Pretty background. Artful accident. Click to view/download.

I was playing around with Photoshop, and this happened. I thought it looked cool, and therefore thought I would share it. As has happened before, I was working on something else, but this one element stuck out loud enough to become something on it’s own, apart from the original piece… which perhaps I’ll show you some other time.

Yesterday I had three things I meant to write about – but at the moment, only one comes to mind… I figured I would update you on the status of my Thunderbird adventure.

I have a computer in my bedroom on which I get all of my email in Thunderbird now. I send email, and do all of my other work on a different computer, however, that uses Opera as my email client. So there. I use both and I’m happy. Ha!

The End.

I don’t make a practice of this kind of thing, but I like to play my CDs through the media player of my choice, my way, and this was the first really annoyingly protected CD I’ve bought in quite some time. That said…

Yesterday I bought the Switchfoot CD “Nothing is Sound“. Today I put it in my computer to play it. As may be more common than I’d like to think, a ‘custom’ media player came up. To be shorten this story, I deduced that this was a Macrovision TotalPlay CD. I hate custom players. ARG! Which set me on my path…

Normally I would just use the freeware program AudioGrabber, which has ripped other copy protected CDs I own without a hic-up. In this case, the last track (Daisy) gave an ASPI error when ripping. Had I completely disliked the track, I might have gone on my sweet little way, but that wasn’t the case.

As is my secondary try, I open up (the now defunct) Cool Edit Pro – great audio editing software, on the cheap, that has the ability to pull audio from CDs. [CoolEdit is now an Adobe product called Audition]. For some reason (I’m not that nerdy) this has been able to get certain tracks that AudioGrabber couldn’t get. In this case, however, the track list wouldn’t load. Oh, well.

So, the ‘custom’ media player allows one to copy the media files to “your library”, and to burn the CD up to 3 times. I assumed that the burned CD would include copy protection, but I decided to experiment.

I opted to rip the tracks to my library, and being the audiophile that I am I chose the Windows Media Lossless format. Hopefully you already assumed that the only available formats were WMA.

Once the rip was complete, I simply went into Windows Media Player 10 and used it’s built in burning capabilities to select the tracks I had just ripped to be burned to a new CD-R. Sure enough AudioGrabber had no problem reading and ripping all of the tracks from the new CD to good ol’ (unprotected) MP3 files.

The extra step is only an annoyance, but the upside is that I now have two CDs I can play in my car/house/computer/wherever.

Now, to quickly answer some questions: No, I will not distribute these files in any way. This was simply an exercise for personal pleasure. No, I will not get you a copy of the CD. No, I will not answer your questions about how to rip your own CDs. This wasn’t intended to be a lesson in getting around a copy protection scheme so that you could put all your songs on some peer-to-peer network somewhere. (In that case, I would have given you step-by-step instructions with screen shots to follow along with).

I was excited that I got around a top-of-the-line CD copy protection by using elementary tools, and thought I would brag a bit about how simple it seemed.

The End.

Whichever the case may be, I have decided to give up the “default template”, as I feel I have left it long enough to give thanks to the people that created it, and because I’m ready to work on something of my own. So here it is. The official announcement that at some time in the future you will come back to this site and it will look different. Probably not as different (or good looking) as this site or this one, sad as that may be, but finally something of my own, that will better suit me.