From: owner-ecto-digest@smoe.org (ecto-digest) To: ecto-digest@smoe.org Subject: ecto-digest V9 #127 Reply-To: ecto@smoe.org Sender: owner-ecto-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-ecto-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk ecto-digest Wednesday, May 7 2003 Volume 09 : Number 127 Today's Subjects: ----------------- San Francisco venues [Paul Schreiber ] Re: mp3 players [Paul Schreiber ] MP3 rippin' ["Bill" ] Re: MP3 rippin' [Andrew Fries ] Re: mp3 players ["John Zimmer" ] RE: mp3 players ["Foghorn J. Fornorn" ] interesting article on the demise of studio recording [tjshadb@voyuz.net] Re: MP3 rippin' [Jeff Wasilko ] MP3 rippin' [Steve VanDevender ] Re: MP3 rippin' ["Brian Bloom" ] Goldfrapp's "Black Cherry." [Craig Gidney ] Re: MP3 rippin' [Yngve Hauge ] Re: MP3 rippin' [Andrew Fries ] Re: MP3 rippin' [Yngve Hauge ] Re: MP3 rippin' [Steve VanDevender ] Re: MP3 rippin' [Joseph Zitt ] Re: MP3 rippin' [Paul Blair ] Living Room Concerts ["Datura Child" ] Re: MP3 rippin' [Steve VanDevender ] Re: MP3 rippin' [meredith ] Re: MP3 rippin' (plus slight ecto content re patty larkin live) [Damon Ha] Re: MP3 rippin' [Birdie ] Re: MP3 rippin' (plus slight ecto content re patty larkin live) [Steve Va] another Unix geek and some ecto [garrick@siosos.fsnet.co.uk] Re: another Unix geek and some ecto [Damon Harper ] Re: MP3 rippin' [Andrew Fries ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 5 May 2003 22:59:01 -0700 From: Paul Schreiber Subject: San Francisco venues > Any SF Ectos ??? the following three gigs are local: Have you found any good local venues? i mean _really good_, like C'est What in Toronto or the Hotel Cafe in LA? i.e. places with acoustic artists and residencies and run by music lovers? In San Francisco: - - Cafe du Nord is okay, but they could stand to gain some food :-) - - Brainwash is good, but a bit small, and a weird room arrangement - - Johnny Foley's (saw Tara MacLean there, can recommend the place) - - Hotel Utah (bar, small but crowded) Other smallish places: - - Bazaar Cafe - - Canvas Cafe - - Blue Lamp - - Last Day Saloon - - Noe Valley Ministry (church that has (non-Christian) music when it's not a church) - - Biscuits and Blues (blues only) largeish places: - - Bimbo's - - Warfield (my fave of the larger places due to room layout) - - Great American Music Hall - - Fillmore - - Slim's Anyone care to add to the list? Paul shad 96c / uw cs 2001 / mac activist / fumbler / eda / headliner / navy-souper fan of / sophie b. / steve poltz / habs / bills / 49ers / "Some questions are logically nonsensical because the querent thinks they know more than they do. A lot of these have the form "How do I use X to accomplish Y?" There's nothing wrong with this, except that sometimes X is a chocolate-covered banana and Y is the integration of European currency systems." -- Mark-Jason Dominus ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 5 May 2003 23:04:32 -0700 From: Paul Schreiber Subject: Re: mp3 players I have an iPod and love it. It's pretty much how I listen to all my music nowadays. CDs are ripped, go in to iTunes, and are synched with the iPod, which goes in my car. When you can carry around pretty much your entire music collection with you at all times, it really does change the way you think about music. And no, I'm not just drinking the kool-aid. :-) I got the 5 GB soon after it came out, and upgraded to the 10, which I've just managed to fill. I may replaced it with a 20 or 30 eventually. If you're getting an MP3 player, I wouldn't even consider getting one of those dinky memory card-based models. It's night and day. Why have 50 songs when you can have 1,000? Lastly, for Bill: in addition to MP3s and AACs, the iPod can also play music in the lossless file formats AIFF and WAVE. Paul shad 96c / uw cs 2001 / mac activist / fumbler / eda / headliner / navy-souper fan of / sophie b. / steve poltz / habs / bills / 49ers / "I've heard about your witness protection program -- it's called woodlawn cemetery." -- _Law & Order_ ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 05 May 2003 23:17:06 -0700 From: "Bill" Subject: MP3 rippin' While the topic is hot, I have an MP3-ripping question for the house: I rip my MP3s using