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Techno Page - By Harendra Alwis Email: technopage_lk@yahoo.com Ripping your way through MP3 players have begun to storm into our lives and the giant stack of audio CDs you've collected over the years start to look a sorry sight. How do you get the music off the CD and into the MP3 format? It's a 2-step
process: 1. Copy the
music from the CD, then The process
of copying the songs from an audio CD is called "Digital Audio
Extraction" or DAE. Because the music is copied from the CD
in its digital form as data rather than music, DAE has also become
known as "ripping", because you are just ripping the bits
from the disc, not converting them to an analog signal. This process
can make bit-for-bit copies of the original source. The music data
on an audio CD is written less carefully than regular computer data.
There is almost no error correction capability built into the audio
CD data structure. The upside is that approximately 750MB of audio
can be written to a CD-R that will only hold about 650MB of computer
data. The downside is that the music is more vulnerable to read
errors during playback. Which is usually no problem because the
algorithm used by a CD player to convert the music from a digital
to analog stream is capable of "filling in" some pretty
large gaps in the data. It is a problem when it comes to DAE, however.
Since the bits are being read directly to a file, they are not processed
by a player's error-correction circuitry, so any read errors will
show up as audible defects in the extracted file - things like clicks
or pops or just silence. This can be annoying when you play them
back as sound files. In the "olden
days" computer CD-ROM drives weren't capable of reading audio
data directly from a CD. Today, just about every drive that can
read a data CD can also extract digital audio. There are many
programs out there that "do" DAE. Some cost money, some
are free. The best DAE program for Windows also happens to be a
free DAE program - Exact Audio Copy, or EAC. Why is EAC the best
"ripper" for Windows? It is apparently the only one that
attempts any error correction during DAE. It's also an excellent
"front-end" for MP3 encoding and it can create ID3 tags
for your ripped songs. Why not use
Musicmatch, Jukebox or AudioGrabber or some other ripping program?
EAC reads the audio data one sector at a time, and then reads it
again, compares the 2 reads, and if they match, moves to the next
one. If the 2 reads of a sector don't match, EAC reads it again
and again until 2 reads match - and if that doesn't happen, it flags
an error for you so you know the rip wasn't perfect. No other program
does this. One drawback
is that EAC is slow at reading a disc compared to others. Most of
the time you won't see rip speeds higher than about 4x using EAC,
while the others might report 12x or more. The difference is the
other programs just rip the data, don't check it, and don't let
you know if there was a problem. Speed or quality? At the moment
you can't have both! Setting up
EAC is not the simplest of tasks. There are 2 or 3 things you'll
need to download including EAC, LAME, and maybe an "ASPI layer".
If you need the ASPI layer EAC will tell you so. Follow the instructions
that come with EAC (www.exactaudiocopy.de)
and LAME (http://home.pi.be/~mk442837)
to install them. Then run EAC and see if it complains about you
having no ASPI layer or if your CD reader(s) don't show up in the
drop-down list - in which case you'll have to track down a program
called "force-aspi" (try sear-ching with Google) or any
other ASPI layer. You now should have the basic setup for ripping audio CDs and converting them to high-quality MP3s. Of course there is a multitude of options for file naming, CDDB access, ID3 tags, etc. - and you are on your own to figure those out. Be sure to read the FAQ file that comes with EAC, and also check out the mini-tutorial at r3mix.net on their "ripping" page as there is lots of info there about settings for the MP3 encoder. Happy ripping! It's E-love I know quite
a few people who have fallen in love through the Net. Cupid is also
said to be addicted to the Internet and spends quite a lot of time
surfing and chatting online. People meet through chat rooms and
Cupid does the rest in his new high tech way. Relationships
that take shape online have their ups and downs. They require a
lot of commitment and dedication as the people involved don't come
into physical contact till after quite some time. But the good part
is (or is it the bad part?) that in most cases they don't get to
actually see each other. So the relationships that take form in
cyberspace are not merely based on 'good looks'. In cyberspace,
you generally prefer to 'hang out' with those whom you can relate
to and people you have begun to trust, even though you have never
met. Some people
might ask how you show emotions through mere text. Well msn and
yahoo came with this neat idea of expressing emotions through things
called emoticons. These are simply cute little faces showing all
sorts of expressions (such as smiling, crying, laughing, etc.) that
are sent during the dialogue. Chat room
dictionary: You are quite
right Ameen. We at Techno Page have also received a number of unconfirmed
reports that Cupid himself has been seen chatting at "Sri Lankan
Teen Central" <http://www.lankanteens.cjb.net>
during the past few months. Anybody out there got anything to add
to what Ameen had to say about E-love? Write in with your views
and comments to <technopage_lk@yahoo.com>. |
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