In this post, I offer to detail how to use EAC v1.6 (the most recent version while I wirte). First, to best configure it, then to use it fast with an efficient repeatititve but simple routine.

Exact Audio Copy (EAC) configuration to rip into FLAC

Before working, you need to first configure your EAC copy in order to reach a smooth operation mode. You’ll do this only once and it will stay put for all the rips afterwards. You can use the EAC “Configuration Wizard” (it’s easy to use at first), but I will go through option menus one after the other while highlighting a few critical aspects.

EAC > EAC Options…

I will prioritize quality over time in the “Error recovery quality”. After all, why use FLAC if the data is poorly recovered on old discs? High is for up to 5 batches of 16 re-reads.

The third selection is a time saver: You always want to have the metadata from the database.

Let’s avoid showing status at the end of extraction for the sake of time and efficiency (we don’t want to close another dialog box for each CD).

At the bottom, you can change the interface language, but I will keep English here.

The top two options are simply useless if your CD drive does not support reading UPC/ISRC codes. But it’s nothing to worry much about.

Depending on the use of your collection of rips, you may want to extract a .m3u playlist file. I don’t.

I am personnaly oppposed to normalizing sound (and it is quite dangerous to classical music) since it creates much damage to the low and high sounds that may be importnat on your music. Here we are generating quality lossless backups, not transforming the audio record.

The safer choice is “%tracknr2% %title%” but it’s your choice.

I prefer to store each rip in a separate directory…

EAC > Drive options…

Here, it may require a little technical experimenting.

The top part should have been auto-configured by the AccurateRip configuration. No need to change anything.

Here, CaptainRookie recommends method A, but I think method B is the most tolerant in case of some CDs with very long gaps.

EAC > Compression Options…

Here we come to the heart of things: We want to produce FLAC files from your audio CDs as fast and as efficiently as possible.

All external “FLAC compression” program options have been provided by CaptainRookie. They are safe to use and efficicent. I auto-decreased slightly the bit rate but it seems to be without any observable impact.

“Delete WAV after compression” will remove useless intermediate files.

I strongly recommend to always use the “Test encoder” button before moving to the next tab.

So, nothing original in the last tabs.

EAC > Metadata Options…

I recommend using the simplest opton for metadata: Freedb. even if you may have to open a free account on their web site.

You may have to provide your own free authentication data.

I choose not to enable the last option, but you may want it to keep working even in th event of a server error. I prefer more visibility/transparency; It’s up to you.

How to use Exact Audio Copy (EAC) to rip a CD-A into FLAC?

Now, is the time to start your own personal ripping routine. Nothing original, nothing really hard, not instantaneous, but deeply satisfying and efficient. I apprecaite that this can be done from the keyboard, which is more reproducible.

Open exact Audio Copy (EAC) from Windows, and insert a CD. EAC will start reading the CD, then connect to FreeDB in order to collect the metadata.

It is time for you to check the metadata (track names, album and artist names, etc.) You can immediately make needed corrections.

If this is the first time you are using EAC, I recommend reaching to the Action menu to enable “Append Gaps to Previous Track (default)”. Next time, for the other CD you will want to rip, this option will stay put and you won’t need to go back and click it.

Now, you can start with pressing F4 (for Action > Detect Gaps) and let EAC detct the useless empty spaces between tracks (the so-called gaps). A few seconds and you’re back to the previous state, but ready to rip.

Press Shift-F6 and let EAC do its job. It will ask where you want to store the FLAC files (the waveform). It’s up to you, really.

This next steps is the longest (EAC must read the whole CD from start to end). It may be quite long if it finds the CD quite degraded and must read the tracks several times to recover a perfect image of your prefered music track. Let it do its job and be patient, this is worth it.

When it’s finished, it will eject the disc, play a little sound and wait for the next CD.

Technical thanks

I must heartily thank those who helped me build this guide. All original ideas come from them, all errors come from me.

• CaptainRookie guide.
• TechRadar FLAC rip guide.
• A Quick and Easy Guide on How to Rip CD to FLAC.

Conclusion

Now is the time for you to do it by yourself. It’s not that Exact Audio Copy is ripping your audio discs by itself, or that it takes no time. But I believe that this guide may help you (like it did for me) spend minimal time on this overly tedious task of ripping all your music into good FLAC files.

But when I wanted to transfer ma CD library to a more user-friendly form (did you notice that the CD player has disappeared from the new cars, like the dinosaur audio tape player?), I came to consider that the MP3 recording format has a slight issue for the audiophile (even the amateur): It is a compressed data format, that is reducing audio quality (supposedly an inaudible reduction though). Oh! You can choose the compression ratio (or rather the more imprecise data flow rate in kbps). But I’m still convinced that this a way to inelegantly balance between an unsavory compression and the space used on the storage media.