Roxio Easy CD Creator 5. Quite often the MP3s come out with a sort of "chirping" sound in them; random chirps of various volumes. At first I blamed my Cli, but further trials showed that the chirps were reproduced in other MP3 players as well. The question is, what software, freeware preferably, do you all recommend to rip MP3s? And, other than the obvious (and perhaps only) parameter of bit rate, is there anything else I should watch out for? Mainly, though, I am interested in a utility that will do the MP3 rippin' job nicely. Other than what comes with Roxio Easy CD Creator 5, which is neither easy nor creative. - - Bill G. ------------------------------ Date: 06 May 2003 17:41:12 +1000 From: Andrew Fries Subject: Re: MP3 rippin' On Tue, 2003-05-06 at 16:17, Bill wrote: > Mainly, though, I am interested in a utility that will do the MP3 > rippin' job nicely. Other than what comes with Roxio Easy CD Creator > 5, which is neither easy nor creative. Roxio, that's Windows, right? Well, I believe one highly regarded, and free ripping program for Windows is Exact Audio Copy (EAC), available from - --------------------------------------------------------------------- "I have always tried to live in an ivory tower, but a tide of shit is beating at its walls, threatening to undermine it." -- Gustave Flaubert - -- 08:43:09 up 19:32, 2 users, load average: 0.08, 0.02, 0.01-- ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 6 May 2003 03:31:09 -0700 From: "John Zimmer" Subject: Re: mp3 players jeff wrote: > a) the process of turning CDs into collections of MP3s is called > "ripping"... Quite a good summation of the process, but as I understand the term, "ripping" is technically just the step that extracts the digital audio from the CD, typically as a WAV file or something equivalent. Encoding is the step that transforms and compresses that into an mp3 (or OGG, etc.) file, depending on the encoder used. For most folks -- especially since we're discussing portable players -- that will be mp3. In practice, though, a *lot* of people do tend to use the term "ripping" to refer to both steps, since so many ripper/encoders combine them transparently. For an excellent introduction to this whole process (for JoAnn or anyone else still feeling their way around), I highly recommend the "Radified Guide to Ripping & Encoding CD Audio": http://mp3.radified.com/ Lots of good information there, and its author also raves at length about Exact Audio Copy as a ripper. Myself, I still find CDex more than adequate for my needs, being neither golden-eared nor *quite* geeky enough to want or need EAC's level of control and configurability. Both are freeware, but AFAIK Windows only. John ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 6 May 2003 08:39:19 -0400 From: "Foghorn J. Fornorn" Subject: RE: mp3 players For many years I used a program called "AudioCatalyst" on my Windows PC. It was easy to use, very configurable, and fast. I used it for most of my audio ripping: WAVs for straight burned CDs, and for MP3s. When I upgraded my system to XP, AudioCatalyst no longer worked. I was really bummed, I looked at a lot of free-/share-ware MP3 rippers and didn't like any of them. Then I stumbled onto "AudioGrabber". It appears that AudioCatalyst had always been a knockoff of AudioGrabber, and only the latter was actively supported. AudioGrabber is the same interface, incrementally improved. The CDDB hooks of AudioCatalyst have been switched over to FreeDB hooks, since CDDB has been bought by corporate interests. (FreeDB is an open source project). AudioCatalyst always had an automatic "normalize" option to try to set the maximum volume of tracks equally. AudioGrabber does one better by offering an option for normalizing according to an "average" volume, which is closer to what you probably really want if you're making a mix of MP3s from differently mastered sources. It's free to try, and $20 to buy. http://www.audiograbber.com-us.net/ One little warning though... the core of all these programs is an "MP3 encoder". This is actually a separate software module that is often not free, and sometimes not cheap. Roxio and most other audio s/w companies include a licenced copy of the Fraunhofer MP3 encoder. Audiograbber does not come with its own built in encoder, but can use the others as plug-ins. There's a free one called "Lame" (unfortunate name) that is easy to "plug in", and it will hook into others (for example, Fraunhofer's is available to me since I have Roxio on this system too). ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 6 May 2003 08:08 +0100 From: tjshadb@voyuz.net Subject: interesting article on the demise of studio recording From this morning's SF Chronicle, in a nutshell; ProTools kills recording studios... http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/05/06/DD265157.DTL ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 6 May 2003 13:01:05 -0400 From: Jeff Wasilko Subject: Re: MP3 rippin' On Tue, May 06, 2003 at 05:41:12PM +1000, Andrew Fries wrote: > Roxio, that's Windows, right? Well, I believe one highly regarded, and > free ripping program for Windows is Exact Audio Copy (EAC), available > from EAC + LAME is by far the best way to go. EAC will get clean rips off of your oldest, most scratched CDs. LAME has got the best reputation for doing MP3 encoding.... - -j ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 6 May 2003 10:22:44 -0700 From: Steve VanDevender Subject: MP3 rippin' Bill writes: > The question is, what software, freeware preferably, do you all > recommend to rip MP3s? And, other than the obvious (and perhaps only) > parameter of bit rate, is there anything else I should watch out for? I've been using an MP3 encoder called LAME, and I quite like it, but my needs are probably somewhat different than yours. For one thing, the main reason I chose LAME is that I could get it in source code form to build and run in Linux on my laptop. Along with it I typically use a CD ripper called "grip" which has a nice graphical interface and plenty of configurability (grip can actually use any of a number of encoders; you just stuff the encoder command line you want into the configuration). Typically all I need to do to rip a CD is pop it into the laptop's CD drive, type in the title/artist/track information (if I happen to have a network connection, it can even consult online databases for those), and tell it to go to work; it typically takes a little less time than it takes to play an album to turn it into MP3s. I believe I have seen that LAME has been built and runs in Windows, but I don't know if you can find a corresponding Windows CD ripper and encoder front end like grip. I have also heard that LAME is pretty well-regarded in terms of the audio quality of the MP3s it produces. Other people seem to like a non-MP3 format called "Ogg Vorbis"; its virtue is that it has no patent encumbrance like the MP3 format, and has similar compression with similar quality. However, it's not as commonly used as the MP3 format and not as commonly supported in devices like portable players. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 6 May 2003 10:32:37 -0700 (PDT) From: "Brian Bloom" Subject: Re: MP3 rippin' > On Tue, 2003-05-06 at 16:17, Bill wrote: > >> Mainly, though, I am interested in a utility that will do the MP3 >> rippin' job nicely. Other than what comes with Roxio Easy CD Creator >> 5, which is neither easy nor creative. > > Roxio, that's Windows, right? Well, I believe one highly regarded, and > free ripping program for Windows is Exact Audio Copy (EAC), available > from For a really good tutorial on how to configure and use EAC and LAME [on a windows box], check out: http://www.chrismyden.com/nuke/modules.php?op=modload&name=MP3DB&file=painless (if you have problems with that URL, try http://www.ChrisMyden.com/MUSIC/ and following the link on "creating amazing mp3s" ) I get my best tradeoff between quality and size with a VBR optimized between 160 and 192 kbs, YMMV of course... ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 6 May 2003 12:03:06 -0700 (PDT) From: Craig Gidney Subject: Goldfrapp's "Black Cherry." Goldfrapp's new cd is beautifully perverse. Electronic 80s pop, lush orchestration, alien female vocals, and George Battaille by way of Erica Jong lyrics. A musical evocation of the zipless fuck! __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo. http://search.yahoo.com ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 6 May 2003 22:05:41 +0200 (CEST) From: Yngve Hauge Subject: Re: MP3 rippin' On Tue, 6 May 2003, Steve VanDevender wrote: > Bill writes: > > The question is, what software, freeware preferably, do you all > > recommend to rip MP3s? And, other than the obvious (and perhaps only) > > parameter of bit rate, is there anything else I should watch out for? > > I've been using an MP3 encoder called LAME, and I quite like it, but my > needs are probably somewhat different than yours. For one thing, the > main reason I chose LAME is that I could get it in source code form to > build and run in Linux on my laptop. Along with it I typically use a CD > ripper called "grip" which has a nice graphical interface and plenty of > configurability (grip can actually use any of a number of encoders; you > just stuff the encoder command line you want into the configuration). The Grip program is for the gnome desktop only, and as I am using KDE it ain't an option. Anyone knows of a good program that also works for the KDE desktop? - -- Yngve ****************************************** * E-mail: onealien@mo.himolde.no ********* * Cell: +47 41330571 ********************* ***** Blessed be!!! ********************** ------------------------------ Date: 07 May 2003 08:44:25 +1000 From: Andrew Fries Subject: Re: MP3 rippin' On Wed, 2003-05-07 at 06:05, Yngve Hauge wrote: > The Grip program is for the gnome desktop only, and as I am using KDE it > ain't an option. Anyone knows of a good program that also works for the > KDE desktop? well, I believe Konqueror itself can be used for ripping, using encoder of your choice... I can't give you much detail because I use Grip myself. Grip runs in KDE just fine, as long as you have the required libraries, naturally. > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > "I have always tried to live in an ivory tower, but a tide of shit > is beating at its walls, threatening to undermine it." > -- Gustave Flaubert > -- 08:38:23 up 1 day, 19:28, 2 users, load average: 0.16, 0.09, 0.05-- ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 7 May 2003 00:56:29 +0200 (CEST) From: Yngve Hauge Subject: Re: MP3 rippin' On Wed, 7 May 2003, Andrew Fries wrote: > On Wed, 2003-05-07 at 06:05, Yngve Hauge wrote: > > > The Grip program is for the gnome desktop only, and as I am using KDE it > > ain't an option. Anyone knows of a good program that also works for the > > KDE desktop? > well, I believe Konqueror itself can be used for ripping, using encoder > of your choice... I can't give you much detail because I use Grip > myself. Grip runs in KDE just fine, as long as you have the required > libraries, naturally. grip-2.96 works just fine in KDE it seems ... - -- Yngve ****************************************** * E-mail: onealien@mo.himolde.no ********* * Cell: +47 41330571 ********************* ***** Blessed be!!! ********************** ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 6 May 2003 15:58:49 -0700 From: Steve VanDevender Subject: Re: MP3 rippin' Andrew Fries writes: > On Wed, 2003-05-07 at 06:05, Yngve Hauge wrote: > > > The Grip program is for the gnome desktop only, and as I am using KDE it > > ain't an option. Anyone knows of a good program that also works for the > > KDE desktop? > well, I believe Konqueror itself can be used for ripping, using encoder > of your choice... I can't give you much detail because I use Grip > myself. Grip runs in KDE just fine, as long as you have the required > libraries, naturally. It helps if you have an older version of Grip -- I stopped at 2.96 when version 3.x came out and tried to pull in the entire GNOME suite. Perhaps the newer versions are better but since I wanted none of KDE or GNOME, but have grudgingly accepted the GTK libraries, it has been working well enough for me. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 06 May 2003 15:55:17 -0700 From: Joseph Zitt Subject: Re: MP3 rippin' Yngve Hauge wrote: >The Grip program is for the gnome desktop only, and as I am using KDE it >ain't an option. Anyone knows of a good program that also works for the >KDE desktop? > While we're talking about this: can anyone explain how to play CDs under Linux on an external USB-Audio interface? I've tried several tools and followed several sets of instructions, but I must be missing some steps someplace. Probably best to reply offlist, before this goes over the edge of offtopictude. