Vinyl to digital using Linux part 1

Its just one of those things where you want to listen to a favorite track while in the car or working away but it is on vinyl back at home. Often I really need to hear a track because it is stuck in my mind or I'm in the mood for it but its not on my phone or computer and I know full well that I have it on vinyl so recently I did something that I have been meaning to do for some time. Got my turn table connected to my computer. Or laptop to be precise.

This will be part 1 of 2 parts. The actual setting up and recording.

Part 2 will be separating the results into the separate tracks and saving them as individual songs instead of one big track.

Hardware

Apart from the obvious laptop the only additional hardware is a turn table (I used the one connected to my sony midi hi-fi but any standard turntable should work).

The important bit for this to work, is a USB Audio Phono Preamp. I use one by Pinnacle systems which came with Steinberg Clean plus version 5. I got this years ago (when I still had XP that got deleted one drunken night). I get really good results with this set up.

Audio File Type.

Audacity start as .ogg as the default but you can change this to what feel is more convenient or works best on your music device.

Software

For this I used what appears to be the standard software: Audacity or at least that is what I have found to be the standard in audio recording with Linux.

To actually get started you need to check a number of things are set right in software.

1. Before you launch Audacity turn your turn table so that software picks up on start up, otherwise it won't be work.

2. Click on the Device Toolbar and check that USB Audio CODEC is set as the recording devices and that the default sound card that you use is also selected.

Also makes sure that the recording channels are set on 2 (stereo).

3. You will also want to have software play through clicked on so that you can hear if  its actually get through. (Also means that you can listen to the music). This is where having more memory pays off because it doesn't work at all well on the old laptop or the desktop with 2gb.

4. In the mixer toolbar, turn the left-hand output volume slider up.

The right-hand volume slider can be used to vary the volume/loudness of the recording it self.

5. Also, make sure that the Project Rate botton is set to 44 100 Hz.

Right, that should now make it all work,

Now start playing the record and press the red button to record.

Play and record the whole of the record as this is a lot easier than doing each track.

In part 2 I will deal with what to do with the recording.


Nighthawk

Nightingale 1.11 Released

New releases of blogs in quick succession normally means a back log of stuff. In this case it includes things that I didn't get to post when they happened. In this case, one thing was that I didn't post about was the new release of Nightingale media player at the time it was released.

Nightingale 1.11 was released last month, there are a number of new bits but these aren't really that obvious at first although there is a bug that causes the display pane for music files, etc to be blank when its first started.

The list of improvements that the site gives are-

• Fixed interface issues
• Several fixes on the default feather
• Performance improvements
• Faster search
• Now Playing list
• Now based on XULRunner 1.9.2.3
• Fix Credits page (Typo and Songbird Credits)
• Better icon on Windows (better resolution)
• Build script updated
• Implemented update-checker and update mechanism

One thing that I did find, was that the feather, Blue glow, does not work for some reason. I am going to have to check information that I found in the forum and the wiki for clues that will make it work. Once this is done I am going to release it. But this will have to wait till my uni work is out the way.

It can still be installed the same way as described before but there has recently been a RPM made for fedora made available but it needs a maintainer, would love to do it but I don't have the time at the moment. A;lso available for Arch and Chakra, [possibly for ubuntu as well.

Nighthawk

Please welcome the NovaTech NSPIRE B960,

Its finally happened, the old 8 year old Toshiba has been replaced, it still works and when the dissertation is done, will be tidied up with any unused software and files gone.

The new family member is the Novatech Nspire B960,

Specs-

15.6" INTEL PENTIUM DUAL CORE B960 MOBILE PROCESSOR -
4GB DDR3 MEMORY -
500GB SATA HARD DRIVE -
DVD WRITER - INTEL HM65 CHIPSET

and the big plus is that it comes with NO OS. Well actually, it can do but I don't want that microsoft crap. I wanted a laptop with nothing on it because, as you may have guessed I was going to put Linux on it. I chose Fedora 16 KDE (thought about Chakra but still love Fedora), for the pure reason I like it. The only big trouble is the curser not behaving. Actually at times it is uncontrollable which results in me having to resort  to rebooting the machine to get it back under control again. I had this problem before on the toshiba and would have thought this kind of thing would have been fixed, like other basic things, before the powers that be come out with new stuff.

