gHacks technology news » record http://www.ghacks.net A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Tue, 24 Nov 2009 23:31:44 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 Huge Music Collection for sale on eBay http://www.ghacks.net/2008/02/19/huge-music-collection-for-sale-on-ebay/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/02/19/huge-music-collection-for-sale-on-ebay/#comments Mon, 18 Feb 2008 22:32:36 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2008/02/19/huge-music-collection-for-sale-on-ebay/ I’m sometimes astonished as to what people sell at eBay. I always thought those video game collections that filled rooms where impressive but this music collection must be one of the largest sales ever on eBay. A collector is apparently selling his entire music collection on eBay which consists of more than 3 million records and 300000 CDs currently stored in a 16,000 square foot climate controlled warehouse.

The initial price for the music collection is three million Dollars with no reserve price. That’s a great bargain if you believe the estimates that the music collection is worth more than fifty million Dollars. The auction will run another two days and the buyer will even get $10 back from eBay if he applies, is not that nice..

A website was created to answer frequently asked questions like why it is for sale, what people can expect, what home they would need to store all those records and CDs. It’s interesting that the collection would be shipped world wide, wonder how much one had to pay for the shipping costs alone.

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I would be really tempted to buy the collection if I had the money to do so. It would probably take ages but I guess it would be possible to make a huge fortune by selling the records and CDs separately instead.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2008/02/19/huge-music-collection-for-sale-on-ebay/feed/ 3 Record Sounds from any source http://www.ghacks.net/2007/02/09/record-sounds-from-any-source/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/02/09/record-sounds-from-any-source/#comments Fri, 09 Feb 2007 07:56:46 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2007/02/09/record-sounds-from-any-source/ 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 task 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.

The best feature of Harddisk Ogg is that it sits in the tray once configured and you can start the recording with a single mouse click and end it with another one. The quality of the recorded audio can be configured in detail including bitrate, mono or stereo recording and encoding quality.

Harddisk Ogg offers several normalization modes that amplify the input signal to a constant volume. You need to download and move the lame encoder into the folder of Harddisk Ogg to be able to record mp3 files directly.

I would like to explain why a tool like Harddisk Ogg might be useful now or in the near future. Several countries have already laws in place that make it illegal to copy music from Cd’s if the CD is copy protected. They still allow however to record the songs using audio devices and compare this to the recording of radio with audio tapes.

This is also great if you want to rip audio from music videos that you found on the internet or from youtube videos.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2007/02/09/record-sounds-from-any-source/feed/ 6 Record more than 4000 internet radio stations http://www.ghacks.net/2007/01/17/record-more-than-4000-internet-radio-stations/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/01/17/record-more-than-4000-internet-radio-stations/#comments Wed, 17 Jan 2007 15:06:40 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2007/01/17/record-more-than-4000-internet-radio-stations/ If you are looking for an easy way to record internet radio stations look no further. Phonostar is a free radio player and recorder that comes preconfigured with more than 4000 radio stations. Phonostar tries to automatically determine the audio source that can be used to record songs and loads the interface afterwards. Top stations are selected and a double-click starts the playback of that station. Please note that all top stations seem to be in German, conduct a search for English stations.

Phonostar has more than 2100 English stations in it database including such famous ones as digital imported radio. If your favorite stations are missing you can simply add them by clicking on On Air and selecting Add radio station or open stream url. Before you are ready to record songs you should enter the recording settings and change the default format from .wav to .mp3 to save space on your hard drive. Click on recording in the left pane and select mp3 as the file format.

Click on Options > Settings afterwards and check the Recording settings there as well. Change the default dir for the recordings if you do not have enough space on c:\ like I do. Everything can remain as is. To record simply click the red button in the left pane and the recording process starts.

I did not find a way (unfortunately) to change the way the recorded files are named. Some programs are able to save information like artist, song title and album when recording and it seems that Phonostar is not able to do that. This is clearly a disadvantage.

