Library Hell

I'm sitting in the public library in Urbana at the moment, downloading an application and various other bits for a personal project I don't particularly want to have flashing across the networks of my Dear Employer. Nothing x-rated or illegal, of course: it's just that my office is militant about any app downloaded off the Internet. Shoot your director and you'll get a mild reprimand (or possibly a letter of commendation for creatively reducing our headcount and overhead costs): download an update of, say, perl and you & your extended family will be whisked off to Guantanamo.

The library is, at the moment, incredibly loud. There are people at the tables near me clearly frustrated in their attempts to work but the place is overrun with crying toddlers, screaming children and kids generally running up & down the rows of books. The only parents present are being utterly ineffective in corralling their demon-spawn.

Next time, I'm setting snare traps.

So why am I here at all? I need an update of Pacemaker, an application used in conjunction with WinAmp to modify music tempo and pitch on the fly.

kent4str and I had both noticed a couple of weeks ago that a few of our square dance MP3 music files didn't sound right. Some were just a little off --twangy and lacking in bass-- but others sounded like they were recorded 10 meters underwater, yet most played back perfectly. If I didn't know better, I'd say that some MP3 files were decaying, something clearly not possible.

Yesterday, I checked the quality on every single MP3 in our active collection. 19 out of 400 had sound issues of some kind.

This morning, I went into the backups and compared checksums of the backup MP3 files (which sounded fine on my iMac, I should add) to the set on my calling laptop and found they were identical.

Using the same square dance calling laptop, I started up Real Player to play back the MP3 files and found they were fine. The problem had to be in WinAmp. Digging a little deeper, I disabled PaceMaker and found that the music suddenly played perfectly. Ah ha!

I reinstalled PaceMaker but got the same sound distortion issues. Clicking on the "Enable processing" button on PaceMaker suddenly cleared the issue. Perfect!

I'll try this little operation at home on the HP laptop to see if it addresses the issues there, but I'm cautiously optimistic. I really want this permanently resolved before going on stage at the Cleveland convention.

Library Hell

I'm sitting in the public library in Urbana at the moment, downloading an application and various other bits for a personal project I don't particularly want to have flashing across the networks of my Dear Employer. Nothing x-rated or illegal, of course: it's just that my office is militant about any app downloaded off the Internet. Shoot your director and you'll get a mild reprimand (or possibly a letter of commendation for creatively reducing our headcount and overhead costs): download an update of, say, perl and you & your extended family will be whisked off to Guantanamo.

The library is, at the moment, incredibly loud. There are people at the tables near me clearly frustrated in their attempts to work but the place is overrun with crying toddlers, screaming children and kids generally running up & down the rows of books. The only parents present are being utterly ineffective in corralling their demon-spawn.

Next time, I'm setting snare traps.

So why am I here at all? I need an update of Pacemaker, an application used in conjunction with WinAmp to modify music tempo and pitch on the fly.

kent4str and I had both noticed a couple of weeks ago that a few of our square dance MP3 music files didn't sound right. Some were just a little off --twangy and lacking in bass-- but others sounded like they were recorded 10 meters underwater, yet most played back perfectly. If I didn't know better, I'd say that some MP3 files were decaying, something clearly not possible.

Yesterday, I checked the quality on every single MP3 in our active collection. 19 out of 400 had sound issues of some kind.

This morning, I went into the backups and compared checksums of the backup MP3 files (which sounded fine on my iMac, I should add) to the set on my calling laptop and found they were identical.

Using the same square dance calling laptop, I started up Real Player to play back the MP3 files and found they were fine. The problem had to be in WinAmp. Digging a little deeper, I disabled PaceMaker and found that the music suddenly played perfectly. Ah ha!

I reinstalled PaceMaker but got the same sound distortion issues. Clicking on the "Enable processing" button on PaceMaker suddenly cleared the issue. Perfect!

I'll try this little operation at home on the HP laptop to see if it addresses the issues there, but I'm cautiously optimistic. I really want this permanently resolved before going on stage at the Cleveland convention.