to you. I do like making up the odd mix up, especially when there are friends around. Just queue up a few songs with a easy to use interface (no searching through disks, missing/wrong/scratched disks) and you are set. Great for a party, as anyone can pop up and queue up a song of their own, especially if it has a web front-end, just about anyone can use a browser these days. But can your aunt or a drunk person eject and play a new CD in your home system without mass destruction? ;-)

And if that person wants to hear a track you don't have, you can usually download it at faster than real time, and play it right there and then. That's a killer app.

I'd have to spend time converting everything to mp3, or looking around online for good quality rips. Then, I have to get the mp3s onto something the player will read.

Growing up, I'd always wanted a juke box, which then became a large multidisk CD changer, which I never did get round to getting, as they all were not very good in the audio quality department. I heard of mp3 about 4 years ago, and it sounded like the way to go to get that much wanted music system. So, I do have the fortune of already having my entire CD collection on a very large hard drive, and the desire to do so!

Encoding time for new stuff has never been an issue for me, besides, you don't need to baby sit the encoding process anyway. Most encoders check the CDDB database for the track titles etc, and some ever have a batch mode, where you put in one disk, wait for it to pop out, and put in another.

If you have friends also doing it, a set of CD-RWs becomes invaluable. And you can listen to them on the drive home.

Burning media for portable devices is almost disposable. If you lose or have the disks stolen, you haven't lost anything more than a few 15 cent disks. I have no worries about keeping around 100 albums in the car, provided they are out of view! Nothing more frustrating that paying to have your window fixed, all for nothing of saleable value whatsoever!

Give it 5-10 years, and most people will be using some form of compressed media for music. That format may or may not be mp3, but we shouldn't hold up any sentimental feelings for the format, ditto CDs. When I'm talking about what I think the future of media may involve, I'm not talking about a specific file format.

I'm not saying CD will die either. The number of working CD players in the market will keep the format around for a very long time. As these break, they will eventially be replaced with newer technologies, much like the migration from cassette to CDs. Remember when you only had one CD player?

I was introduced to Open-Source less than a year ago, starting with Mozilla. I have since started dual-booting GNU/Linux on my primary computer, and learning about CDex, GAIM, and others along the way. I've even posted a comment or two on Bugzilla. But one thing still bothers me.

Open-Source is supposed to be, at least eventually, user-friendly. Right now, the top-level programmers are doing a good job, but it isn't enough. Open-source is agile, but it lacks the perceived solidity of closed-source. It would be extremely taxing, but perhaps not damaging, to instead have the top-level programmers make the core stable enough to withstand an indefinite period of time as everything is build atop this constant collection of code.

In this way, if we can get Grandma in on a forum, we can build her suggestions to a program. Then, if it's approved, a milestone build is put into the program. When it comes past half-distribution cycle, the installation UI developers can be sure that the install is straightforward. Perhaps the true geek in us will want the nightly, perhaps with no fancy graphical install, but it's great for the hobbyists.

Sure my suggestions are moves for less change, but in the fast paced world of computers, we don't have the time to rush. I'll be seeing you, grandma, when I build my own Linux 3.0 distro.

256-kbit is a tad excessive. You should be using VBR, such as the r3mix preset. I've never seen any mp3 files with a better quality/size ratio than those encoded with it. Encoders/rippers such as CDex (windows) and LAME support it. Basically it's a "shortcut" to a whole load of command-line switches that have been through blind listening tests.

I hear this argument time after time, regarding MS and Samba. I'm curious to hear someone say why they feel that Microsoft is obligated to maintain interoperability with Samba. It's an MS-owned technology, the specs to which aren't terribly open in terms of what's coming down the 'pike. While Microsoft is no doubt aware that Samba has become a rather integral part of many computer users' experience, both in Linux and now OS X, it's acting as something of a rope around their neck; if they wish to implement any major changes to their file sharing protocol, samba likely would be unable to operate properly with it, requiring MS to keep a certain level of backwards-compatability in the protocol if they wish to not alienate these platforms (granted, they probably don't care a whole lot about alienating Linux users, but the OS X market may be more lucrative to them.)

In a perfect world, operating systems would be perfectly interoperable. 100% compatible operating systems don't (given less than a minute of thinking, at least) strike me as a very lucrative market. Why buy a particular OS when you can do the same with the others?

And, to continue my downward spiral to flamebaitdom, let's address the "...and deal with product activation and force DRM down your throats." What is the big deal about product activation? You fill in the form, which only asks you what country you're from (the rest is purely optional, at least on my install CD's) and hit the submit button. That'st he end of it. I've installed WinXP on two desktops and one laptop with this CD and haven't had the MS storm troopers come knocking on my door yet. As for the DRM technologies, so far I have felt no impact from them. While it does apparently exist in Media Player, there's a simple solution around that, don't use Media Player to rip your CD's. I use this marvelous little program called CDex that does a one-stop rip from CD to MP3, Ogg, or any number of other formats. All DRM-free, plays on any computer with the proper codecs. Windows is not forced DRM-land yet, and personally, I doubt it ever will be. Right now we're hearing scares from the 'for the people' organizations about how horrible the future will be and that all this is being pushed through the system without opposition. Believe me, the instant the average consumer is impacted negatively by this, the backers of whatever measure that struck a nerve will be forced to back off.