Phonostar is nevertheless a fine program that makes it easy for even inexperienced users to record songs of internet radio stations.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2007/01/17/record-more-than-4000-internet-radio-stations/feed/ 0 Record any sound on your computer http://www.ghacks.net/2006/12/25/record-any-sound-on-your-computer/ http://www.ghacks.net/2006/12/25/record-any-sound-on-your-computer/#comments Mon, 25 Dec 2006 16:15:41 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2006/12/25/record-any-sound-on-your-computer/ I always thought that it should be theoretically possible to record any sound that you are hearing on your computer. Sometimes solutions for selected programs exist but I was looking for a free program that could record any sound no matter the source it was coming from. This can be for example quite useful if you want to record conversations in Skype or Teamspeak or record a sound that you heard on a website on the internet. Yes, even streaming radio poses no problem but you should note that the following free tool is not capable of recognizing the beginning and end of songs. It just records for as long as you want.

The freeware that I’m speaking of is called MP3 My MP3 Recorder. After installing the application you specify the source from where you want to record the audio from. You may select from the following sources: Phone Line, Microphone, Line In, CD Player, AUX, SPDIF, Stereo Mix and Mono Mix. Stereo Mix for instance should be a great selection for most purposes. Once that is done you should fine tune the recording level for best results.

To do so take a look at the bar on the right side of the program window which should not peak into the red area at all times.  Once that is done click on settings to specify the bit rate for the sound that will be recorded (between 32 and 320). You may also set a time limit for the recording but the default is to record until you stop the recording.

If everything is set the way you want it to be you click on the (red) recording button to start the process. The buttons to stop and play the already recorded songs will become active once that process has started.

I think this is a great tool if you want to record audio fast and easy. The quality is pretty nice as well.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2006/12/25/record-any-sound-on-your-computer/feed/ 13 Taksi Open Source Alternative to Fraps http://www.ghacks.net/2006/12/12/taksi-open-source-alternative-to-fraps/ http://www.ghacks.net/2006/12/12/taksi-open-source-alternative-to-fraps/#comments Tue, 12 Dec 2006 13:33:02 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2006/12/12/taksi-open-source-alternative-to-fraps/ Fraps is a application that lets you capture videos / screens of 3D applications and is mostly used for recording in game movies. The biggest drawback of Fraps is that it is not freeware, you have to purchase it to use all of its features. Taksi steps in and provides a similar functionality with the advantage that it is Open Source, free for everyone to use and download.

The unregistered version of Fraps stops after 30 seconds of recording and adds a Fraps watermark automatically to the captured video. It does not make lots of sense to use this version but for testing purposes. Taksi on the other hand has no such limitations making it an ideal capturing application for everyone who does not want to buy Fraps.

Taksi is able to use installed video codecs to compress the recorded video on the fly which makes it possible to record very long sequences. The biggest drawback is that Taksi will not record audio as well, you need to find a different way to record the audio. (should work with harddisk ogg for example, not tested though). There are no limitations but the space on your hard disk for recording videos.

I hope the Taksi team decides to integrate audio recording to their application, this seems to be the only thing that is missing to make it a great alternative to Fraps.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2006/12/12/taksi-open-source-alternative-to-fraps/feed/ 4 Camstudio http://www.ghacks.net/2006/04/24/camstudio/ http://www.ghacks.net/2006/04/24/camstudio/#comments Mon, 24 Apr 2006 08:06:55 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2006/04/24/camstudio/ CamStudio is able to record all screen and audio activity on your computer and create industry-standard AVI video files and using it’s built-in SWF Producer can turn those AVIs into lean, mean, bandwidth-friendly Streaming Flash videos (SWFs). It´s a great way to create demonstrations for instance or record video tutorials. Besides that you could also record gameplay footage to show your gaming skills or create movies using the recorded footage.

camstudio record windows screen

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