Rip Cassette into MP3 with Ubuntu

http://askubuntu.com/questions/50447/app-that-will-rip-mp3s-from-an-analog-cassette-tape

So I've got a bunch of old cassette tapes that I've been wanting to listen to for a long time. I finally broke down and figured out how to rip the audio into an MP3 on my computer.

1. First, install Audacity and Sound Converter
2. Plug in you jack into the appropriate sound-in / headphone socket in your laptop or PC sound card.
3. On your tape, approximately forward to where you have the "loudest sound"
4. Play your tape
5. Using Audacity, press the record button
6. Adjust the input levels so that the sound doesnt "clip"
7. Stop recording and rewind the tape
8. Choose from the Audacity Menu - Transport - Sound Activated Recording
9. Play your tape and record until the end of the tape

Now a bit of clean-up of the sound recorded.
To remove the tape-hiss choose from the Audacity Menu:

1. Effect - Normalize. This will adjust the approximate sound level through the entire track
2. Effect - Noise Removal. This will remove some of the lower frequency sounds that is the tape hiss - just follow the two suggested steps on the window. Play with the results to get the best sound on your track.
3. Finally, save the file as a .wav file.

At this point, the source link tells you to use Gramofile to automatically split the big .wav file into individual tracks. I found this to be a huge waste of time, because it didn't do it all that well for my audio. Instead, I used Audacity.

1. Select the section of the audio for each track.
2. Export the selection as a .wav file.
3. Convert to MP3 using Sound Converter.

And there you have it! Did it work for you as well as it did for me? Do you have any other tricks I'm missing? Let me know!

Midnight Reverie - It's so good it's... shockolate? chocking?

So, my wife got a surprise for me at the store: Ghirardelli's Intense Dark 86% Cacao Midnight Reverie Bar. I decided to try it, and - wow. Blown away. Now, I'm much more a dark chocolate kinda person than milk chocolate, and this one was pretty dark. From the Tasting Notes: "The deep, full bodied flavor is noticeable upfront and evenly throughout with hints of dark cherries, dried plums, and a roasted flavor from the high cacao content."  I think that description does it justice. If you're into dark, I definitely recommend it.



I found a great review of this chocolate, and in it some others that I would like to try in the future, among them the Lindt 90% and the Green & Black 85% bars. Any good ones I missed?

How to Do Simple Stuff From Command Line

Ubuntu Linux

to view images from the command line, try eog <filename>

to view pdf's from the command line, try evince <filename>

to scroll in a terminal window from the keyboard: [Shift] + PgUp/PgDn

Windows 

to open an new terminal from the command line, try 'start' (with no quotes)

to open a file explorer window (at the current location) from the command line, try 'start .' (that's start-space-period, no quotes)



Know any other simple command line tricks? Let me know!

Fixing Flashing No-Boot for Ubuntu 12.04

So, I installed a clean Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit OS onto a new Dell XPS i7 that previously had Windows 8 UEFI, and had disastrous results. After hours of work, I was finally able to get it working (yay!) Here's what I had to do...


First, make sure you get into the BIOS and turn of the Secure Boot.


Once this was done, I was able to boot the Ubuntu LiveCD (USB?) from by handy USB flash drive, and easily install the OS. This was where the fun really started. Upon reboot, the system would occasionally boot to the login screen, flickering violently, with the screen split in half. Logging in only left me with the blank background (no icons, nothing except a mouse) that kept flashing. This seizure-fest was only for special occasions, however, as most of the time it would boot and sit at a blank screen.

Once I was able to get the GRUB boot menu to come up (thanks to boot-repair), I was able to log into the rescue mode. Starting in low-graphics mode led to more issues, and it hung with

ath: phy0: TX while HW is in FULL_SLEEP mode

Well, it looked like this could be caused by the wireless, which had been giving me a headache during install. (Seriously, the 2nd desktop with WIFI I've had trouble with lately - what's the deal?) So, I got into command line mode and:

ifconfig
nmcli nm wifi off
ifconfig

did the trick (the ifconfig's are just to check that it worked.) Reboot, try again, back to (most likely) the real problem - the graphics driver. This time the errors included:

swapon failed: Device or resource busy

and

initctl: Event failed

I checked my graphics card

lspci -v  | less

and jockey-text did the rest. (Source)


Use

jockey-text --list

to get a list of available drivers and their status, then use

# the init lines are required only for graphics drivers
sudo init 1
jockey-text --enable=DRIVER
sudo init 2

where DRIVER is the one you got from the list. For example, to install the Broadcom B43 wireless driver:

jockey-text --enable=firmware:b43



Once I switched over to the best video driver for my graphics card, I was a reboot away from a happy system (finally!)