Good day.

And if you happen to be stuck with, or chose to use Windows, CDEX already supports Ogg. Insert disk, click CD->MP3 (they haven't changed the interface yet) and it looks up using CDDB, rips, encodes, names files via CDDB. The only thing you'd need to do is enforce a standard naming convention, so everyone named files appropriately.

Last update in March 2002

Vorbis has come a _LONG_ way since then. To my ears, OGG files sound quite a bit better, especially when one is comparing lower bitrates.

Grab CDex. It includes LAME and OGG encoders, or check out the comparison on the ogg vorbis page. You may be surprised. Please dont quote articles that analyzed the codec before the developers even considered it to be a 1.0 release (I'm sure that even the Fraunhofer encoder was quite poor before its own "1.0" release).

Oh, btw, I'm not a linux/oss/fsf zealot. I prefer windows on my desktop and linux on my servers.

While I applaud the open source community for producing such a high-quality competitor to MP3 as OGG, the real issue of getting people to switch still lies in hardware support and easy-to-use, CDDB compatible OGG CD-rip utilities.

Hardware support is the biggie. CD ripping is a non-issue - Exact Audio Copier and CDex, which are surely the two rippers most people are using, both support Ogg perfectly well (along with a swag of other non-MP3 formats).

It's called CDEX, people! Get it! It rips to the fully-standard MP3 format or even the Open-source Ogg Vorbis format. No DRM-BS. Get it! Use it! Love it!

When in windows, the only answer to the question of which ripper to use is CdEx.

Besides, that Roxio stuff does strange sh~t to your ASPI layer.

There is an application called NeoAudio, which is a straight CDex rip off. They changed some string (i.e. replace CDex with NeoAudio), changed the logo and added some nice SpyWare and Adware. I contacted Richard M. Stallman about this issue, but unfortunately I can not do much about it, except for the fact that they are removing/changing copyright strings which they should not. So please do not download and install NeoAudio (they probably make quite a few dollars by shipping the adware) and also advice other people NOT to download NeoAudio either, and warn innocent users not to download this application but download CDex instead.

In addition there is a small but worthwhile discussion over at Freedb. Some Slashdotters have missed the fact that Mr. Faber does not claim NeoAudio violates the license, he is merely suggesting potential users make informed decisions on whether to use CDex or NeoAudio. Logically, there is no reason to use NeoAudio -- it offers no improvements over CDex.

Of course, there's always Exact Audio Copy, which has proved itself in the mp3 scene as the de-facto standard for ripping.

Now if only my MP3/CD Player, one from iRiver, would support Ogg anytime soon I could have a complete solution.

I agree with you that CDex is very good.

You probably should also take a look at Exact Audio Copy.

2002-07-15 15:54:22 Ogg Vorbis Goes Gold (articles,announce) (rejected)

Harrumph.

Well it's been two years and two thousand posts and look at the mess I'm in
A broken heart and an empty journal, an excess of anal skin -
Well I stew and I cook, on my broken down powerbook
And I say about slashdot, that it's not worth another look.

Take away, take away, take away this Karma cap
Well I'm lonely and I'm tired, and I can't read any more crap
Take away, take away, oh my patience surely will snap
Take away, take away, take away - take away this Karma cap

Well I've searched and I've searched, to find the perfect troll
On physics facts or profane shit, or refusal to pay the slashdot toll
But to talk sense on slashdot is to teach a pig to sing -
You can post all day long, and not say anything.

Take away, take away, take away this Karma cap
Well I'm sick and I'm tired, and I can't post any more crap
Take away, take away, oh will Kathleen sit on my lap?
Take away, take away, take away - take away this Karma cap

Well I passed the bar on the way to my dingy hidden sid
I spent all my money - so did LNUX, soon it's delisted
Will I wake up on the Blacklist, or with a Subnet Ban instead?
You don't have to be Kreskin - it's a fact, I'm already dead.

Take away, take away, take away this Karma cap
Well I'm lonely and I'm tired, and I can't post any more crap
Take away, take away, well I do deserve a bitchslap
Take away, take away, take away - take away this Karma cap!

have you tried cdex? It's not quite the ripping software you'll be using with this 2.5.19 kernel, and you won't find out if the bug with auido ripping/open gl is in the kernel code of the VIA chipset, or if it's related to DRI's open gl code (is DRI used for cd ripping?, though that was just audio drivers and such...).

at any rate i've found that when all else fails there's ususally a workable alterantive. i've used cdex, and it works just nicely.

The phenomenon has been around here in the UK for 6 months to a year now and is huge on the London DJ scene, with The Sugababes getting a chart #1 recently with Adina Howard's 'Freak' and Gary Human's 'Are Friends Electric?' (Although the NYT article probably mentions this).

