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I Talk To The Wind
Jan. 16th, 2007 10:00 pmOn my old computer, with my old CD burner, I had a program called "Nero Burning ROM" for burning CDs. It took me a while to get the joke in the title, but eventually I realized that the icon for the program was like a little picture of the Roman Colosseum on fire.
It was an okay program, I suppose. I generally only burn one instance of disc at a time, not batches of the same thing, and rarely the exact same thing more than once, but it was okay. It was easy to add files to the disc, just by dragging from one window to another, and easy to tell when you were running out of space.
There was also a Nero WAV editor, which was pretty cool. It could open several different kinds of sound files, convert them to WAV, and then do simple operations on them, like cropping, copying and pasting, even reversing. (So, decades later, I was finally able to determine what the backward section on Bob & Doug McKenzie's "Great White North" album was all about. Not much, apparently.)
On my new computer, with its DVD burner, I also have Nero software which came preinstalled. In comparison, I have to say that I'm not particularly impressed.
For one thing, there seem to be a few too many paths through "Nero Express" from which you can't go back. Let's say that you have painstakingly assembled a bunch of files to burn to your DVD-R. It looks like it's pretty close to full on the little meter on the bottom of the screen. So you click on the "Next >>" button on the bottom of your little wizard form. It checks for a few seconds and then pops out your disc, asking you to insert something with contains enough space for your compilation, because you've gone one megabyte over.
Now, at this point, wouldn't you want to go back and delete a few files from your compilation and try again? Of course you would. Under "Nero Burning ROM", this was easy, because you could always go back to the file selection screen. But under "Nero Express", you're SOL. You have to go and rebuild the compilation from scratch.
But surely, you say, there's a way to save your compilation to a file and reload it again, so you can fix it? The way there was with Burning ROM? Well, supposedly there is, and maybe I just haven't figured out how to work it properly. But I'm no newbie when it comes to computers. Rather, I feel like Eric Raymond trying to configure CUPS--if the feature is there but I can't find it, then it's in the wrong place. Trust me, I spent a long time trying to figure out how to do it, and failed.
What "Nero Express" looks like is a dumbed-down interface for the computer-illiterate. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but would it be too hard to put the actual complex interface in as well? Or to at least preserve a few of the capabilities?
Not to mention that the WAV editor isn't part of the new suite. I keep meaning to actually install it off of the old Nero disc, so that I can fix up some of my MP3s.
That's another problem I have. I've always used a freeware program called "FreeRip" for ripping my CDs into MP3, once I discovered that the built-in Windows program used WMA files instead. I do realize that there's other formats out there, but I've become attached to MP3. You can keep your WMA's and OGG's and M4A's and whatever else. It's not necessarily rational, but there you are.
Anyway, FreeRip has a few issues which occasionally annoy me. One of them is the inability to recognize something which my old CD player had no trouble with--song intros. A good example is on my South Park "Chef Aid" CD. Each song begins with an intro, usually of Chef introducing the song. On my old CD player, this would play as, for instance, starting at -0:23 of Track 10. So the information is there, somehow, encoded in the CD format. But FreeRip seems to ignore it utterly. It sees those 23 seconds as being the end of Track 9--which I'm sure they are, physically, but somewhere there's additional information but it's ignoring. So one of these days I need to go through all my "Chef Aid" files and take the intros off the end of each track and put them at the beginning of the next one. But I don't even know at this point which of my tracks also have that problem, because my old CD player had too many skipping problems and has been "retired". (If anyone knows of a ripping program that can fix this issue, that'd be great. As long as it produces MP3s and doesn't cost anything.)
FreeRip also seems to have some annoying slowdowns. You put in a CD, and it basically freezes for fifteen seconds while it looks it up on freedb. Then, after you select the track listing, it freezes again, this time because it's writing the track titles. I know this because if you edit a track title, it freezes again. Is it resubmitting the track data to freedb? Not a clue. I know from my Windows programming experience that this freezing just means that the code isn't responding to Windows events, like the one that gets the window to refresh or anything like that. Why not? What's so all-fired important that it can't spare the time to refresh the screen? At least whenever I do that I have a good reason.*
Of course, one of these days I'd also like to get MP3 versions of the sizable portion of my collection which has never issued on CD. I imagine it's possible by just hooking up one's stereo to one's computer through audio cables, recording WAV files, and then splitting them up into tracks. There may even be easier ways to do it, of course, but I think that right now I have the actual physical capability to do it...but I'd have to rearrange my computer room to put my stereo even near my computer in the first place...or else find a extra-long cable to string up over the ceiling or something.
