Category: Software

Coverting Music? Handy Guide

Recently Ive been at doctors office very often and decided to download some toons and rip some of my old cd’s to my old school mp3 player.

While surfing I came across this gems and plan to add to it.. Unfortunately original person that put together the info from peoples input on the thread was removed. But still some good info. Despite being posted in 2000. Most of the programs discussed  are free or easy to get.

my own suggestion on flv to mp3 or 4 if you don’t want to download anything. Upload flv to youtube then download same file from youtube in mp3 or mp4 format. Only works good if you have fast internet service.

MP3 to CD
Real easy:

  • Get Nero 5
  •  Goldenhawk CDRWIN to write one big MP3 or WAV as multiple tracks.
  • Or convert to WAV (see below) and use any program to burn as CD-Audio

Note:

  • DONT USE CDRW media: They dont work on 99.9% of stereos

MP3 to WAV
This is very easy to do with winamp so no program list this time

  • Make sure that shuffle and random are off
  • Go to preferences (press CTRL+P or use the context menu options>preferences, thanks to dianelala for telling me to include this)
  • Select Nullsoft diskwriter as your output plugin (prefs>plugins>output)
  • Press configure to select the directory the WAVs will go (forgot to mention this one, thanks go to Lumberjack and Reverend Ike for bringing it up )
  • Load the mp3s you want to convert to wav
  • Press play and wait
  • Remember to set output back to waveOut or DirectSound afterwards, for normal playback.

Notes:

  • The above works for other conversions like VQF to WAV, or even WAV to WAV, with the notable exception of analog CD (not 100% sure) and secure formats (read:WMA)
  • For WAV to WAV (eg. for converting an 8-bit 22KHz file to CD Quality, make sure you checkmark “Convert to Format” in Diskwriter config, and make sure “PCM 44,100 KHz, 16 Bit, Stereo” is the selected format).

CDex does this too, along with Nero 5

CD to WAV
What you need is called a ripper.
Try:

CD to MP3
use:

CD OR WAV or MP3 to WMA
I’m probably missing a few progs, but here goes

  • Zlurp
  • Nero 5
  • And of course Winamp with the the CD Reader plugin as input and the WMA output plugin as output (Winamp 2.81 and earlier)

WAV to MP3
Lots of programs, many same as above

MP3 to MP3
No, youre not seing double. You might need this to save on disk space, copy file to a floppy or upload music to your portable player. The thing to note here is that even if you increase the bitrate the quality wont rise. So compressing with MP3 goes only one way
CDex -> Convert Menu -> MPEG to MPEG

  • The free version of MusicMatch bloatware, suggestion by Bruce
  • Winamp, with a MP3 output plugin of your choice. (See notes at the end)

note: i dont know about other progs, suggestions are welcome.

MIDI to WAV
RTFM
More tips here and here (2.9x/5.x)

MP3/WAV to WMA
use the WMA Output plugin (included in 2.63 to 2.9x)
or Nero 5

data mined from winamp forums

How Steam in-home streaming can turn your old laptop or Windows tablet PC

great article:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2359241/how-steam-in-home-streaming-can-turn-your-old-laptop-or-windows-tablet-into-a-pc-gaming-force.html?page=2

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2359241/how-steam-in-home-streaming-can-turn-your-old-laptop-or-windows-tablet-into-a-pc-gaming-force.html#tk.fb_pc

| @BradChacos
Senior Editor, PCWorld
__________________________________

 

 

The process couldn’t be easier. Simply make sure both computers are turned on, connected to the same local network, and logged into the same Steam account. If all that’s set, a pop-up will appear in the lower-right corner of your screen, letting you know you’re connected to your primary machine.

steam streaming 1
Behold, the Stream option.

Your Steam library will be shared between the two PCs, and a Streamoption will appear for games that are installed remotely. (You’ll need to install the games you want to stream on your host PC first, of course.) If any of your games are installed on both machines, you’ll be able to choose whether you want to stream it or play it straight from the PC you’re holding.

