(no subject)
Jul. 28th, 2005 00:30![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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.
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,
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)