[kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: Ripping CDs (and bonus Wheezy Party?)

[Paul Nijjar]

I tried ripping a CD once. Everybody was talking about ripping their
CD collections, and I wanted to be trendy. It did not turn out well.
The resulting CD fragments wouldn't lie flat in the tray
of my CD player any more, and the music sounded terrible -- much worse
than before I had tried ripping it. Worse, I couldn't undo the damage.
Not even duct tape helped. I resigned myself to being uncool,
and dismissed ripping CDs as yet another trend I would never
understand, like distressed jeans or body scarification.

Apparently I am in the minority. People continue to rip their
CD collections, and supposedly some people have moved on to ripping
DVDs and other media. They claim that this has many advantages:
better searching, easy playlists, the ability to play audio from many
different devices, and reduced shelfspace. I remain dubious, but if anybody
can convince me it would be this month's presenters. Richard Weait and
Colin K (aka Mysterious Colin) will demonstrate some techniques
they use to rip their audio. 

Richard has cobbled together old hardware into a monstrosity that can rip
through CD collections quickly and efficiently. He will demonstrate the
hardware and software he put together for this task.  (Incidentally, if you
have never seen Richard present you really want to do so. Over the years
KWLUG has been blessed with many excellent presenters, and Richard is
definitely one of them.) 

None of that should detract from the second presentation in our double
feature.  Colin has demonstrated his audio-visual chops by recording
and livestreaming KWLUG presentations for us. (See, for example,
http://www.twitch.tv/chamunks/videos .) He is interested in
lossless, high-fidelity ripping, and to accomplish this he uses a
piece of software called Morituri, which you can read about at
http://freecode.com/projects/morituri . 

In other news, the nice people at the Debian project will be releasing
the latest version of their distribution (codenamed "Wheezy", which
is not intended to be a comment on the distribution's cardiovascular
health) on May 5. The kwlug-disc mailing list has been abuzz with
chatter about holding some kind of release party after the main
meeting. Details are still a little sketchy, but if you are in a
celebratory mood feel free to show up with party hats and/or goodies
to share. 

KWLUG member Chris Irwin recently got a new toy: a colour-calibration
device called ColorHUG (http://hughski.com/). This device does not
give you a hug, but rather engages in some color profiling, and
generates an ICC profile for your monitor. In the spirit of
conspicuous consumption, Chris is bringing his new toy to the KWLUG
meeting, and is offering to profile people's monitors on a first come,
first served basis.   

The meeting will be held at the usual location: 

St John's Kitchen
97 Victoria Street North
(at the corner of Victoria and Weber) 
Kitchener

There are maps and photos of the location on our website:
http://kwlug.org/node/709 . If you have a motor vehicle you can park
it in the Worth A Second Look parking lot. If you have a bike or a
pogo stick you can chain it to the side of the building. 

The meeting starts at 7pm. Doors open at 6:30pm or so, and we
dearly appreciate those who show up early to help with setup. 

- Paul 

-- 
http://pnijjar.freeshell.org