I just read an interesting article at Arstechnica by Ken Fisher who was commenting on the termination of Google’s commercial Video service. The termination takes effect in just two days which would not be a big problem if the users who bought or rented videos from the service would still be able to play their purchased videos after that date.

Categories: Music and Video, Music Industry, Online Services

About eight years ago I was backing up some pretty valuable files on CD. I should add valuable to me. One Cd contained demos of me and my clan playing Unreal Tournament capture the flag and I’ve always seen this as a part of my history. Well, I tried to copy the CD to my hard drive a few days ago and guess what; Some files could not be read and I lost some of them during the process. At least that’s what I thought until I found the freeware Copy Cat. Copy Cat uses a superior method to copy files by using a byte per byte method.

Categories: Operating Systems, Tools, Windows

Nothing is more frustrating than to realize that some files of a backup are corrupted. This happens of course right at the time when you need the backup. One way to prevent this scenario from happening would be to use different locations for your backups, for example CDs, external hard drives and USB drives. Even though you store the backup in different places it is not guaranteed that the files on those devices are not corrupted. The probability that it will happen is simply reduced.

Categories: Operating Systems, Tools, Windows

Burning CDs or DVDs has a distinctive disadvantage over purchased media. The self created audio, video or data CDs and DVDs have no initial cover artwork. This makes them rather unattractive if you want to give them to someone else or put them into a rack. It probably does not matter if you just use them to backup files or burn one use audio or video CDs and DVDs but I think it does make a difference for media that you want to keep for a longer time. The key to create great front and back covers is a program that makes it as easy as possible to do so.

Categories: Operating Systems, Software, Tools, Windows

While Audacity is a great audio editing utility with the ability to record sounds and edit them afterwards it still felt a little bit overweight for the mere taks of recording sounds fast on a computer. I found a freeware utility that can record sounds from any incoming source in various formats including ogg vorbis, monkey audio, mp3 and acm.

Categories: Operating Systems, Tools, Windows

Ding Ding Ding, welcome the the next round in this amazing fight. In the right corner we have the underdog, a Russian mp3 website that offers what customers apparently want: MP3 files without DRM, variable bitrate at low costs. Did I mention that this is a perfectly legal company under Russian law ? In the opposite corner the RIAA, a institution living in the past, trying to hold of progress by sueing its customers and denying them what they really want.

Categories: Music Industry

The name of this software distribution is probably a little bit out of line but the purpose is not. The goal is to reduce software costs for students but the compilation is also attractive to everyone else. The website offers a version of this distribution for Windows computers and for Macs. You may download it using the preferred method bittorrent to ease the load on the servers and reduce bandwidth costs.

Categories: Operating Systems, Tools, Windows

Many users just buy blank CDs and DVDs without thinking much about the manufacturer who created them – most want it cheap which has the result that their system has to cope with different media. They notice that their system burns some CDs and DVDs faster without knowing why. Your burner might have the specification to burn DVDs with 8x speed but your burning software offers you only 4x. This article explains why that is the case and what you can do to never make this happen again.

Categories: Hardware

Well this is no big news to the internet community. We, more than everyone else, are keen on using new media devices and like to be among the first when it comes to technology in general. A survey among canadian music retailers now found out what we actually now for a very long time: Copy protection is bad for business. Customers are more frequently than before returning cds which they could not play in their personal computer or copy to their mobile player. Retailers also observe that customers tend to put cds down when they spot the copy protected logo.

Categories: Advice, Music and Video, Music Industry