While it is a pity admitting that after the near-Earth-shaking launch of a CD-A able to faithfully record (within limits sets by 16 bits and 44kHz), here we are back to state where we are stuck with a technical solution invented to solve the problem of many years ago when thumb drives were so small… Today, any recording storage you will find (USB thumb drives, MP3 players, partable discs, smartphnones, etc.) contains so many gigabytes of space that you can store as many albums you’d like to.

So, why not come back to the original quality? This is exactly the proposition from the FLAC recording format. It reduces the original size by 50% (sometimes a little more), via a lossless compression algorithme wich is faithful to the original. Moreover, except some prehistoric MP3 players of dubious origin, no reasonable MP3 players will rejct FLAC files (some other lossless recording formats exist but they less well globally accepted; And we still want the ease of use when got used to wiht MP3).

FLAC: Try it once, keep for life!

• A slightly modified MicroEmacs (coming from Dave G. Conroy and modified by Christian Jullien in 1987).
• I used it as a basis for some time to have my own YR-Emacs (up to v1.30a).
• What appears to be a MicroEmacs v3.12a (original v3.12 from Daniel Lawrence, but slightly modified by me in a pitiful attempt to extend it for my own use).
• Ed Davis addition in 2018: A very old (14 Dec 85) version of MicroEmacs, and a minimally updated version, to get it to compile on Windows 7 and Linux.
  • readme.txt     – this file.
  • uemacs.message – 14 Dec 85 21:31:29 GMT message posted to net.sources, with uemacs v2.0 source.
  • updated.zip    – updates of the same, to get it to compile on Windows 7 and Linux.
  • changes.txt    – changes from original to whats in updated.zip

I am not sure that this is more than history. It looks like nobody would be using these versions today, but I don’t want to let this go. I am mainly assuming that some source code historian would find this useful in 2050 (if this web site survived until then, and the word Emacs still has a meaning).

2020-02-13 UPDATE: modified all inks to make sure that they are HTTPS, in order to avoid compatibility issues with modern web browsers.

Actually, I am trying to make sure that you will get much more than you can swallow here: tens of thousands of character fonts. Not only a bunch of them, but two sources of the nicest kind.

FontPark is nothing less than a 70,000-font archive. You can search, dig, drag, drown into it.

But this is really an organized archive, which makes it quite usable even from the pro designer. and did I mention that most fonts are freeware or free for personal use?

But there are other sources for your character fonts. I found an interesting one because they are free and very accessible while containing real good quality font-ware. Google has built its own web font store: Google WebFonts

What is really special about Google WebFonts is that it comes with an API that most web sites can use to collect the fonts and use them when designing a web site. Actually, it’s as easy as using standard CSS style commands. As in the following example:

body {
        font-family: 'Tangerine', serif;
        font-size: 48px;
}

Definitely good news for the web designers.

You find them anywhere and everywhere, but it’s not always worth the visit. To find a beautiful wallpaper for your computer (even more if it has seevral screens), you need to find reliable sources of nice wallpapers. I wrote down a few of the best ones here:

• The wallpaper section of National Geographic
• Digital Blasphemy (an age-old good source)
• Vlad Studio
• Adolescent Eyes whose work is shown below
• Mandolux, a photographer very attentive to the use of his pictures as dual screen wallpapers
• InterfaceLift has an excellent search engine
• dualscreenwallpaper.com and dualmonitorbackgrounds.com for dual screen personal computers
• MintyWhite
• Social Wallpapering

A simple reminder, if you have multiple screens, your PC will appreciate your using DisplayFusion, the perfect software to handle corectly those large picture files. Like I do it with this photo of a rbown snake eagle taken in Kenya (backlit by the setting sun).

These are language courses which have been developed by the US government and are set in the public domain. So, you can use them as much as you want.

A long list of languages:

Source: fsi-language-courses.org.

Probably the Best Free Security List in the World

Opera just announced that, while they are not the larger player in the browser field, they cornered a nice piece of turf: 100 million users of Opera (about 50 millions on the Desktop, and a 50 million chunk on the mobile phone).

This impressive position in the mobile phone market is probably going to get a serious boost with the other announcement from Opera: Apple just approved the Opera free browser on iTunes for application on the iPhone. Up to now, the iPhone user had no other choice than Safari (from Apple), but it seems that the competition will now be open with Opera mini which is generally considered as the best mobile browser (at least on the Windows-based phones).

I started to test it as early as this morning on my own iPhone 3G-S and I can tell you: it feels great.

• Installation and configuration in a whizzzz (near instantaneous (including the synchronization of bookmarks and Speed Dial with my Opera on PC Win7)
• Overall feeling: Very fast browser, a little jumpy. Sometimes, it even feels more nervous than most iPhone applications, but the operating mode is still 100% consistent with the rest of the iPhone apps, so it feels right)
• Screen surface well used and very good rendition of all the web sites I could rush to.

