Frontier Records, the recording company, added voice overs to all songs on the record but two. Each song seems to have three low quality voice overs to stop piracy and Internet uploading. His problem now was that he could not review the music properly because of the annoying voice overs.

The album itself, at least the two tracks that he was able to listen to without interference, was superb according to his article. Trying to stop leaks in the distribution chain is one thing but doing it in a way that makes it impossible for some people to do their job is an entirely different one.

So what went wrong? Well that would be the dodgy Italian voice over that the label, Frontiers Records, have added over all bar two tracks on this album, supposedly to stop piracy and internet uploading. Will it stop that? Does anyone honestly believe it will? Regardless, this is not the way to do things, because as a reviewer I have to review what is put in front of me, what my ears hear, no what I want them to hear. What I am listening to here is an album that can best be described as perhaps the Mona Lisa after a 2 year old covered in chocolate has crawled all over it. Yes it might once have been a great painting, and yes you can still see that greatness, but really all you can see now is little chocolate hand prints.

via Torrentfreak

With more than 2000 books and hundreds of CDs and DVDs it would just be a pretty boring process and I don’t want to waste that much time. Libra could be a solution for me. It is a free software that organizes collections offering several features that make it stick out of the masses.

The first is a unique one that I never heard about before. It can use a webcam to scan a barcode and identify the item by itself. No more typing and searching through the results to find the item that you bought. This is really useful.

Libra supports other search options besides keyword searches, those are: UPC, ISBN, EAN and Jan in case the barcode reader can’t be used or the item does not have a barcode which is the case for many of my books that I own.

Libra currently searches six Amazon databases which should be fine for most Books, Games, CDs and DVDs but could pose problems for older items. The search itself is very fast and displays covers as well as information about the item. All items are shown as if they were lying on a bookshelf which is also how they are shown in your collection.

Several other features include a way to keep track of borrowed items, print options, create web pages with your collection, import possibilities for existing collections and xml support.

External Links:

Libra Homepage

Data Crow was written in Java which means that you need a Java Runtime Environment installed on your computer to be able to install and run the software. When you have done that you can start adding your collection to the program by either adding items manually or importing items from online databases such as Amazon, Imdb, Freedb and Musicbrainz.

If the item is found covers, tracks, and other information are imported directly to the database. One nice feature is that you can search for an artist for instance and import all of the CDs found at once.

Data Crow has another feature that sticks out from other media catalogers which is called Loan Administration. You can add contact information to Data Crow and lend those contacts items from your collection. Everything is registered in the Loan Administration which means that you can always look up if you lend the item to someone.

It is possible to create pdf or html reports and export information to xml or csv files.

As the CD’s contents are preserved, a scratched CD can be recovered by polishing its plastic surface. If, after carrying out the above cleansing, the CD persists in giving reading errors, just polish the CD with toothpaste. That’s right, toothpaste. It works wonders, and you won’t spend a fortune buying professional cleaning kits. Polish the scratches with a cotton swab, rubbing gently the paste-imbued swab over the scratches until they disappear or until you notice that you have removed them as far as possible. Sometimes the paste may cause new scratching, but it will be merely superficial and easily removed. After clearing the scratches, wash the CD in water.

[tags]CD, Recover, scratched cd, repair, scratched dvd[/tags]