Setting up SoundJuicer to encode the files as MP3 instead of Ogg Vorbis requires some new tricks when compared to older versions. Just installing MP3 support isn’t enough. You need to create a gstreamer audio profile to do it. Paul W. Frields has a good guide that helped me get set up.
I just upgraded my laptop to Fedora Core 4 and noticed that my carefully crafted .Xdefaults stopped working with Emacs. For some odd reason FC4 has changed the window name (?) of Emacs from emacs to emacs-x. Changing all references in .Xdefaults respectively will let you benefit from your modifications.
And now, all is well once again and Emacs can again be used. And remember kids: vi is not to be trusted.
Because I’m lazy and don’t like switching computers to test my web development work, I’ve been playing around with Internet Explorer on Linux a bit more. As I’ve already noted, the Sidenet configuration utility works well in installing IE 6.
But unfortunately web development still requires testing with older IE versions so I finally got around to testing the well-known tutorial on getting several different IE versions to work on the same computer. I used the packages provided by Ryan Parman to simplify the process. By following the directions you’ll get the different versions installed.
I tested them and although the About-dialog always shows the same version number (6.0…), server logs show that different IE versions were used. There are also subtle differences in the layout that they produce, so everything should be fine in that respect. I did note an interesting bug though, the output of phpinfo() just shows the table boxes with all of the colors and such, but all of the text is missing. I wonder if the same problem persists on Windows as well?
After my recent hard-drive crash I had to reinstall Linux on it. Since I got a clean drive from HP and I haven’t used Windows on the laptop I decided to use the whole drive for Linux. If you need to keep Windows, I suggest you look at my notes on installing Fedora Core 2 on the same laptop.
I saw Dream Theater’s Live at Budokan DVD at our local supermarket and somehow it just found its way into our basket. I’d been thinking of getting it at some point, but seeing it and feeling it beckon, I was unable to resist.
A good concert, something I’d wish to have been able to see live myself. Especially the Instrumedley they played was something that just said coding music as well. So, instead of going out and looking for the CDs of the concert (which probably can’t be found anywhere near here), I decided to rip the audio off the DVD into an MP3-file. And yes, this is all perfectly legal as I’m making a copy for my own personal use of content I have bought.
I used Mplayer on Linux (Fedora Core 3) to do this, but the same commands should be applicable elsewhere as Mplayer is available on several other platforms. In this case we are talking about chapter 9 of the first title (title 1). The first step is to encode the audio of the chapter into a file.
mencoder dvd://1 -chapter 9-9 -oac mp3lame -ovc frameno -o instrumedely.avi
Remember, the -chapter parameter takes a range as its value. If you specify only one number (e.g. 9) it assume that it’s the beginning of the range and the end of the range is the end of the disc.
Now you have an AVI file in which there isn’t any video and the audio is MP3 encoded. The next step is to extract just the audio into a separate file.
mplayer instrumedley.avi -dumpaudio -dumpfile Instrumedley.mp3
Now you have a MP3 file. I recommend setting the ID3 tags, easyTAG is fairly easy to use for the task.