More thoughts on ripping

I spent a large part of the weekend cleaning things. While Michele cleaned the girls room, I cleaned the linen closet on Saturday. On Sunday I cleaned the garage and finally go a chance to sort out our CD collection in hopes of getting them all ripped.


After sorting out things that didn’t need to get ripped, putting scattered CDs back in the jewel cases, I got a final total of what I want to rip. 376 CDs. There are three rows of 100 and the rest add up to 76. Much bigger than I thought.
I began to wonder if the cost was really worth it and considered what it would take to do it myself. I did a few tests and found that it takes about 10 minutes to rip a CD and that if you do 6 an hour, you are doing good.
Doing the math 376 CD / 6 CD/hr = 62.66 hrs to rip them all.
Let’s say I can spend 4 hrs/night doing ripping, it will take 62.66 hrs / 4hrs/night = 16 nights to rip them.
Half a month? Geez. At $6/hr this is quite a low paying job.
So I’m still torn. I want all the CDs ripped, but the cost to send it to RipDigital is high. On the other hand, spending more than two weeks ripping CDs for hours at a time is a pain as well.
What do you, loyal Cruft readers, think I should do?

RipDigital

A week or so ago, I read about the new company RipDigital in a Metafilter thread. RipDigital takes your audio CD collection and rips them to MP3s for you en masse. 100, 200, 500 CDs? RipDigital says they get is done in a couple days.
Michele and I would really like to have our music available in this form. Most of our CDs live in a cabinet up front and we rarely dig through it. Converting these one at time is quite unappealing.
I had a few questions about the way they tagged the MP3s and I wrote off an email to RipDigital. I recieved a reply from Dick Adams, the founder, offering to send me a sample disc so I could see for myself. Kick ass.
The CD arrived today with 5 clips encoded at various bitrates. The RipDigital site says they encode at 224Kb/s, but the sample disc had a wide range.


I don’t have a ‘golden ear’ so the 224Kb/s MP3 sounds great to me. AAC is a good format that Apple uses in iTunes, FLAC is a lossless codec, MP3 is the de facto standard for digital music, and WMA is Windows Media Audio. I’m guessing that RipDigital could encode to any of the standards, but I’d ask them rather than make an assumption.

I opened up the MP3s in an ID3 tag editor and took a look. The filename is the way I like it: Band – Album – Track # – Song. Too me, this is one of the most important things. A sucky filename would kill the deal.

The basic ID3 tags are loaded. It appears to be ID3 v2, for those that worry about such things. There were no extraneous entries or any info in the extended fields.

Each MP3 did have a small image of the album cover included. When playing in Windows Media Player or JetAudio, the image appears. Pretty neat actually.
Overall, it all looks great.
There is one issue though that remains of concern. RipDigital says that in each file, they “include a unique identifying mark with each file to encourage responsible use of digital music”. It’s not an ID3 tag, so it’s probably an audio water mark that their encoder includes. I work with audio watermarks at the office and they aren’t hard to add. They don’t affect the audio in any perceptible way.
I don’t plan to upload my library to the net or P2P systems, but it is a bit strange to have an ID stuck in my MP3s. I’m not sure of the exact type of watermarking they do, but it’s possible it could move to the WAVs if I make the MP3s into a CD for a mix.
But since I don’t plan on sharing my MP3s on the P2P networks, it’s not a such a huge deal. I do wish that RipDigital was explicitly clear on what exactly is going on and in what cases they would release the information.
So I’m going to go count our CDs and place an order with RipDigital. I’ll report back when it’s all done and how it turned out.

State of the Union

After hearing the President’s address last night, I’m glad to hear that we are working hard on two hugely important issues, steroid use by professional athletes and stoping sex between high schoolers. Well, we must have solved the sex tourism issue already.
Sean made a wonderful graphic of the President’s key points.
George Bush is truly a disgrace to those that believe in fiscal responsiblity and personal liberties.

I love my mother, but…

I love my mother, but she’s crazy.
Yesterday we were over at my parent’s house for the big surprise party for my father. My Dad turned 65 and we had a big party for him.
I was looking my mother’s freezer for ice when I spied this:


Yes, it says: “Lasagna Sauce 12-21-98”
It’s January 2004. That sauce has been in her fridge for over FIVE YEARS.
Now I’m not one to make comments on the peculiarity of other’s, but this has got to be crazy by everyone’s standards.
I love you Mom, but you are nuts!

Can you read this?

At Christmas I recieved this wonderful shirt. My brother Matt found it and thought I would like it.


