KWLUG Meeting: Monday, May 6 2013, 7pm

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.

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Note: There will be a release party for Debian Wheezy happening after the regular meeting schedule, at 9pm. We will have our regular presentations first.

This month's presentations both focus on converting audio on physical media to digital formats.

Richard Weait writes:

I recently converted my plastic disc CD collection for use on a full-house
media system. it's nice to be able to play thematic playlists without
changing discs. One thing that kept me from this for years was the endless
time ripping the CDs to digital. The solution, for me, was two-part.
Re-purpose some old hardware, and use some improved software.

During this presentation Richard will demonstrate his workflow and tools.

Mysterious Colin writes:

This presentation will create Archival quality Lossless audio
rips with log files to boot so you can be certain there has been zero loss
between the medium and the FLAC files.

In particular, Colin will likely discuss the Morituri project
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The host for this meeting was acant.