Wednesday –
I’m using Linux pretty much exclusively these days, but sometimes there is a glaring lack in the Open-source world.
I enjoy burning CDs to listen to in my car, rather than making cassettes as I did 15 years ago. No biggee, right?
I can burn audio CDs very easily in Windows, and kind of easily in Linux. Here’s where it gets weird. I took a series of tracks that came from old cassettes or CDs or even (heaven forbid) MP3 files, and wanted to make a themed audio disc for the drive to work. I wanted all the songs to be nearly equivalent in volume, and some of them had been recorded at much reduced volume levels than others. So, I ran them through the "equalize volume" feature of Spin Doctor (a feature of Easy CD Creator in Windows). Then, since I was in Windows, I had Easy CD Creator make the disc. I surfed the Net while waiting for my burner to finish, and then played the CD on the way to work (great lunch break, eh?). It sounded like crap in places.
I had forgotten one of the primary rules of Windows: it sucks at multitasking. After making several data CDs in Linux, I’d forgotten that Windows doesn’t want you to do ANYTHING else while you’re burning a CD. So, although there were no errors reported by the CD-R program, and no apparent buffer under-runs, the CD was a coaster.
Fast forward to the next evening. I rebuild the tracks, all in Linux. I used MPG123 to convert the MP3s to WAV files; I used CDParanoia to rip the CD tracks to WAVs, and I eventually used cdrecord (at the command line even!) to burn the tracks to CD. The glaring omission in all this is the audio editing. I can’t find a decent audio editor for Linux. I’ve looked, and found a lot of half-finished projects that may turn out to be worthwhile someday. But, nothing to compare to CoolEdit or SoundForge is available for my favorite OS yet. So, I put together my pack of WAV files, booted into Windows, equalized the volume with CoolEdit (sweet program) as well as chopping out some dead air. Then, I rebooted into Linux to make the CD.
Seems like a waste of two boots, eh? I wish I had a Gigahertz machine so VMWare didn’t seem so damned slow…
I’m outta here. Surf well.
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