I have vague plans to do the rearranging, but the problem with rearranging any room in our house is figuring out where to put all the stuff that's cluttering up the space where things need to be moved through, let alone the stuff that's being moved. One of these days...
It was an okay program, I suppose. I generally only burn one instance of disc at a time, not batches of the same thing, and rarely the exact same thing more than once, but it was okay. It was easy to add files to the disc, just by dragging from one window to another, and easy to tell when you were running out of space.
There was also a Nero WAV editor, which was pretty cool. It could open several different kinds of sound files, convert them to WAV, and then do simple operations on them, like cropping, copying and pasting, even reversing. (So, decades later, I was finally able to determine what the backward section on Bob & Doug McKenzie's "Great White North" album was all about. Not much, apparently.)
On my new computer, with its DVD burner, I also have Nero software which came preinstalled. In comparison, I have to say that I'm not particularly impressed.
For one thing, there seem to be a few too many paths through "Nero Express" from which you can't go back. Let's say that you have painstakingly assembled a bunch of files to burn to your DVD-R. It looks like it's pretty close to full on the little meter on the bottom of the screen. So you click on the "Next >>" button on the bottom of your little wizard form. It checks for a few seconds and then pops out your disc, asking you to insert something with contains enough space for your compilation, because you've gone one megabyte over.
Now, at this point, wouldn't you want to go back and delete a few files from your compilation and try again? Of course you would. Under "Nero Burning ROM", this was easy, because you could always go back to the file selection screen. But under "Nero Express", you're SOL. You have to go and rebuild the compilation from scratch.
But surely, you say, there's a way to save your compilation to a file and reload it again, so you can fix it? The way there was with Burning ROM? Well, supposedly there is, and maybe I just haven't figured out how to work it properly. But I'm no newbie when it comes to computers. Rather, I feel like Eric Raymond trying to configure CUPS--if the feature is there but I can't find it, then it's in the wrong place. Trust me, I spent a long time trying to figure out how to do it, and failed.
What "Nero Express" looks like is a dumbed-down interface for the computer-illiterate. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but would it be too hard to put the actual complex interface in as well? Or to at least preserve a few of the capabilities?
Not to mention that the WAV editor isn't part of the new suite. I keep meaning to actually install it off of the old Nero disc, so that I can fix up some of my MP3s.
That's another problem I have. I've always used a freeware program called "FreeRip" for ripping my CDs into MP3, once I discovered that the built-in Windows program used WMA files instead. I do realize that there's other formats out there, but I've become attached to MP3. You can keep your WMA's and OGG's and M4A's and whatever else. It's not necessarily rational, but there you are.
Anyway, FreeRip has a few issues which occasionally annoy me. One of them is the inability to recognize something which my old CD player had no trouble with--song intros. A good example is on my South Park "Chef Aid" CD. Each song begins with an intro, usually of Chef introducing the song. On my old CD player, this would play as, for instance, starting at -0:23 of Track 10. So the information is there, somehow, encoded in the CD format. But FreeRip seems to ignore it utterly. It sees those 23 seconds as being the end of Track 9--which I'm sure they are, physically, but somewhere there's additional information but it's ignoring. So one of these days I need to go through all my "Chef Aid" files and take the intros off the end of each track and put them at the beginning of the next one. But I don't even know at this point which of my tracks also have that problem, because my old CD player had too many skipping problems and has been "retired". (If anyone knows of a ripping program that can fix this issue, that'd be great. As long as it produces MP3s and doesn't cost anything.)
FreeRip also seems to have some annoying slowdowns. You put in a CD, and it basically freezes for fifteen seconds while it looks it up on freedb. Then, after you select the track listing, it freezes again, this time because it's writing the track titles. I know this because if you edit a track title, it freezes again. Is it resubmitting the track data to freedb? Not a clue. I know from my Windows programming experience that this freezing just means that the code isn't responding to Windows events, like the one that gets the window to refresh or anything like that. Why not? What's so all-fired important that it can't spare the time to refresh the screen? At least whenever I do that I have a good reason.*
Of course, one of these days I'd also like to get MP3 versions of the sizable portion of my collection which has never issued on CD. I imagine it's possible by just hooking up one's stereo to one's computer through audio cables, recording WAV files, and then splitting them up into tracks. There may even be easier ways to do it, of course, but I think that right now I have the actual physical capability to do it...but I'd have to rearrange my computer room to put my stereo even near my computer in the first place...or else find a extra-long cable to string up over the ceiling or something.
I have vague plans to do the rearranging, but the problem with rearranging any room in our house is figuring out where to put all the stuff that's cluttering up the space where things need to be moved through, let alone the stuff that's being moved. One of these days...