That’s it!

If you want to try to play a game that isn’t offered on Steam, try adding it via the Games > Add a Non-Steam Game to my Library option on your host machine to try and force the matter. Valve’s streaming FAQ says that might work, but warns that streaming non-Steam games is not officially supported.

Trouble-shooting Steam in-home streaming

Troubleshooting streaming problems is also fairly straightforward, assuming your hardware and home network are up to snuff to begin with.

If your games are doing the jitter-bug—in-home streaming handles latency by dropping the frame rate, rather than dropping the picture quality, for some bizarre reason—open Steam on your client PC and head to Steam > Settings > In-Home Streaming in the menu bar. Under the “Client options” portion, you’ll see options for Fast, Balanced, andBeautiful, with Balanced enabled by default. Try dropping the setting to Fast.

steam streaming 5

If that doesn’t do enough, click Advanced Client Options, then open the Limit Resolution To drop-down menu and select a less pixel-packed streaming resolution option. With my setup—a hardwired Core i5 desktop PC streaming to various laptops over 802.11n—dropping the resolution to 720p helps even action-packed games stream with few hitches. (The frame rate can still get a little hairy in particularly explosive and fast-paced scenes, though.) My Wi-Fi doesn’t have to struggle for airspace with competing networks in my rural abode, however.

steam streaming 2

What, that didn’t fix the problem either? First, make sure the Enable hardware encodingand Enable hardware decoding options are, in fact, enabled on your host and client machine, respectively—they should be by default. You can also try enabling the Prioritize network traffic option on your host machine, or switching your router to the less-trafficked 5GHz spectrum band (if your router supports the 5GHz band). If that doesn’t work, it’s time to break out the Ethernet cables. There’s a reason Valve recommends using wired connections—they’re stronger than wireless ones.

Wrapping up

That should be about it. While Steam’s in-home streaming has officially dumped its beta tag, don’t be surprised if you run into occasional frame rate or input woes, as the technology is still in its early days. Some games might not play audio, or they might refuse to launch whatsoever. More frantic games may have hiccups. Again, Hayden Dingman’s hands-on with Steam in-home streaming can give you a good overview of what to expect.

valve steam machineCOLBEHR
Steam in-home streaming, along with Valve’s own Steam Controller and Steam Machine prototype (pictured), are laying the groundwork for Linux-powered living room “PC consoles,” but in-home streaming’s benefits extend to a wide range of hardware.

All that said, it’s held up remarkably well for me thus far. Sure, the introduction of Steam in-home streaming is meant to pave the way for living room-ready Steam Machines and make Steam for Linux’s paltry (but growing) library less painful, but it’s great being able to game on your laptop while you’re lounging on the couch or lying in bed. Merely plugging an HDMI cord into your laptop can bring your entire Steam library to your TV, and in-home streaming also brings the full Windows-based Steam catalog to Linux and Mac computers without the need for complex technical tricks.

Yes, Steam’s in-home streaming truly feels like magic, even though it’s not quite perfect yet. And once you’ve played a beastly modern game on a crusty old laptop that normally starts dropping frames when the word “Battlefield” is merely uttered, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Search ENGINES

