LookIt

How to rip sound from a DVD on Windows using freeware

I am amazed and appalled that none of the answers I got from Google on this worked with the DVD I had. Codecs and formats are still beyond standardization, I guess. Fortunately, Doom9 came to the rescue. The short answer is to rip the raw sound from the DVD as a WAV file, edit it, and save it as an MP3. It takes two freeware programs.

• Get eac3to, a command-line Windows tool.
• Find the VOB file on the DVD that has the sound you want, and copy it to your hard drive.
• Open a command window in Windows, and give the command
  eac3to.exe source-from-dvd.vob dest-temp.wav
• Get Audacity, a wonderful freeware sound editor.
• Edit the dest-temp.wav file, selecting just the bit you want. Export that bit as a new MP3 file. Audacity has a zillion other tools you can work with to clean up the sound.

I tried three other methods, and they all failed, but I'm fairly sure this will work with other DVDs that I have. I have heard that BeSweet can be used instead of eac3to, but haven't tried it.

(Edited the original article to remove the need for VLC, which makes the process much faster.)

Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, with Pete Seeger thrown in for fun

In the mid 1960's, Pete Seeger put together a wonderful TV show called Rainbow Quest. Some of the shows can be found on Nexflix, others (probably illegally) on YouTube. If you like old-style black blues, some of the best from the 40's through the 60's came from Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. They appeared on one episode of Rainbow Quest, and completely wailed on one of their faves, Rock Island Line. Pete plays a bit on the song, but mostly turns it over to the masters.

Delectable new music: the Carolina Chocolate Drops

If you like old skool roots and blues and what to try something new, by all means check out the Carolina Chocolate Drops. This recent show is a great sampling of their live style: fun, complex, and historical, all at once.

Terrapin Station, live

The fad in the past few years for bands that have been around for a decade or more is to perform an entire album live. The Grateful Dead never did this (thankfully), but people have fixed that problem by putting together mixes from shows that match the album. Here is one for Terrapin Station that is made up of performances just before the album was released. It's surprisingly sweet, although later performances of the title song went out further.

If you don't want to sign up for Lossless Legs and start torrenting (or that link dies), drop me a line and give me your postal info and I'll email you a CD made directly from the torrent.

On Facebook statuses and their visibility

Many Facebook users don't understand how status changes are seen by their "friends". In conversations with my non-geek friends, I somewhat consistently hear that they think all their friends see their status changes. Those of us who know a bit more about web apps and social networking know that this is not the case: your friends only see your status change if Facebook-the-corporation wants them to.

As an experiment, I changed my status last Sunday to "is conducting an experiment. Please send me an email (to any of my addresses) when you see this Facebook status. Results to be reported later." Of my 272 "friends", 11 responded to my proper.com (personal) address, 3 to my vpnc.org (current business) address, and 1 responded to my Gmail (mixed) address. Only 1 responded in Facebook email. Everyone who responded did so within 24 hours. I kept that status for the whole week, only changing it Saturday morning.

For me, some interesting results of the experiment were:

• It seems likely that Facebook only showed my status change for about a day, and only to a small number of my "friends".
• A few people thought that responding to the status message itself constituted email.
• The people responding were widely distributed among actual friends, business contacts, and barely-known people with whom I have become "friends".
• Probably no one looked at my Facebook profile during the week.
• Facebook users don't think much about Facebook email, or they don't consider it one of "my addresses".
• No one uses my imc.org address any more, even though it was my primary business email address for many years.

It's clear that Facebook's rampant popularity will definitely change the way people think of online communication.

Avatar 3D

Surprisingly good. Almost no gratuitous use of 3D for shock value. Lots of "war is bad and ecology is good" messages, but too many splosions. The 3D definitely added to the value of this movie in ways that I suspect will not be true of the slew of Disney 3D movies that were previewed. There were a number of kids in the theater; this movie is not at all appropriate for kids, for all three of swearing, war gore, and [spoiler elided].

God confuses

But that can be explained.