AZ: Fear & Loathing in the land of Microsoft - Page 2

Thermodyne · #11 February 15th, 2006, 09:21 PM

Quote:

TurinTurambar said:

This new Pheonix/Award BIOS I have now is the only one I've ever had that supports anything USB, and yeah I had to manually turn on that setting. Go grab that old PS2 keyboard over there under your sweatpants in the closet...

USB keyboard support is a little iffy still. A lot of the systems that I order have a preinstalled image that I provide from a running system. The end user still has to boot the system and connect the keyboard after windows loads. And yes, there are some PS2�s on the shelf in the back room just in case. Actually, most of the systems coming in now don�t have any PS2 sockets.

AgentZero · #12 February 18th, 2006, 03:56 PM

No PS2 sockets?! Oh noes! Thanks for the advice folks, turned out scrounging a USB-PS2 adapter out the the ole box o' spare parts did the job nicely.
Unfortunately I seem to have nuked a lot of stuff that I thought was on my main partition, but turned out to be on my Windows partition. Like my bookmarks.

More importantly though, I wiped off a really handy little CD-MP3 ripper, and now that I'm in the mood to convert some of my collection for my MP3 player, I can't remember the name of it. Anyone have any suggestions for a simple, FREE (not shareware, but acutally free), MP3 ripper?

Fyron · #13 February 18th, 2006, 04:19 PM

Exact Audio Copy is the best ripping program, and it is totally free.

Jack Simth · #14 February 18th, 2006, 04:48 PM

Glad to be of help.

Fyron · #15 February 18th, 2006, 04:55 PM

Also... unless you have a cheap portable music player that only plays MP3s, I suggest you look into ripping to Ogg Vorbis format. Its algorithms allow for higher quality encoding at lower bitrates, thus saving file size. 192 kbps Ogg Vorbis sounds a hell of a lot better than 192 kbps MP3. Even 128 kbps Ogg Vorbis sound fairly good, which can't be said for MP3.

Of course, the best would be to rip to a lossless format such as FLAC, but that can eat a lot of hdd space. They are about 300 MB or so per album.

If you don't like EAC, you could get Foobar2000, a really good music player that can also convert audio files (such as the .cda files on a CD) to a ton of different formats just by selecting them from a playlist and choosing Convert from right click menu. You might need the "special" installer to get the convert plugin by default. You do not get as exact copies as with EAC, but it is probably easier to use.

Either of these can plug in to FREEDB for getting album and track info for the meta tags.