I have found that setting up a double monitor set up with the laptop was easy and worked well. The second monitor was my PC one with a different resolution but I was happy with it. just got to get my hands on a cable to replace the one that I borrowed to check the idea out.

The web cam and mic was tested for skype and G+, these worked well although I wasn't fully sure if I had both at first because the mic wasn't listed in the specs. Thankfully I did. Also found was the SD card reader (not tested and the USB3 sockets (tested with USB2 device, also working).

In conclusion, would I recommend this?


Yes I would, being able to buy a machine without an OS was fantastic and as the nice call centre person said, 'made for people who like to play with their machines'. May test Chakra Linux on it but for now, Fedora it is.

Nighthawk

Emusic dowloading Part Deux

The recent re installation of Chakra on my tower as well as a new laptop as meant that I have had to reinstall a downloader for Emusic. However, for some reason Emusicj (see earlier) didn't want to run what ever I did. so I tried a search for the official downloader and yes their still is one but it doesn't appear to have been updated to their version 5.

You can download here-

http://www.emusic.com/info/download-manager/

You need to click on 'get older version version near the bottom of the page'.

To install.

1. Unzip the file in its own folder in home.

2. Go to that folder and click on emusicloader -> builds -> emusicdlm

3. It should then run, follow the set up instructions, job done!

It works well in conjunction with firefox (not tried chrome), after the first time go to the setting in firefox where you will fine applications and click on emusic downloader to open with the file type from emusic.

Nighthawk

Charkra Linux 2012.2, a personal review

About a week and half ago I decided that my tower PC was getting a bit in need of updating to something that was a rolling release but not Arch (I've heard its a pain). I am coming to the opinion that an OS should be more of a rolling release with improvements made along the way rather the Linux standard of re install every time a new version is released. I see it as a waste of time an that it is more important to improve what we have rather than replace with something just as buggy or doesn't work quite right.

I started looking and found exactly what I want in the form of Chakra 12.2, Arch with out the rumoured pain and with KDE. Chakra is actually a fork of Arch and if Chakra is anything to go by after my sort experience with it then I may one day have a go with Arch because, quite frankly, its been a joy! Well almost.

The other thing that attracted me to this distro is that it is KDE which I have a great liking for because I find it much more pleasant to use than Gnome3. This distro is only KDE, meaning that there are no Gnome files, if you want these so that you can run some software it is easy  to download from the distros' repos.

Everything just worked apart from the problem that my HP printer/scanner does not work right as a scanner. There seems to be something missing, not sure what, but there is. It works fine a printer though.

One of the first things added was Nightingale (naturally), didn't work properly at first. I found by chance that after rebooting it did work.

When I installed the system I checked the wiki in case of anything extra, seeing as though its a new distro for me. I found the instructions slightly different when it comes to partitioning for the new system and was able to follow the instructions so that I could have a seperate /home folder so that I wouldn't lose anything personal files like music and photos.

Apart from that not much to it. So I can highly recommend it.

Nighthawk

Link for downloading the ISO- http://chakra-linux.org/get/

Wiki Link- http://chakra-linux.org/wiki/index.php/Installing_Chakra#Partitioning_Schemes

New feather for nightingale

My interest in Nightingale music player as reached a point where I wanted to do something for it. So with determination I went forth and found a Songbird feather which I thought could be worked on, I found one and changed the name to blue glow. I changed all that was needed to get it to work and the end result will be uploaded by the end of the week. Providing I can get an icon for it finished.

There is still some improvements to be done but I want to get it out and tested by others. I hope to keep this going.

Feed back welcome!

Cheers

Saving web pages to disk as ODF files

The past few months as seen me carry out a number of projects which involved the use of pages that I had bookmarked for later use. Increasingly I have found that the pages I want are no longer there so I no longer have the info.

I am now taking the step of saving the pages with the information that I need to my harddrive.

After saving the page I have found that if I open the page in libre office writer I can delete any thing like headers, adverts and other irrelevant stuff and save the bit I want as an ODF file.

I now have the stuff saved for my personnal use later when I come to finish the project.