Dispelled.ca

Well sometimes it takes a while to get back into a project. I started ripping our old CD’s back in 2010, and here I am starting it back up again now… After some consideration, I still like the accuraterip feature of EAC, plus it’s just easy to use. I guess I could use K3b or Soundconverter, but they don’t offer the same features, and I started this project using EAC. So let’s do what is being done.

http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/en/index.php/resources/download/

Download and run with Wine, at easiest that means left or right clicking it and run with Wine, or just navigating to the directory you downloaded it to and typing

wine eac*

This will install it, but it will error when you try to start the program. Next open a terminal in the directory you installed to. For me that was

/home/username/.wine/drive_c/Program Files(x86)/Exact Audio Copy/

and type

regsrv32 sql*

as shown here. Ok now the program will open, but there is a few things to sort out. I went through the wizard that guides you on first setup. It didn’t find my CD-Rom. Fine. It needs LAME. Right I remember this. Leave it on that screen and open a browser window.

http://www.rarewares.org/mp3-lame-bundle.php, I downloaded 3.99.5.

Extract the zip, copy the folder that is created to the EAC install directory, and continue the wizard. Show it where you put lame.exe. CDDB wants an email address, so I gave them one. I left the options unchanged for the naming conventions, I’ll change them later.

Like it says on the WineHQ page, I had change EAC Options -> Interface from “Native Win32 interface for XP/Vista/Win7″ to “Installed external ASPI interface” and then restart EAC before Audio CDs would be recognized. I was kind of ready to give up here, and restarted a few times, and had another beer, but it started working.

So reopening EAC it finds the CD, and communicates with the accuraterip database, and opens the CD. Now to add the names of the song.

Database > Get CD Information from > Remote Metadata Provider

I picked my CD and continued. Now to set up the MP3 bitrate and naming convention before ripping.

EAC > Compression Options > Under bit rate change it to 320kbps (if you like, that’s just what I like). Select LAME Mp3 and let it clear the parameters. Last I set the naming convention.

As shown in this post, EAC > Filename > Naming Scheme. It used to be

%D (%C)\%N %T

but now it is

%artist%\%albumtitle%\(%tracknr2%) %title%

thats about it, EAC is now working for me. It is now 3am. Listening to a bit more James Low Western Front, ripping some old Buddy Emmons, finishing my beer and going to bed. Night. The stars don’t care.

Computers, Music, Recording, Ubuntu, Uncategorized, Wine No comments

I finally got around to this project after wanting to build one for years. Sometimes I have to get past that idea stage and just go build something, see how it goes, and learn from it. I had some pieces sawn up already that we were going to use for a bed frame so I cut them into 3′ sections and  glued two together as the body with headstock style, and clamped it in an unusual but effective glue drip way.

The body turned out good and I planed up the sides even. Next was the fretboard. I had a 3/4 piece that I had used to glue flooring down that was lifting up in our house and planed it down to about a 1/4. After that the corners were easy to shape and I got my template printed out. 22.5 scale 3 wide and something like .03 between the strings and the edges of the fretboard. After taping the template to the board, I used an exacto blade to mark the frets, and then used a mitre box and hacksaw to groove out frets.

Cutting the headstock was by far the hardest part, and next time I think I would just do a regular guitar headstock. I didn’t take any pictures cause I was worried about screwing it up. Not my most skilled moment, but it worked.

Next was getting the body edges routed, and then starting to put the hardware on. The nut was made of a 1/2 by 3/4 piece of angle aluminum, and the bridge out of a 3/4 aluminum channel with holes drilled in it to hold the strings.

Stole the pickup, jack and tuning pegs out of a les paul copy I had that wasn’t getting played. Routed out a slot for the pickup and jack, and drilled a hole from one to the other to hook em up.

After everything went on, I had a beer and strung ‘er up. The set of strings I got didn’t even have a ball on the end, but I made it work.

It played great (lucky!) so I played it for the rest of the night and had a few more beers. The next night I took the hardware off and gave it two coats of stain, and some clear coats of varathane.

Maybe another time I will fill in the frets with something else and put fret markers on, but this one is rustic style so I’m keeping it simple.

Finally done! Here’s a pic all strung up and ready to go with my new Paloma stoneware tone bar. At first I started with a open E tuning since it suited the set of strings I had, but quickly changed to a C6/A7 tuning that is a lot more fun. From low to high C# E G A C E. Learning some stuff here. http://gregcutshaw.com/Tab/LapTab.html

Music, Shop, Woodworking No comments

A quick post about my two favorite music apps for Android. I’m using Gingerbread on a Samsung Galaxy S2.

I’m an old guitar player and I can’t stand it when a guitar is out. I found an app called GStrings in the market that works really good.

Next, how about some multitrack recording? Four Tracks Lite does this easily. Heres a shot of it in action.

Recordings are 11025hz, and you can mix down to wav or ogg formats to export it. That way I can take it to the studio and have the tracks right there to refresh my memory.

You need headphones to record and listen at the same time, but for a quick recording of a riff or song idea, you can just use the phones mic. I use this all the time to keep stuff I would otherwise forget about 2 minutes later.

Well that’s it. No big deal eh? A music studio on my phone. Welcome to the future!

Android, Electronics, Music, Phones, Recording No comments

Recently I tried buying some CD’s from Amazon. After three weeks, on the day of their delivery, Amazon sent me a cowardly email saying it would take another 1 to 7 months. Tourettes symptoms. No more buying CD’s from them. I’ve been looking for some albums by Redd Volkaert and a few others for a while now.

