How to get HELP!
All of us have wanted to get help from someone (anyone) on routine problems with computers. Hopefully this article will give you some places and techniques:
There! Now you have all of my secrets!
After a short break for coffee and cookies, the meeting continued with our featured speaker, Les Laky of Domainkeep.com. Les offers several valuable services. First, he will obtain and maintain a domain (an Internet address) for you. So if you want your website and email address to be "personalized" and belong to you (rather than being loaned to you by your current ISP), you work with him to get one. Second, once you have a domain, he can manage email and URL redirection, so the email and browser requests for a URL to your personalized domain are received by your current ISP who hosts your website and email
Les explained the domain system, and gave some history, and some predictions. Basically, if you want a personalized domain, get it soon - the good ones are going fast. If you want johnsmith@johnsmith.com, you're probably out of luck, but there are variations available that Les can suggest.
SPAUG has greatly benefited by using Les's service. When MNC decided to drop free hosting, and SPAUG had to move, Les redirected all calls for www.pa-spaug.org from our MNC address to our new SVPAL address. That means you don't have to change you bookmark or favorite link to SPAUG - even though it goes to a different ISP location, it still uses the same domain address. SPAUG also registered www.paspaug.org, so people who mis-type the URL will be forwarded to www.pa-spaug.org, rather than going who knows where.
I've recently started using Audacity to record my vinyl records to WAV files, and then ripping to MP4 (AAC) format in iTunes for my iPod. I've been monitoring the mail list, and have collected some good advice. If you're looking for this kind of application, Audacity is open-source, and free. It is on the club disk, or you can download it from the Internet. You should go through the Preferences before you start anything; some defaults are not correct for some tasks. There is a lot of online documentation and FAQs.
First, set Audacity to record in stereo. Next, plug one end of a stereo cable into the “Line Out” or “Headphone” connector on your output system. Plug the other end into your computer's “Line In” connector. If you do not have a cable that fits both of these connectors, you can find one at an electronics store. Choose “Line In” as the input source on the Audacity toolbar, and press the Record button. While Audacity is recording, start playing your tape or disc. When you have captured the entire recording, press the Stop button.
Notes:
• Do not plug stereo equipment into your computer's “Microphone” port, which is designed for low-powered (“mic-level”) signals only. Use the “Line In” port instead.
• Do not connect a turntable directly to your computer. The signal from a turntable is distorted; it must be corrected by passing it through a phono pre-amp or a receiver with a “phono” input.
• What you record is also determined in the mixer software of your soundcard. There you can switch certain sources on and off, such as the Line Input, the Microphone Input or the CD Audio. After selecting the corresponding input source in the Input Slider Selector, you can control the level of that source going in to the recording with this slider. Should your input sound distorted, you should lower this slider until no distortion can heard.
• For recording, it is advised to turn down all sources you do not wish to record. If turned up they only add noise
To create a separate file for each song or segment of a long recording, which is particularly useful if you are creating a CD if you want each file to appear as a separate track on the CD:
• Click to place the cursor at the start of the first song.
• Choose “Add Label at Selection” from the Project menu. If you wish, you can type the name of the song.
• Repeat steps 1 and 2 for each song.
• When you are finished, choose “Export Multiple” from the File menu. When you click the “Export” button, Audacity will save each song as a separate file, using the format and location you choose.
After making a recording or editing a file in Audacity, follow these steps to save your work on an audio CD:
1. Use the “Export as WAV” (for PC) or “Export as AIFF” (for Mac) command to save your Audacity recording in a sound file.
2. Use any CD-recording software (iTunes or Nero, for example) to burn this file to a CD.
• To make a disc you can play in normal CD players, make sure to create a “music” or “audio” CD (not a “data” CD). Use CD-R discs, because some players cannot read CD-RW.
• Some CD software will burn only 16-bit, 44.1-KHz stereo sound files. If your CD recording software won't open your sound file, export the file again after choosing the following settings in Audacity:
1. At the bottom of the Audacity window, set the Project Rate to 44100 Hz.
2. In the File Formats preferences, choose WAV (16-bit...) or AIFF (16-bit...).
3. If your project does not already contain a stereo track, choose “New Stereo Track” from the Project menu. (This will make Audacity export your recording as a stereo file.)
(editing them within Audacity requires importing the whole file back to audio samples and then exporting them back out to a new MP3, which seems like overkill)
You could try using TagScanner, also free.
AudioShell is a freeware MS Windows Explorer shell extension plugin. There are some non-standard GUI aspects, but it works well. AudioShell adds tag editor and viewer tabs to the music files properties menu ...
• You can directly edit mp3 tags, even add graphics and commentary, and it's totally free, works well with wav files, as well...though they are more limited in terms of editing. Only "free" for 30 days, though. After that, $29.95. Use ID3-TagIT under Windows, the version without .net.
ID3 Tag editing in winamp:
1. In winamp load the mp3 whose ID3 tag you want to edit into the winamp playlist.
2. Right-click on the name of the track or file (whatever shows up) in the playlist.
3. Click View file info - It will pop up a window that has encoding rate and other info of the file. It will also show whatever the file has for ID3 tag info. You can either add to it or change it.
4. Choose Update
Noise Reduction menu
This effect is ideal for removing constant background noise such as fans, tape noise, or hums. It will not work very well for removing talking or music in the background.
Removing noise is a two-step process. In the first step, you select a portion of your sound that contains all noise and no signal, in other words, select the part that's silent except for the noise [like band separation between tracks]. Then choose Noise Removal... from the Effect menu and click Get Profile. Audacity learns from this selection what the noise sounds like, so it knows what to filter out later.
Then, select all of the audio where you want the noise removed from and choose Noise Removal... again (don't set it to high because of risks of sound artifacts). This time, click the "Remove Noise" button. It may take a few seconds or longer depending on how much you selected.
If too much or not enough noise was removed, you can Undo (from the Edit menu or Ctrl-z) and try Noise Removal... again with a different noise removal level. You don't have to get a new noise profile again if you think the first one was fine. You could then do some other treatments, but always with moderation. Finally, save your recording [you might want to save intermediate steps, just in case].
Removing noise usually results in some distortion. This is normal and there's virtually nothing you can do about it. When there's only a little bit of noise, and the signal (i.e. the voice or the music or whatever) is much louder than the noise, this effect works well and there's very little audible distortion. But when the noise is very loud, when the noise is variable, or when the signal is not much louder than the noise, then the result is often too distorted.
"Effect" menu
The items in Audacity's "Effect" menu are only available when you Select audio first. To apply an effect to your entire recording, you can choose "Select All" from the Edit menu. Otherwise, click and drag in the waveform (using the selection tool) to highlight the part of the audio you want to modify.
A quick fix if imported WAV files don't turn out as expected might to add the WAV files to an iTunes playlist. Go to iTunes preferences, choose Import, and select WAV. By default, iTunes will use the same WAV settings that Windows machines prefer -- as close to a "standard" for WAV as you can get, in practice. Select your files in the iTunes playlist, right-click them, and choose "Export to WAV". Maybe just test one of them, to see if it works.