For all you UK readers, the Grange Hill Theme & Eminem track is quite surreal. :o)

This has been going on for quite a while now, especially in London. The boomselection blog probably has the latest bootlegs available, although some of the more recent ones have been rather dodgy

MO, this will cause the PS2 version to be different enough from the PC version so that it won't be as successful. Add to the fact that you will need a bunch of peripherals to chat for the game (can you say 'expensive'?), and this will drive away all but the really hardcore Everquest gamers.

Obviously, this person has never EXPERIENCED EverCrack. I sat stunned reading this story on the front page a few times. I fear EQ, quit two years ago. I honestly can't decide if it was easier or harder than smoking.

I can say that both had to be quit at the same time, EQ's time-dependency makes you smoke packs a day....

I hope they do bridge the game to the PC worlds. Why wouldn't they? The last EQ expansion was the first that the majority of players didn't rush to buy. I'd say make a snapshot of the current expansion sets, and link the PS2 and PC versions here and now....

What am I doing, damn EQ, it's taking up my time AGAIN just thinking about it now.
Want to know how addictive EQ can be? Check out NeverSleep.

Capitalism at it's best. Maybe VirtualWorld Services will offset the RealWorld damages... Remember the article that the _average_ EQ players spends more time playing than working.

Other great statistics here.

um, he probably could set the ogg bitrate lower than his mp3 one, and get the same quality for less space. Theoretically it would work, although in actuality i bet you would lose data (going from lossy format to lossy format, like the first link says). i haven't tried the freshmeat script, so i have no idea...i don't have to play with some new toys tonight. I keep my old mp3's the way they are...just not enough time to homogenize everything. It's Ogg for the new stuff, though.

But yes, the best results would be in taking a full .wav file and running it through your ogg encoder. I _highly_ reccomend CDex for windows, and of course the usual ogg stuff for linux.

so come on over to the dark side...

FastTrack on the other hand has a semi-heirarchical structure so it uses less bandwith, with those with the fastest connections doing the routing.

(Plug: View my Honours dissertation by clicking here)

"Hey, I am doing nothing wrong, and if it helps catch people that are, so much the better." Well, the problem starts when innocent people are accused of doing something by mistake.

Don't forget the possibility of some influential entity deciding that perfectly legal activities should be criminalized to protect their interests.

Unlike with MP3, at the moment there is only one reference implementation of a Vorbis encoder. There are quite a few frontends, though. If you are in Windows, your best bet at the moment is to use the incredible but slightly clunky EAC, with the command line oggenc encoder available from the main site. The main alternative is CDex, but at the moment it only supports RC2 (not RC3). If you are in Linux, then you can use any ripping program you like as long as you use oggenc as the encoder.

What options to use?

You are using LAME --r3mix at the moment, so give '-q 5' a go (with RC3 on, specify a *quality* level rather than a *bitrate*). Quality 5 (out of 10) is nominally 160kpbs, and should be comparable or better than --r3mix in quality.

For more information and discussion, check out the Hydrogen Audio (Project Mayhem) forum. Many of the developers of various audio formats hang out there, as well as people organising listening tests.

1) CDex. Has an Ogg encoder (RC2 version) embedded, and you can use the command line RC3 version with it very easily. The latest betas use the 'cdparanoia' libraries to rip. This would be nice choice once it's been updated to RC3.

2) EAC. This is the benchmark for quality ripping in Windows. It's slightly harder to set up, and doesn't integrate as nicely with passing metadata to the external ogg encoder, but it's the best Windows ripper bar none. Both pieces of software are free. CDex is also open source (useful if you happen to have a copy of VC++ floating around).

Some human being is, almost unbelievably, doing these by hand. What a sad person - hi there Mr Sad! (waves).

Mr. Sad's name is Jamie McCarthy, and he calls modslapping threads "grunt work" in this post:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=24252&cid=2641 410

For the first time in my life I understand the trolls.

Welcome to our frustrated, pissed off, disenfranchised little world. We can teach you more about Slashcode and how the system really works than anyone else; but at a price. Prepare to be bitchslapped, modslapped, IP banned, $rtbl'd, and lose all your moderation priveleges. We offer knowledge at a cost.

Blue or red?

that particular incident was done by a script (the author / user who did it admits to it down in one of the threads).

However, if you look around ... there was a poll called "should slashdot dump the jerk", which was asked of readers shortly after jon katz joined the staff a few years back. while it was active, it got relatively few votes, and most readers said sure, keep katz around. A few months back, though, a "troll" found the same poll, and started spreading it around common troll hangouts. the other trolls then posted it all over slashdot. many, many people voted to drop katz. Eventually, the minority who favored dropping katz turned into a vast majority (this was soon after his letter from kabul episode, which was a perfect example of stupidity and irresponsible journalism). BUT, somehow the poll was "fixed" to it's original values a few days later. someone on the slashdot staff not only reset the numbers, but reset the date on the poll (fixing the numbers moved the date order of the poll ... a second fix was required to put it in its original order). I, personally, cant find the links at the moment, but i'm going to continue looking. check back for updates.

CDex does this as well and it's free... normalising, multiple formats (including ogg), realtime encoding using multiple encoders (the newest beta of lame is my favorite), and cddb/freedb ...

well ...

try this or this.

not that either are really worthwhile, but occasionally they're entertaining.