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 6 May 2003 19:48:49 -0400 From: Paul Blair Subject: Re: MP3 rippin' Damn, is there anyone on this list who *isn't* a UN*X geek? ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 06 May 2003 19:55:45 -0400 From: "Datura Child" Subject: Living Room Concerts Hello all~ I need help! A friend of mine bought a house not long ago with a space that would be perfect for hosting living room concerts. A former owner of the house (supposedly an orchestra conductor) had a solarium/rehearsal room added to the building. Dark wood paneling, stone floor, high ceiling, huge windows facing out on the woods. Brilliant acoustics. Every now and then she uses it for parties and salons, poetry readings, and such; but I don't think it gets much regular use. I originally mentioned the concert idea to her about a year ago. She's been having some financial difficulties with her mortgage and some repairs that need to be made to the house, and I thought it might be a good way to generate some funds (every little bit helps.) She liked the idea but we never went anywhere with it. But now with Happy (and some of my friends) looking for places to play I'm considering it again. It's more or less been left up to me to make the arrangements, and I admit that I am at a loss as to where to begin. I figured I might as well ask the experts :-) Any advice and wisdom you veterans would care to pass alongr will be GREATLY appreciated!!! ~Megan _________________________________________________________________ Tired of spam? Get advanced junk mail protection with MSN 8. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 6 May 2003 16:56:16 -0700 From: Steve VanDevender Subject: Re: MP3 rippin' Paul Blair writes: > Damn, is there anyone on this list who *isn't* a UN*X geek? Apparently, Bill G. isn't, but we seem to have found him adequate Windows equivalents of our UNIX goodies. (Typing this on my old Digital UNIX AlphaStation, while listening to Tympanic MP3s with my Toshiba laptop running Linux 2.4.21-rc1 and AlsaPlayer, at my job administering refrigerator-sized Solaris boxes. :-) ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 06 May 2003 19:56:28 -0400 From: meredith Subject: Re: MP3 rippin' Hi, Paul wondered: >Damn, is there anyone on this list who *isn't* a UN*X geek? Me me me me me!!! I have a mental block on even the most basic of Unix commands. I gave up years ago. =============================================== Meredith Tarr New Haven, CT USA mailto:meth@smoe.org http://www.smoe.org/meth =============================================== Live At The House O'Muzak House Concert Series http://muzak.smoe.org =============================================== ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 6 May 2003 17:05:44 -0700 From: Damon Harper Subject: Re: MP3 rippin' (plus slight ecto content re patty larkin live) On 06 May, Paul Blair wrote: > Damn, is there anyone on this list who *isn't* a UN*X geek? plenty... but also plenty who are. that's what makes watching the X-Mailer and User-Agent headers here so much fun! i think stevev's the only one i've seen using emacs for mail in recent history... congratulations! ;) and the ecto content: saw patty larkin here in vancouver at the WISE hall a little while ago (ok, most of a month already). very good show, kevin (former ecto subscriber) and i took along a friend who'd never heard her and afterwards he couldn't stop talking about her. i'd seen her live once before, but that was at the van folk festival from pretty far away - the front row of the WISE was a different experience altogether. and i now finally own a patty larkin album. :) at first i thought she was having a bad grumpy day, until i finally figured out that's just her schtick. random comment: it's always fun to watch american artists react to canadian (or maybe just vancouverite?) audiences. everyone there was obviously enjoying themselves but you could see she wasn't getting the feedback she was used to because we're all so quiet. ;) - -damon ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 06 May 2003 17:10:56 -0700 From: Birdie Subject: Re: MP3 rippin' Paul exclaimed.... > Damn, is there anyone on this list who *isn't* a UN*X geek? I dunno, but since I was on the "Love-Hounds" list waaaaay back when only people who did UseNet with Unix were on it, that might explain some of the crowd here....those were the days....just the coolest brightest people on the net...and if there was a problem, we simply used our kill file function! Then the GUI was invented and AOL and....there are a few lists around that survived the deluge that followed and remain cool clean lists that have maintained their integrity - this being one of them. Cheers Birdie ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 6 May 2003 17:21:35 -0700 From: Steve VanDevender Subject: Re: MP3 rippin' (plus slight ecto content re patty larkin live) Damon Harper writes: > On 06 May, Paul Blair wrote: > > > Damn, is there anyone on this list who *isn't* a UN*X geek? > > plenty... but also plenty who are. that's what makes watching the > X-Mailer and User-Agent headers here so much fun! i think stevev's > the only one i've seen using emacs for mail in recent history... > congratulations! ;) And this actually goes waaay back; I think I started using Kyle Jones's Emacs-based VM mail reader in 1989, and have been using some version of Emacs with some version of VM for email ever since. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 7 May 2003 02:08:21 +0100 From: garrick@siosos.fsnet.co.uk Subject: another Unix geek and some ecto Hello everyone. Another Unix geek here, Gnu/Linux (Slackware, but let's not get into a distro war here :) ) at home and Solaris at work if they make me, well I'm recently redundant ("shifts in the market place, have to remain competitive etc. etc.") but doubt I've seen the last of Sun boxes. While on the subject of Ecto demographics are there any other vegans here? How about Radio Amateurs? Ecto content; I saw Lucinda Williams at the Shepherds Bush Empire, London, this evening and she was, in a word, astounding. I wasn't a huge fan up until a few hours ago and wasn't going to go until I found that she doesn't like flying and that it's the first time she's been in the UK for 10 years. I only have two of her albums, "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road" and "World Without Tears" but will have to expand on that after tonights performance. As a bonus the support was a surprisingly long set by Beth Orton! Cool! n.p. radioparadise Garrick. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 6 May 2003 18:30:37 -0700 From: Damon Harper Subject: Re: another Unix geek and some ecto On 07 May, garrick@siosos.fsnet.co.uk wrote: > While on the subject of Ecto demographics are there any other vegans > here? *raises hand* ... that'd be me, mr. long-haired vegan unix geek #2. er, you do have long hair, right? ;) looks like we even use the same (current) version of mutt. > How about Radio Amateurs? i guess that's where we part ways. :) stevev: i use xemacs for just about everything else text-related but never quite got into VM. meth: you may not be a unix geek, but you do use eudora which still sets you apart from 99% of computer users these days... so stand proud. :) - -damon, perversely enjoying this thread ------------------------------ Date: 07 May 2003 13:31:27 +1000 From: Andrew Fries Subject: Re: MP3 rippin' On Wed, 2003-05-07 at 09:56, meredith wrote: > I have a mental block on even the most basic of Unix commands. I gave up > years ago. In that case, you might consider having another look at Linux - the progress it made over the last two-three years is quite amazing. As far as user-friendliness goes, it really isn't much worse than Windows any more and if you wish to set it up this way, it can look and feel quite similar too! Some Ecto content... well, my 3 Karnataka CDs just arrived in the mail: Karnataka, "The Storm" and "delicate flame of desire". Yay :) - --------------------------------------------------------------------- "Grrr...Arrgh!" -- Mutant - -- 13:16:07 up 2 days, 5 min, 2 users, load average: 0.14, 0.06, 0.04-- ------------------------------ End of ecto-digest V9 #127 **************************