Can you read it?
I thought that most computer & tech people would get he joke. Yesterday I wore it ot work and everyone kept asking ‘what is 3l337’? Now, I work with an IT and an engineering department and I expected most people to get it.
Only two people, Nathan & Yoshi, read the patch at first glance. Are hacker-knowledgeable people really so rare?
In any case, if you don’t understand it, 3l337 translates to elite in hacker-speak aka leet-speak.
If you are interested in the connotation of elite or the basics of hacker-speak, read more.
Until later, j00 r 411 l4m3rz! I 0\/\/nz0r j00!!!

Almost here

The weekend is almost here. My brother arrives tomorrow and we will spend the weekend celebrating my Dad’s birthday. This has been a long week.
The time at court gave me some time to get into my latest book, Perdido Street Station. The book came highly recommended and I picked it up after Christmas.
After the first hundred pages I began to wonder if I was going to like the book. It got off to a slow start and didn’t throw out a lot of goodies for me to think about. I kept asking questions in my mind and the book wasn’t answering them.
Around page 250, the author finally kicks the story into overdrive and the story launches full force with a host of neat ideas and concepts. Much more of a fantasy novel than sci-fi, the book leaves reality far behind and drags you into a wierd alternate plane were there is no electricity, but there is magic.
I look forward to the second half of the book.
Other good stuff:
Extreme Segway
Caffeinated Hot Sauce
Missile Defense that doesn’t work
Jar of Toothpaste

Duty Fufilled

I spent my second day on the jury during voir dire and I thought I would end up on the final jury panel. Out of the blue, the defense attorney said “Juror #12, thank you for your time.” With that I completed my duty. Being on the trial would have been interesting, but I must admit some relief.
In other news, I order a new Toyota Prius today with all the options. The trusty Oldsmobile Intrigue is well past it’s prime. I am looking forward to the GPS navigation system with audible directions.
That’s all for now. Back to your regularly scheduled web surfing.

Civic Duty

I’m on Jury Duty. I’ve been placed in a Jury Panel and unless I get taken out via a preemptory challenge, I’m going to be on the trial jury for a SEVEN day trial.
One of the great things about America is trial by jury and I respect our legal system, but even I am wincing at the thought of seven days on a jury. The court operates from 10:30 to Noon and then 1:30 to 3:30. Three and a half hours in the courtroom per day max. I wish it could be a little more, but the judge says it’s due to budget constraints and overtime.
Who knows, maybe I can spend my lengthy lunch hour war driving downtown LA.

Blogs & Business

I was reading the Many 2 Many site and saw the Blogging the Market entry by Ross Mayfield.
Now for a lot of the big thinking in the blogosphere, I am a bit disconnected. I’m not really into the ‘power laws’ or the ‘fairness’ issues. But when it comes to weblogs in business, I think I know enough to discuss things.
The entry is about the Blogging the Market essay by George N. Dafermos. Mr. Dafermos deals with several issues, marketing blogging, employee external blogging, and internal company blogging.
Several times in the essay he claims things like “massive productivity gains through far more efficient communication, collaboration, and knowledge management.” with no real justification. In my day job, I deal with this kinda stuff all the time. The idea that business processes are so horribly inefficient that there are huge amounts of productivity to be gained is anecdotal and unproven.
Mr. Dafermos comes close to the real benefit of weblogs inside a company but misses it. The benefit is not found in Knowledge Management, the search and retrieval of information, the benefit is found in workflow.
In any business, information and ideas FLOW though the organization up and down the hierarchy. The flow happens via email, paper, conversations, specialized software and a multitude of other means.
This flow of ideas, approvals, and comments is key to a business’s success. It is not simple search and retrieval, it is directed flow of information to the right places to allow people to do their part.
It is in this area of workflow where weblogs can play a vital role. Weblogs alone are not the ‘killer app’, they are simply part of the new wave of information flow such as RSS, ATOM, media encapsulation, commenting, and other blogosphere friendly technologies.
The information must flow from weblogs in the right direction. It is not enough that a weblog shows a new post, the groups down the workflow chain must know that new information is available. It is nonsensical that the write people, randomly surfing internal weblogs would stumble on all the right information at the right time. You might be able to pull it off in a 50 person company but in a 500 or 5,000 person company it would be madness.
As companies remake their workflow processes away from the traditional paper and email chains into application based systems, they will be faced with a choice. Customized niche workflow applications built by high priced consultants or weblogs tied to simple routing and approval systems. For those that choose the weblog path, they are likely to find the productivity gains without spending millions.
But the key to success is keeping the weblogs focus on the task at hand and using some method to keep the information flowing through the business. Business weblogs cannot be passive like more personal weblogs, they must actively push their content along the line.
There is definitely some side benefit to employee weblogs about ideas and feelings, but the real driver of weblogs in business will not be an unstructured free-for-all.
Businesses are structured by necessity, unlike the internet where chaos fuels innovation. For weblogs to help businesses, there must be structure and purpose.