I gave up in the end and knuckled down to some serious tinkering.  Found a spare hard disk and loaded up Ubuntu 6.10 linux onto it to see if I could get my music program functioning again.

After updating the whole system over the internet, a mere 1Gb (!) download and a few hours of tinkering later and it lives again!  Hoorah!  I’m so happy, I’ve got one of the few useful things I’ve ever written up and running again.

Of course nothing is ever that simple round here, that was purely a test… Now I have the fun task of repeating the installation on a headless box with no optical drive attached.  Think I’ll wait until I acquire a more up to date disc with Ubuntu on, don’t fancy that monster download again.

Other than that, I was quite impressed with Ubuntu, still not a fan of the Gnome desktop, I’ve always prefered KDE, but the system itself is a breeze to use.  I could be converted.

This is driving me insane.  About three years ago I wrote a perl script to manage my music collection.  Then, after updating Mandrake (as it was back then) it broke.  Try as I might to fix the perl installation, grabbing all the modules that made it work, still resulted in a non functioning script.

It’s beginning to piss me off now.  I’m even tempted to port the whole thing to another language in order to get it working again.  Or changing the distro of the box it used to run on.  Neither of which have any guarantee of success.

What’s more annoying than not having access to the dirty little hack I put together, is not having the skills to get it working again. Cue much wailing and gnashing of teeth…

Having been recently donated an XP box, without the option of installing linux on it, I’m slowly rebuilding my music toolkit.  Fortunately most of the bits of software I favour come in both windows and linux flavours…

The key tool that used to be a one stop shop for me was Grip, a combined ripping and encoding program with the obligatory CDDB lookup for track details. This though is a linux only tool, so I’ve been forced to find something else, enter CDDA Ripper XP.

The main reason for picking that one over the others I looked at, was the fact that it can use the LAME mp3 encoder, widely recognised as the best free mp3 encoder out there.  It’s a separate download, but well worth the effort, giving me the option to encode tracks with the ‘extreme’ settings, VBR with a maximum bitrate of 320kbps.  Large file size, but sounds great…

Those in addition with Audacity, which I wrote about earlier, give me all the tools I used to enjoy on my linux box. (Audacity also uses the LAME encoder, but not all the options are available, particularly the VBR ones…)  Let the merriment ensue.

Having been reading all the hype in Edge recently about MGS4, which I must note is one of the two games I would consider buying a PS3 for (The other being Burnout: Paradise) I thought I’d dust down my unfinished copy of MGS2: Sons of Liberty…

Now, either I set the difficulty level way too high, or I’m just getting too old for that amount of hand/eye co-ordination. It’s impossible. I’m off to restart in idiot mode, turn it all right down and start again. If that fails then it’s back to something that doesn’t require quite as much grey matter, like Burnout or possibly a bash on Final Fantasy X (something else I haven’t finished…)

Just been going thru some of my old MP3’s and I’ve finally figured out why some of them seem so slow.

A few years ago I went thru them and picked out some of my faves, then I ran them thru Audacity to speed them up by about 20%.  That’s why they sound so slow to me when I hear them on the radio.  It’s taken me ages to figure out what the difference was…

As an aside, if you’re in need of a free audio tool, for playing with, mixing, normalising or just generally playing with your tunes you could do worse than take a look at Audacity.

(The full list of tunes I tweaked is available, for a price, some of them I’m not proud of…)