(no subject)

[torquill]

I'm listening to Sasha ("Communicate One"), ripping "Live in Ibiza 2", and thinking that Ibiza 1 must be in my portable CD player. Somewhere. I lost it a few months ago, though I suspect it's somewhere in this house... I did, however, find a copy of Ibiza 1 while cleaning my room today. Good thing, as this is apparently the only set of Sasha discs I had neglected to rip to MP3. That is being corrected.

My CDs seem to get lost or damaged too often. I don't think I take horrible care of them -- they're just inherently fragile. Sigh. Communicate One somehow got scratched on the label side; it's harder to do that with commercial discs than home copies, but there it is with a chunk of data missing so that it skips in exactly the two places on the disc I love it best. I found that I had already ripped it, though (thank heaven)... now I just need to decode the MP3s and burn it back to a CD. Hoping all the while I can find a way to prevent fractional gaps between tracks, which would drive me batty bugnuts when listening to a continuous mix CD. (Tips, anyone?)

This of course assumes I can make the linux SCSI drivers behave, so that I can burn CDs at all. I need to futz with that some more. (lame seems happy with the SCSI emulation, so I don't know what cdread's problem is... -scanbus gives me an error of "Cannot open SCSI driver". Sigh.)

When I do get it working, I need to fulfill the vow I made ages ago that I will copy every single disc I listen to regularly, and stash the originals away at home while listening to the copies in the car. If the car ever gets broken into, I don't lose untold $$ worth of CDs, and they aren't subject to scratches and heat damage, or (as would be the case if I archived them on the computer) data loss. (Yes, eyeofcanaan, I have always been extremely conscious of the failure rate of hard drives, which is why I hoped you had thought of the possibility of a HD crash when you were ripping your whole library. :) )

Thank god for cdparanoia. I copied a Joe Satriani disc with my Windows CD burner software, and it had a definite glitch in the copy; the original disc looks fine to the naked eye, but it must have had some dust or a small scratch on it at the time. cdparanoia would have looked at that, read it over again, reconstructed the data, and flagged it as a corrected skip... the Windows burner just bounced happily onward without noticing. Bah. So much for the "open source software isn't as good as commercial software" whine I hear every so often.

The last time I really listened to Communicate was when I was in school, stressed out to hell and back, driving to Pittsburg at 07ungodlyhour and trying not to either fall asleep or have a nervous breakdown. Listening to it now, it feels soothing and stabilizing, very solid, so I suppose it was a good match for when I was tearing my hair out over school. :) I'm just relaxing into it right now, and wishing I had the sort of sound on my headphones that I do in the car. Given some money to burn, I'd consider a pair of those headphones that foogod got... but I have better things to spend money on right now.

Speaking of which... I looked up troubleshooting info for cd players, particularly car decks, in the hope that mine might be fixable for less money than it would take to buy a new one. It turns out that transient skipping, which is the main issue I'm having right now, can often be due to just a dirty lens. Hell, that wouldn't even be enough to make me take it in to my stereo repair guy -- that I can deal with here. I've taken the deck apart once already, to clean the rollers... there's just one tricky spring, and the rest is really easy. My dad has equipment to clean optical lenses (I'd go for lens paper and isopropyl, but I'll see what he recommends), and I can blow out the mechanisms and clean the rollers while I'm at it.

We'll see whether that makes it behave... the other possibility is that it has issues with the fine control apparatus, and that's nothing I want to fuss with. Too many ways to go wrong. Then it would be a question of whether my repair shop would be cheaper than replacing the unit with a comparable one; I think they run a few hundred dollars, but I haven't priced them in years.

So that's on my to-do list, along with a slew of other things. I ought to get back to the Gimp, though; I'm futzing with graphics for eyeofcanaan before heading to bed.

Comments

[therobbergirl.livejournal.com]

I use Alto MP3 for ripping. There's an option to suppress or add those pesky gaps. I'm not at my home computer right now so I can't check it (I don't know if it will make CD tracks from MP3 tracks and I can't remmeber where the option to remove gaps is), but the link above will let you download a trial copy. The trial copy functions in all ways for the first 12 tracks of a CD.

[luna-torquill.livejournal.com]

Thanks... I'll keep it in mind if I need a Windows ripper again. :)

[therobbergirl.livejournal.com]

Ack, oops, I wasn't paying attention.

[foogod.livejournal.com]

First, you should be able to avoid track gaps by burning in DAO mode. With modern software (see below) that's easier than it used to be, too. If you can't get it to work let me know and I'll see what I can do..

Second, you don't need SCSI emulation for CD burning in Linux anymore. Modern kernels support direct ATAPI support through the normal IDE drivers. Unless you've got some really strange hardware, it should "just work" now.

Third, as for CD burning apps, I highly recommend K3B (the KDE CD burning utility). You may already have it installed, but being a KDE app, it won't show up on the Gnome menus (I usually just run it from the command line ("k3b")). It's much more intuitive than anything else I've seen, and seems to be able to do just about anything you would want it to (including DAO audio CDs, and it'll automatically transcode .ogg/.mp3/etc files in the process (though for MP3 you will need to download the k3b MP3 plugin from livna, if I remember right)..

Anyway, gimme a call if you need help with any of this..

[luna-torquill.livejournal.com]

What I'm worried about is gaps caused by "rounded ends" when decoding MP3s -- the beginning and end aren't necessarily sampled such at encoding time that they decode back to a crisp cut. DAO wouldn't help this, as the fractional gap would be part of the beginning and end of each wav file. It might not be an issue, but it seems very likely that it would happen, which is why I'm worried. (I've known for years how to turn off the three-second pause "feature".)

As for ATAPI support "just working", I was very surprised that it didn't. It still doesn't. I haven't had time or energy to try everything I can think of yet, but it really does look like I'm missing a module somewhere.

I'll go fetch k3b, as I don't seem to have it. It would sure beat XCdRoast, which is doing its typical thing of half-working, sometimes, at odd intervals. I wonder whether it would give me more helpful output than I'm getting from cdread/cdrecord...

[foogod.livejournal.com]

Well, from my own experience, if you've ripped them with cdparanoia, it's generally very good about cutting the tracks at exactly the same point so they match up later.. with other rippers I can't really say. If it turns out you need to do some tweaking to the ends of things to get them to sound better, I'd recommend Audacity, which I've found to be a quite capable audio editor with some nice features.. (you can get it from extras, but for mp3 support you'll need the livna or dag version (be sure you're getting the right one, because the livna/dag ones are slightly older versions than the one in extras, so yum will fetch from extras by default))

[luna-torquill.livejournal.com]

I am awed by your remote wiz field. 'cdrecord -scanbus' just returned a proper listing. It wasn't working last night...