beecherbowers.com

If you need a “perfect” rip of your audio CD, there’s a new free tool for you to use, courtesy of CDFreaks. The tool will even allow you to calibrate it to work best with your drive.

Here’s a list of features available:

-Reading speed setting.
-Raw and packed (corrected) subchannel reading.
-C2 error reporting with offset correction.
-Image (main, sub and cue) and wav format output.
-Main channel offset correction in samples/bytes.
-User entered and auto detected subchannel offset correction.
-C2 pointer report bit order adjustment.
-Burst vs one read length per read command.
-Highly descriptive log output.
-MCN (UPC/EAN), ISRC, CD-TEXT reading.
-Sub & C2 alternative order setting.
-Accurate song/gap detection/extraction.

You can download it from CDFreaks here.

I catch up weekly to Wil Wheaton’s blog and came across this gem of a site for music, called Magnatune.

In addition to letting you hear the entire album/track online prior to choosing to buy it or not, the site lets you choose your price for the tunes.  I like chilled ambient music when I’m working and Etherfysh has several really good tracks available for listening there. There albums can be bought for ~$8 and they’re 320Kbps bitrate which is very good quality for downloaded music.

I believe that if the larger labels had this same mindset, music piracy would be non-existent. I think the reason they don’t is that their artists wouldn’t be able to sell albums consisting of one track you like and ten more tracks of blather.

Take all the headlines you see on different websites with a five pound bag of salt.

On that note, I have to pass along what I think is about the best April fools prank I’ve pulled off. One of the places I used to work had a central area for employees to make copies and was one of only two places at that location for copies to be made. Early April 1st, I attached official looking signs to the copiers letting people know that they had been upgraded and now accept voice commands. I put instructions for clearly stating your name, number of copies, department to bill, etc… There were some people that repeated the information 4 and 5 times before someone else let them in on it.