Back to work.

It’s a “Fair Trade” music site, co-founded by Derek Webb, of whom you may have heard or seen. Get legally free music from tons of artists, or “pay what you want”.

Check out the About page for more deets.

The Anthony Clark Project – Errands

More info on The ACP  later.

The End.

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/04/diy_analog_tape_delay_mac.html?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InZNBcJTmWs

In early-December, Drew Ailes boarded the mewithoutYou tour bus to discuss some weighty topics with vocalist Aaron Weiss.

He did a great job, had awesome questions, and got awesome answers. It was posted on January 14th of this year (2007) but I’m just now seeing it, and thought it was worth the read.

Go read it!

The End.

I’ll probably be creating the xMEMPHISx blog soon, so everyone can keep up with what’s going on behind the scenes.

People love behind-the-scenes, don’t they?

I think that’s why gossip is so popular.

The End.

So, for those of you that are trying to keep track of the “Episodes” that are flying around bulletins on MySpace, I’ve decided to post them (or about them) here. Not that I post anything else of value, so I may as well… and perhaps you’ll laugh in the process.

In other news, I’m excited about going to the Emery show this Sunday night. I’ll have to leave, like, right away after Church… but the shows @ The Complex don’t normally start on time, so I should be good to go.

I’m mostly excited on account of starting up xMEMPHISx, and actually representing something other than myself while at a show.

Also, Fine Arts is coming up (road trip!).

I’m having a big-file-pile-o-poop of a time trying to fix DNS problems, domain expiration issues, and saving Laura’s mission-critical email, which has been out for about 24 hours now… geez… More on that later. Like, maybe after I get all of this garbage resolved, so I can actually think straight and tell the story.

I changed the front page of fourfivetwofour, although the guts are still hidden from the public.

There was something else, but I can’t remember now. Sorry there’s so many (2?) yucky MySpace links. It had to be.
I’ll post links to the movies and such in a while. Or tomorrow. Whichever comes first.

The End.

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.