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September 30, 2006
Use Your Apple Remote for Anything
Products > Remote Buddy > Overview // IOSPIRIT - fueling creative minds worldwide ..
Posted by lsloan at 12:04 PM | Comments (0)
September 26, 2006
amaztype
amaztype is an entertaining tool for searching Amazon web sites. Enter a search term and this Flash application will spell out that term in large letters made up of album or book covers that match the term.
Posted by lsloan at 10:24 PM | Comments (0)
September 23, 2006
Extracting Audio from MPEGs
While my family was in Singapore and Malaysia, we bought a VCD (a CD containing video in MPEG format) of some Buddhist chants. We really like it a lot, so my wife asked me to extract the audio from the video to play on an MP3 player and to burn to CD.
I thought that would be easy.
I knew that the player in QuickTime Pro could save the parts of an MPEG separately. But when I tried that, I found that the video had been MUXed. I can't explain MUXing very well at this point, but let it suffice to say that the audio and video were combined in a way that QuickTime Player wasn't prepared to separate.
So I did a Google search and found a suggestion for MPEG Streamclip. The description claimed it could demux and export, so I gave it a try. It did great, extracting the audio to AIFF, an uncompressed audio format. Given that the chant video was over an hour long (the half-hour chant was played twice), the AIFF file was about 635 MB. I used iTunes to make it into an MP3, but with the chant repeated, some introductory crap at the beginning, and some dead air, it was still almost 58 MB. I needed to cut it down.
I looked around for free audio editing applications and found Audacity. It's a good, free, open-source application that was straightforward to use. (At least, it was for me, since I've played with audio editors before.) I cut the chant down to one full performance and eliminated a lot of the dead air.
The only problem with Audacity is it doesn't save directly to MP3 unless the LAME (that's what it's called, it's not my description of it) MP3 encoder is installed separately. I didn't feel like fooling around with it, so just exported the completed audio to the stinking Microsoft WAV format. I don't know why Audacity couldn't export to AIFF...
After that, I loaded the WAV into iTunes and converted it to MP3. We've been enjoying it ever since.
Posted by lsloan at 06:12 PM | Comments (0)
September 14, 2006
CrossOver Mac
This product,
CodeWeavers - CrossOver Mac,
claims that it can run Windoze applications "seamlessly integrated on Mac OS X". I wonder how well this actually works without setting up a virtual machine and filesystem for Windows to run these applications with. It it worked well, it might be nicer than Parallels Desktop. (Which I also haven't tried yet.)
Posted by lsloan at 09:09 AM | Comments (0)
September 12, 2006
Mac OS X Maintenance Software
Also see Yasu:
http://jimmitchell.org/projects/yasu/
Posted by lsloan at 09:49 AM