Monthly Archives: October 2004

Recording Windows Media Streams

Yesterday, my housemate was on [Newstalk 106](http://www.newstalk106.ie), a national radio station, to talk about [Ladyfest Dublin](http://www.ladyfestdublin.org), which she’s involved in. Being the naive-yet-helpful type, I offered to record this for her and mp3 it, so Ladyfest could offer it as a download on their website. In the process of doing this, I downloaded 16 different pieces of software, most of which were completely useless for the job I was trying to do. That’s why I’ve written this, to help anyone else trying to do something similar.

By the way, if anyone has a simpler way, please let me know.

## Once bitten, twice shy
My previous experience of mp3’ing a radio show involved recording it to tape (yes, I still use tapes), connecting from the headphone jack on my stereo to the ‘line in’ jack on my laptop, and recording that. Unfortunately, this resulted in a really crackly mp3, full of static. So I figured, this is the 21st Century, there has to be an easier way to do this.

And being cheap, the easier way had better be free.

## A thoroughly modern, convoluted solution
Newstalk offer a Windows Media stream of their live broadcasts. I used the shareware [Net Transport](http://www.xi-soft.com/default.htm) to record the stream. I believe the shareware version will only record 15 minutes of a stream, but I didn’t check this out. Once it had recorded the stream, I exported it as a 2.14MB _.asf_ file.

Next, I used [asftools](http://www.geocities.com/myasftools/) to create a .wav of the stream. However, the .wav it created was only 2.12MB, while the actual recording was approximately 14 minutes long. Clearly asftools uses some weird codec that, despite downloading 20MBs of codec packs, I just couldn’t find. Their website wasn’t much help either. It addressed the problems with the .wav files asftools creates, but suggests it’s _”a codec problem”_. So I’d have to find something else.

After searching for a good hour or so, I finally stumbled across [http://www.dbpoweramp.com/](DB Power Amp Music Converter). This was able to read the busted wav, and export it as whatever I liked; a .wav or a .mp3. I was finally getting somewhere. Since I still had some editing to do on the source before I put it up as an mp3, I exported it as a “proper”, 145MB .wav.

I opened the .wav file in [audacity](http://audacity.sourceforge.net/) and from there, was able to trim off the useless bit I’d recorded at the beginning. I also added a nice little fade-out, for good measure. Audacity was able to export this as either a .ogg or a .mp3 file. As much as my nerd side wanted to put this out as a .ogg file, my sensible side told me that we were going for as much cross-compatibility as possible, so I exported it as a 12MB .mp3 file.

You can hear the mp3 on the [Ladyfest website](http://www.ladyfestdublin.org)

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del.icio.us

For the past few months, I’ve become increasingly fond of [del.icio.us][]. Plugged into any half-decent RSS reader ([liferea](http://liferea.sourceforge.net/) being my RSS-reader of choice), it becomes an invaluable tool to help me stay on top of my game, exposing me to tools and advice I probably wouldn’t normally have stumbled upon.

But until recently, I never saw the point of signing up for an account. To me, it was a link exchange – whoop-di-doo. I don’t really have enough to contribute to something like this, I don’t tend to come across things by chance that other people would find interesting. Finally, in the depths of last night, I realised its true purpose and how I could help make it better whilst simultaneously scratching many of my own personal itches.

When I browse around on the internet at home, there’s a lot of stuff that I just don’t have time to check out on anything but a ‘high’ level. I’m generally up until 1am, winding down by chewing email for a while and seeing what’s happening in the world, but it’s absolutely impossible for me to keep my concentration levels high for some of the things I come across. For instance, last night I came across a link that explains the [Ten Mistakes Writers Don’t See (But Can Easily Fix When They Do)](http://www.holtuncensored.com/ten_mistakes.html), but it being almost 1am, I couldn’t really digest the information. Since it’s nigh-on impossible (or at least, a whole bunch of work) to synchronise my bookmarks list at home with my workstation in the office, I began the process of emailing the URL to myself, to check it when I got into work today.

I stopped before hitting the “send” button as it finally dawned on me. I realised that I was completely ignoring the fact that I’d just gotten this link from del.icio.us – it would always be there. If only some bright spark could come up with a way for me to keep a track of all the stuff I liked on [del.icio.us][] — one giant all-encompassing bookmark — where I wouldn’t need to maintain a file on a number of seperate machines.