I use Linux (Ubuntu) and not Windows or Mac. I looked at Google Music. Not in Canada. I looked at Amazon Mp3. Not in Canada. I looked all around. Not in Canada. I don’t have much experience in this area. I know my Apple friends can download music in Canada, so maybe I can just download ITunes for a night, run it in Wine, get my songs and delete ITunes the next day? Right. It didn’t even start to work with Wine. I’m not surprised and not disappointed. But well what the hell, I still need these albums.

Yes, there must be other ways, but I’m not looking for any kind of mainstream pop music here, so I need to find a way to buy it. It’s 2012 and there should be a legitimate way to do this. Finally, I start searching for alternatives to ITunes, and find that Ubuntu One and Banshee are doing music sales kind of like ITunes does. I’ve never liked Banshee, and would rather use Audacious. But I might as well try it for this.

I entered my CC info and bought the songs in Banshee. Then it tells me the downloads stay “In the Cloud” (gay) until you sync a computer with Ubuntu One. Ok sync me. As long as they are really non-DRM mp3, I will download ‘em and back ‘em up. Then the program stuck at “queuing” for my songs. I’m feel like starting to go down that familiar road. But then I started searching and read some posts that I just needed to do some commands and/or reboot and such. I think a reboot or process kill would have done it. But with not much choice or patience I just typed the two commands and then rebooted.

u1sdtool -c
u1sdtool -s

It worked! There was a bit of me checking here and there, but Ubuntu One started downloading my songs to the ~.ubuntuone directory and I started listening. (Pause for a shot of Tequila and a new Beer).

So it was $9.99 each (or 0.99$ a song), when Amazon was going to charge me $13 bucks and 1 to 7 months each, the artists site was going to charge me $20 plus $15 each CD, and ITunes was going to charge me 9.99 I guess (didn’t even get that far) plus a night of installing Windows on an old computer and feeling used.

I knew there was going to be some rough edges here but hey, I’m just happy it worked. Otherwise I was going to have to go to Nashville and pick ‘em up myself. That’s the nice way of sayin’ things. Cheers y’all.

Update: It turns out they don’t have deals with all the labels yet, so I found emusic.com after more searching and it turns out their service works too. It is a monthly subscription that gives you a certain amount of music to download. I’ll test it out over the next few months and see if suits me.

Computers, Music, Ubuntu No comments

Last night I did some testing and got the Roland-MC303 working as a sound module. As a sequencer, it is less than average, but as a sound module, it is great.

So after getting the piano set up upstairs, there was one big problem. The studio is on the opposite side of the house, in the basement, a good 70 feet away. I realized I could run a midi cable there, and then run a 1/4 inch instrument cable back to bring the piano’s sweet sounds into the studio. The maximum ‘recommended’ distance of a midi cable is 50 feet, but after some searching, I saw that Cat5e cable can be run a bit further. If you are looking to buy premade midi extenders, there is many people out there selling.

>> Keep Reading >>

Computers, Electronics, Music, Recording 2 comments

Well it is going to take a month before I can set up all the gear in our new house, so I have been doing a bit of research on how everything is going to be set up. My first worries are:

How to record the V-drums
At first I was worried that I might be restricted to using the stereo outs (L, R) from the TD-9 brain, and would have no control over the final mix. After reading some forums, I found this is not an issue.

You attach a midi cable from the TD-9 to the computer, and that records only the midi signals of your playing to a sequencer software on the computer. You attach another midi cable from the computer to the TD-9, and then an audio cable from the stereo outs to the computer. Now you can playback the midi signals you recorded onto the computer, back to the TD-9, and record them through the audio outs.

>> Keep Reading >>

Computers, Drums, Music, Recording No comments

Hooking up the mixer and guitars worked great. The programs I have been starting with are Jack Control (QjackCTL) to start/stop the Jack server, and Ardour for multi track recording.

For levels, I have been using QAmix for quick level changes, and alsamixer for bigger changes. For the laptop, the default levels were way too hot and there was a hiss in the background. I looked into QAmix and all the levels were set to 100%, so setting them down to 75% took care of the hiss and brought the levels down just right.

To record, you need QjackCTL open with the server started, Ardour open with a project started, and then the only thing to do is make the connections from one program to the other. JACK is really just virtual patch cords for programs. You have an input and an output and you plug em together.

>> Keep Reading >>

Computers, Music, Recording, Ubuntu No comments

Wish me luck. I’m installing the Ubuntu Studio packages on the laptop, in hopes that it will become my recording device. I was considering using a desktop with a PCI audio interface to record with, but the laptop has usb2 and firewire.

I figure I can start out by using an old 4-track as a mixer, and then into the line-in on the laptop. Although this is far from ideal, it gets me started for 0 dollars total. If it works, I’ll add an audio interface, and then upgrade the mixer.

It makes sense to start a post now and add to it, since I’ll probably be doing a lot of tweaking along the way. First off I installed the meta packages.

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Computers, Music, Recording, Ubuntu No comments

We found a nice looking 1970′s R-125 (Mediterranean) Hammond Organ for the house looking through Kijiji. It was up for 30 bucks but the lady was nice and said we could have it for free! The only problems were getting it home, repairing a key that was broken, and fixing a short in the bass pedals.

>> Keep Reading >>

Electronics, Music 1 comment

Picked up the Roland TD-9 Drums today and got to play a bit after Anna and Mommy. It is a TD-9k kit (mesh snare, rubber toms) which was a great decision (mesh toms were a thousand more dollars = really, buy the TD-9 brain, and upgrade the toms after. People on the V-Drums forums say this, and they are right.)

Other than that, a DW 5000 Accelerator (DW5000ad3) Single Bass drum pedal which is the most amazing pedal I have ever played, and two pairs of nice sticks. Vic firth 7a’s (for Anna) and 5a’s (for me). She loves drumming with the sticks and her meter is great (even on the Nar). Drum Drum Drum! now if Dad can catch up!

Drums, Electronics, Music No comments