  • LookSmart – Looksmart UK
    LookSmart is the closest rival Yahoo has, in terms of being a human-compiled directory of the web. The high quality of the directory is thanks to a team of nearly 200 full-time professional editors.
  • Yahoo! – Yahoo UK
    Yahoo is the web’s most popular search service and has a well-deserved reputation for helping people find information easily. The secret to Yahoo’s success is human beings. It is the largest human-compiled guide to the web, employing 80 or more editors in an effort to categorize the web. Yahoo has at least 1 million sites listed.
  • MSN (Microsoft)
    Microsoft’s MSN service features both directory listings and search engine results. Powered by Inktomi, this is now one of the most powerful search engines.
  • BBC – Search The Web
    The BBC’s “family friendly” search engine, based on Google search technology. Results are clear, uncluttered, relevant, and commercial free. “Our results are the ones that best match your search words – not the ones advertisers want you to see.” Excellent!
  • GigaBlast
    Gigablast is a new search-engine that looks set to challenge Google. It’s been set up by a New Mexican Software Engineer, and already producing great search results.
  • GO Network
    Go is the reincarnation of Infoseek, a newly designed site claiming to have enhanced capabilities, with a 50% larger search index and search results pages that are 30% faster. It offers portal features such as personalization and free e-mail.
  • HotBot
    This search engine has a great many loyal fans. It very often comes up with the goods where other engines fail.
  • Open Directory
    NetScape’s Open Directory Project aims to build the most comprehensive human-reviewed directory of the web, by relying on a vast army of volunteer editors.
  • Teoma Search
    Teoma, which means “expert” in Gaelic, determines the authority or quality of a site’s content, by using Subject-Specific Popularity. Subject-Specific Popularity ranks a site based on the number of same-subject pages that reference it, not just general popularity.
  • FAST Search
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  • Multi Search
    Multi Search is a powerful tool which will search all the top search engines with one click.
  • Webcrawler
    One of the first and biggest search engines, and it still produces highly relevant results.
  • REX
    This is a VERY nice site – a little sense of humour, very professionally done.
  • HandiLinks
    This is a great directory. HandiLinks listings are all organized into a hierarchical index and it’s fast and easy-to-use. It has extensive categorization, and uses a frame design that aids rather than getting in the way of searches.
  • Snap.com
    Snap.com is a human-compiled directory of web sites, supplemented by search results. It aims to challenge Yahoo as the champion of categorizing the web.
  • Scour.Net
    A useful multimedia search engine. Use it to find audio, video, images and animation Scour.Net takes you directly to the multimedia you are searching for, quickly and easily.
  • AAA Matilda
    The most popular search engine outside of North America. Matilda is a very individual search engine from Australia, and growing rapidly in popularity.
  • UK Plus
    UK Plus features reviews of UK-relevant sites, prepared by a team of journalists. Reviews are grouped into various channels, covering everything from Arts and Business to Travel and Work. They are also searchable.
  • Direct Hit
    This Popularity Engine tracks the sites that people actually select from the search results list. By analyzing the activity of millions of previous Internet searchers, Direct Hit determines the most popular and relevant sites for your search request.
  • Dogpile
    Sends a search to a customizable list of search engines, directories and specialty search sites.
  • Britannica Internet Guide
    This site strives to list only the highest quality sites on the Net. It’s now integrated into the Britannicca.com website, so you get a high-quality search engine and encyclopaedia at the same time.
  • Go2Net
    This is a metacrawler, in other words it searches several other search engines in order to obtain its results. Rapidly gaining in popularity as a web portal.
  • Alba36.com
    A human reviewed searchable directory to over 2700 specialty and regional search engines, vortals, portals, topical guides, specialized directories and the best web sites.
  • WhosBest.com
    A search engine that gives ratings for each site.
  • ANZWERS
    ANZWERS (Australian and New Zealand Web Enquiry and Research System) offers visitors the ability to quickly conduct region and domain specific searches.
  • Mamma
    Sends search requests to seven major search engines.
  • NewsTrawler
    Allows you to send a query to one or more news sites from one location. Hundreds of sites are listed, by country and by category.
  • EuroSeek
    EuroSeek is distinguished from other such engines by a multi-lingual interface.
  • Your WebScout
    A popular index of the Net’s best Web sites, discussion groups and archives.
  • Northern Light
    A professional researchers’ favourite, because it organises material so well by topic. Based in Canada.
  • SelectSurf
    An excellent website directory, that doesn’t overwhelm with too many sites.
  • BrightGate MetaSearch
    Searches over 20 search engines using a parallel metasearch.
  • NewsBot
    HotBot’s news-only search service.
  • UKMax
    UKMax allows users to search only pages within the .uk domain or perform a worldwide search. It also offers some directory listings, regional news content, weather reports, and portal features such as portfolio tracking.
  • SearchUK
    Lists UK-related domains.
  • Global Online Directory (GOD)
    UK based search engine.
  • GoTo
    GoTo is the only major search engine which sells listings. Companies can pay money to be placed higher in the search results, which GoTo feels improves relevancy.
  • Internet Sleuth
    Allows you to search the standard search engine choices or a huge number of specialty sites, all from the same place.
  • Search Spaniel
    This dog sniffs out several of major search engines at the same time, or you can choose to do the same with an extensive list of specialty search services, such as for entertainment or employment information.
  • SavvySearch
    Metacrawler type engine.
  • BOTBOT.com
    BOTBOT parallel search engine and Web Directory – Get multiple results using advanced parallel search technology. Search the Web, News, MP3, Images, Audio, Video and more. Comes up with some good results.
  • UK Index
    Lists sites based in the UK or that are UK-relevant.
  • Metafind
    Similar to Dogpile, except that searches only go to search engines.
  • HuskySearch
    The author of MetaCrawler continues research into information retrieval with this University of Washington-based metacrawler.
  • Mirago
    UK directory and search engine.
  1. HealthLinks
    Massive directory listing over 4,600 health related websites in 150 categories.

