Useful software

What software should I use if I want extract an audio CD to MP3 and have all album, artist and track info automatically inserted for each track?

I believe it is all the rage!

itunes I think

Will iTunes let me extract to mp3? I want to put the songs on a Creative Zen as well as an iPod.

You should have Windows Media player on Vista - I used it last week to 'rip' a rake of CDs to mp3s. I think I have all my music collection on a 4GB usb chip now,

You can rip different formats too with Windows Media Player and you can rip different qualities of mp3 though I took the most compressed and smallest filesize.

And when connected to the internet you usually get all artist, album and track info automatically going in too.

Zhou_Enlai wrote:

Will iTunes let me extract to mp3? I want to put the songs on a Creative Zen as well as an iPod.

It can, but it is generally default set to rip toa different format.

To change it go into iTunes and click:

Edit >> Preferences >> Advanced >> Importing >> Import Using >> MP3 Encoder

That should do the job for you.

lovely jubbley - merci beaucoup

Sorry bout this, but how do I open a .DAT file? Our crappy system is giving me a limited range of options, none of which seem to work

Atticus wrote:

Sorry bout this, but how do I open a .DAT file? Our crappy system is giving me a limited range of options, none of which seem to work

Is it true that you'll never be able to open it unless you know what program created it?

Which programs have you tried to open it?

Only have Adobe 7, Powerpoint, Word, etc etc, the usual Office software. Don't worry, I'll just ask for the file to be sent in a different format. It's just that it's happened a few times and I'm fed up asking to resend.

Sorry for exploiting this thread!

Atticus wrote:

Only have Adobe 7, Powerpoint, Word, etc etc, the usual Office software. Don't worry, I'll just ask for the file to be sent in a different format. It's just that it's happened a few times and I'm fed up asking to resend.

Sorry for exploiting this thread!

Leo says to try to open it with a text editor to see if you can spot any clues as to what it is then maybe you'll be able to find the right program from clues within the file.

http://ask-leo.com/whats_a_dat_file.html

Some .dat files are in fact mail messages. Try to open with Outlook.

Some others are databases which you can open with OpenOffice.

Some others are system files.

This site might be good for software news and general computer gossip.

http://www.downloadsquad.com/

Atticus wrote:

Sorry bout this, but how do I open a .DAT file? Our crappy system is giving me a limited range of options, none of which seem to work

The science bit: .DAT are not designed to be read directly by a computer user. They are flat text files that are read by an executable to give it configuration information such as version number, guuid and so forth.

The L'Oreal bit: If you need to open a .DAT file then use Notepad. this can be done by dragging and dropping it into Notepad. Alternatively, right click on the .DAT file in explorer -> select "Send to" -> select "Notepad". If Notepad is not in Send to then copy a shortcut to the Notepad exe into C:\Documents and Settings\joe.bloggs\SendTo.

I suppose virus checkers might be useful software but does anyone really trust virus checkers at all or could the whole area be a fertile world for businesses to create their own viruses just to sell their products? How would anyone know where the virus came from - while you're updating Windows a virus could be concealed in a download for all you know. Who would know? the offending software first needs to be identified by anti-virus writers and perhaps the dirty little program can get into your computer from a reliable source without leaving any fingerprints ... The virus might leave no trace of itself in Windows other than to cause your system to break your nads with the slowness of it or other annoying behaviour. Suspiciously you might start receiving ads for virus checkers and spyware blockers and all that crap.

Are virus checkers just a gimmick too from this?

calraith wrote:

My $0.02: something-gen in the antivirus world indicates that the detection was based on heuristics, not by static definition. There's apparently something in c:\users\current_user\appdata\local\temp\nsl3355. tmp\nsB265.tmp that has similar functionality to an actual Trojan that *is* in Avast's defs (perhaps a module that posts back tracking data during installation), or at least Avast's heuristics are overzealously suspicious of this potentially unknown virus.

False-positives happen. For what it's worth, I wrote and maintain a custom NSIS installer for Symantec AntiVirus for my school, which tracks some unique information per user and posts back to a SQL database to enforce strict license compliance. At one point, my installers kept disappearing from the web server. Investigation revealed that Symantec AntiVirus running on the web server was deleting the Symantec AntiVirus installers because of Trojan-like behavior -- I assume because the installer was configured to phone home during installation. It's ironic when antivirus software quarantines its own installer, though.

Just thought I'd share.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=5359702&postcount=3

Wouldn't it be better to keep your system as clean as you can, back it up regularly then, if you can, make an image of your system from time to time and wipe/reinstall the image. I'm sure certain components of your system can be selected for saving as part of that image along with the bare OS. That's a bit over-technical though - I might be getting in over my own head there ..

Probably. For all the conspiracy with virus checkers I never had a problem. Avg is sound if you want a free one.

To back up everything could take time and would require much harddrive space. While external drives can be cheap (we are getting close to the 1TB/€100), it takes me about twp hours to backup my complete drive.

Further if you want to clean your system requraly the best way is formatting the drive. That means alot of work in reinstall or nifty programming.

Zhou_Enlai wrote:

Will iTunes let me extract to mp3? I want to put the songs on a Creative Zen as well as an iPod.

itunes is a bit of a nightmare, particularly with respect to DRM...

Audiograbber is a nice little app for what you're looking for.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audiograbber


http://www.audiograbber.com-us.net/


for general conversion, mixing, recording and everything else Audacity is also excellent.

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audacity

Cheers Pax

Pax wrote:

Zhou_Enlai wrote:

Will iTunes let me extract to mp3? I want to put the songs on a Creative Zen as well as an iPod.

itunes is a bit of a nightmare, particularly with respect to DRM...
Audiograbber is a nice little app for what you're looking for.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audiograbber
http://www.audiograbber.com-us.net/
for general conversion, mixing, recording and everything else Audacity is also excellent.
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audacity

Anyone know of any software that will let me convert Ogg files to mp3s or is it possible? I think you use ubuntu as well Pax you might know.

Also, video-editing software - anyone know of any ways of doing stuff to your videos for freee? Does the Gimp work with videos?

Auditor #9 wrote:

Anyone know of any software that will let me convert Ogg files to mp3s or is it possible? I think you use ubuntu as well Pax you might know.

I think I've done that on Ubuntu. Possibly using VLC.
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

eoinmn wrote:

Auditor #9 wrote:

Anyone know of any software that will let me convert Ogg files to mp3s or is it possible? I think you use ubuntu as well Pax you might know.

I think I've done that on Ubuntu. Possibly using VLC.
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

Yes I've been messing with that. I have 8.04 and somehow the VLC program doesn't let me get to the last conversion screen when I'm using the Wizard ...

- it did on 7.10

If you need to make an article website, with blog and other modular content, I find Joomla to be the best. And I've tried quite a few.

Auditor #9 wrote:

Yes I've been messing with that. I have 8.04 and somehow the VLC program doesn't let me get to the last conversion screen when I'm using the Wizard ...

- it did on 7.10

Actually, I had to convert some ogg files last night to mp3.
VLC didn't work.
Soundconverter did though.

However the quality is really crappy, so I'll have to just rip them again to mp3.