But wait! Some bright spark already set this up! If I set up my own [del.icio.us][] account, I could add the link to it, and have it available no matter where it was. I’m almost certainly pointing out the obvious to some of you here, but to me, it was like someone had finally removed the forest and I was able to say _”Oh, there are the trees”_.

This also has a number of other knock-on effects. Now, when I want to show someone something cool I’d seen that they might be interested, I don’t have to go digging through all the various machines I use, I can just point them at my [del.icio.us][] account.

It also has the added advantage of making my bookmarks infinitely sortable. In Firefox, I have a “useful stuff” folder, where I dump, well.. useful stuff. This is to stop me getting confused _”hmm.. where is that useful linux drum sequencer program I found? Is it in ‘linux’ or ‘music’?”_. Now I can have it appear in a filter for ‘useful’, ‘linux’ _and_ ‘sound’.

Like I said, this might all just sound like the most obvious thing in the world to you all, but I’m glad I finally caught up.

[del.icio.us]: http://del.icio.us/

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Getting Things Done with Ecco

Inspired by Merlin Mann’s amazing [43 folders](http://43folders.com), I’ve recently become more and more obsessed with Getting Things Done. This is at least partly due to the fact that circumstances have changed, leaving me with an increased workload and the increased possibility of spreading myself too thin. Using the basic principles of Getting Things Done (or at least, the ones I can pick up from around the place, because it’s absolutely impossible to get my hands on this book in Dublin), I’ve managed to ensure that I’m consistently more productive. And even times when I’m not so productive, I’m still completely focused on what needs to be done.

To this end, I’ve found some pieces of software very useful. First is the Vim Outliner (nice, but too basic for my needs – I feel as if I’m wasting a small-but-significant amount of time wrestling with the software), then there’s TomBoy (will be an indispensible piece of software (especially now that it’s been hooked into Gnome’s new finder-lite), but is still too early a release to be useful for me), and now finally, Ecco.

I read about Ecco on various posts about Getting Things Done. People were saying that they still can’t live without it, despite the fact that it hasn’t been updated in enough years for it to fall into the “ancient history” category, in internet-years. I downloaded it and gave it a go, and found that it almost perfectly suited my needs.

It manages to present the things I like about the Vim Outliner (the ability to “outline” my goals, obviously) in an well-structured way. You can easily throw a goal together, give it a “todo” date (which combines with its built-in calendar to give you a quick overview of your day’s tasks) and easily mark things as done. Once something has been marked as done, it then moves into your “completed tasks” tab, so you can take it out of your TODO list.

It could almost be the perfect piece of software for my needs.

Almost.

My setup here is strange. My primary workstation is a Debian Linux machine, but since a large part of my job includes supporting Windows clients, I also have a Windows 2000 machine on my desk. I have a monitor for each, and thanks to Synergy, I can control both using one keyboard (stolen from an old iMac, because I love the action of the keys) and mouse (a Logitech optical mouse). And this causes problems with Ecc

Because Ecco is quite old, and isn’t quite optimised for today’s operating systems (and kick-ass TCP keyboard/mouse controllers), it barfs every so often. When I give it a date for the TODO, the mouse and keyboard go unresponsive for a couple of seconds. When I click somewhere I shouldn’t, same deal. It’s like Ecco prevents my Windows machine from accessing the network while it’s performing some task. And perhaps that’s the problem – a misconfiguration somewhere that’s causing Ecco to try and access a network share or something.. I’ll try to look into it.

For now, it’s a nasty problem that’s driving me away from Ecco.

Today, as a last resort (and maybe some over-optimism), I tried running Ecco on Linux using Wine. It went well, despite missing some of the features I liked about Ecco on Windows (like the ability to pull in highlighted text from _any_ application), and I would have been happy to live with it, if it hadn’t been for the fact that Ecco crashes each time I try to access the address book in Linux. Since my Inbox is my address book, I rarely use this feature. It’s just knowing that simply clicking on that link would be enough to crash the application I’d rely on most.

Like Chinese Water Torture, it’s enough to drive a man insane.

If you want to try out Ecco, it’s available for free download from [compusol](http://www.compusol.org/ecco/)

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