AMD Catalyst™ 11.11 RELEASED

SwordandKeyboard.com Reports:

Highlights of the AMD Catalyst™ 11.11 Windows release includes:

NEW FEATURES

Adobe Flash Player 11 support
– Enables full support of the GPU accelerated Stage 3D API and Stage 3D applications
– Supported on the AMD Radeon HD Series of GPUs, A-Series APU and E-Series APU

RESOLVED ISSUES

Resolved Issues for the Windows 7 Operating System

This section provides information on resolved known issues in this release of the AMD Catalyst™ 11.11 software suite for Windows 7. These include:
– Images and textures are no longer corrupted (Blue) in Rage.
– Bezel compensation now works correctly with Far Cry 2.
– Screen tearing is no longer randomly observed while moving a window on the desktop while in Clone mode or Eyefinity mode.
– A black screen is no longer observed when extending displays.
– Homefront no longer crashes randomly when Crossfire is enabled.
– DC Universe Online no longer hangs soon after selecting a character and entering the game.

KNOWN ISSUES

Known issues under the Windows 7 operating system
The following section provides a summary of open issues that may be experienced under the Windows 7 operating system in the latest version of AMD Catalyst™. These include:

– Screen tearing may be observed occasionally while playing Portal 2 in DirectX 9 mode.
– Shogun 2 may exhibit screen corruption while playing on low resolution settings in 2×1 Eyefinity mode.
– Choppy playback may be observed playing interlaced DVD content in full screen mode using PowerDVD 11.
– A BSOD error may occur while playing Call of Duty – Black Ops in Multiplayer mode with Crossfire enabled.
– Video corruption may be observed while playing World of Warcraft in windowed mode and AVI file simultaneously.
– Dragon Age 2 may exhibit corruption during in game cinematics when run in DirectX 9 mode.
– Lost Planet 2 my display random corruption and flickering when run in DirectX 9 mode.
– Lost Planet 2 may crash randomly when Crossfire is enabled.
– The following games may experience random flashing textures during gameplay :
– Homefront
– Metro 2033
– Far Cry 2
– Stalker : Call of Pripyat

Known Issues under the Windows Vista Operating System

The following section provides a summary of open issues that may be experienced under the Windows Vista operating system in the latest version of AMD Catalyst™. These include:
– Windows Aero options may be missing after installing the driver.
– A ‘ghost’ cursor may be observed when playing Dragon Age 2 in Crossfire mode.
– The character avatar in Dragon Age 2 may display random flickering.
– HAWX 2 may experience random system reboots when run in Eyefinity mode.
– Civilization V may experience random crashing when run at medium or high in game settings.
– Bulletstorm may experience random flashing during gameplay.
– Dead Space 2 may hang occasionally soon after game launch.