Highly recommended up to now.

Thanks to Bruce Byfield of Linux Journal, it is now possible to have a relatively fair comparison of the heavy-weight champion of office suites (Microsoft Office or MS-Office) and the young hyper-active challenger (OpenOffice).

Obviously, OpenOffice advantage is that it is cheaper than Microsoft Office: It’s free.

But what are the other ways to compare both? Bruce goes to great lengths (3 pages) to try and give us a balanced comparison around the overall interface, the MS-Word/OpenOffice Writer word processors, MS-Excel/OpenOffice Calc spreadsheet applications, PowerPoint/OpenOffice Impress presentation tools.

Interestingly, and I believe that this is a credit OpenOffice, the differences are really small and the price (free) of OpenOffice will be heavy in the decision.

OpenOffice.org vs. Microsoft Office

By the way, did I mention that I am a strong advocate of OpenOffice? I have been using it both for personal and professional activities, for 10 years now; And it it keeps improving a very good base into an excellent tool (including the full compatibility with Microsoft files).

My preferred Internet browser, Opera, has now reached a new version v10.50. Not only is it still the same nice, friendly and powerful browser, but it packs interesting new features:

• Faster: I did not try the beta versions so I was surprised: It’s fast, very fast. I am not sure if it warrants the “fastest browser on Earth” title that their promoter want to give it, but it is not often that you feel such acceleration from a mere version upgrade.
• Win7-ready, perfectly integrated in Windows 7: Special menus for the integration into the icon bar, a specialized animated icon, optimized window, etc.
• Private, secured navigation windows upon request.
• The widgets can now be dropped onto the desktop.

Since Opera is compatible not only with Windows, but with Apple, Linux and most mobile phones, this is very good news about to spread around.

New features:

• Faster start-up times
• Compatibility with MS-Office 2007 documents
• Better Compatibility with MS-Office 97, 2000, XP documents, encrypted with a password
• Importation of dynamic tables from Excel
• Comments are now possible in the Impress presentations
• Improvements to the Calc cells handling (cell merging, sorting, etc.)

For Windows, Mac and GNU/Linux.

In the beginning was Google which installed its servers in China in 2006. The “do no evil” company accepted the conditions of the government of the PRC and included heavy filtering and censoring of its search results (looking for Tienanmen will produce wildly different results in and out of China). But in January 2009, Google discovered that some hackers obtained some detailed information out of its own servers at this was targeting both American companies and Chinese political opponents or partisans of free speech in China. Subsequently, Google announced its intention of both lifting the censorship and leaving China.

What is still very unclear:

• Is Google really serious about these two options?
• Is the main reason for its ire, the political chase or the technological spying? (the US government including Hilary Clinton pushed hard with Google)

What is clear:

• The breach of information seems limited (only email subject lines have been breached, not contents).
• The hackers were affiliated to Chinese official bodies and did not only target Google.
• The hackers used some social engineering and security issues present in Internet Explorer and Adobe PDF, which were probably known but not closed by Microsoft and Adobe.

So, when such information appears in wide open channels of the world press, what happens? Most experts started commenting on the security loopholes in Internet Explorer 6 (and about Adobe PDF reader, too). Many people observed that Internet Explorer 6 is rather old and it is unfortunate that so many people still use it despite the known fact that it is a security liability when browsing the Internet. With such a rush, some very official people also asked for replacement of Internet Explorer (mainly v6) to be replaced with more modern browsers. Even representatives of the German, French and Australian governments asked their countries to replace Internet Explorer with something else.

The competition has seen this as a godsend since it created a rush for the other available browsers. For example (see the graph on the side), Firefox saw a brutal explosion of its downloads in Germany (nearly 300,000 Germans have downloaded Firefox in four days): about three times more than usual. It has been true in other countries even if it was not measured as precisely, and it has been observed by the other browsers Opera, Safari, Chrome (currently profiting from heavy advertising in some European countries like France).

This was definitely a good thing since it was bringing better browsers to many computers. It could have stayed there but there were several reaction and parallel events happening at the same time. The first one was that Firefox was preparing a major upgrade to the successful browser (in many parts of the world Firefox is now used by more Internet users than Internet Explorer). Named v3.6, this new version is bigger than what could have been expected from its small number increase (from 3.5 to 3.6 should have been a minor upgrade). This major event accelerated the rush, with people looking for features like:

• Built-in skins, to make it more personalized
• Faster, more stable
• More security conscious with the addition of user-level messages about risks, including reminders about what plug-ins are outdated and must be upgraded.
• Visual tab previews, which show you the tabs when you press Ctrl-Tab
• Aptitude to browse without leaving too many footsteps and traces in your PC (good for clean browsing like when you visit Adult sites)

This version is also appreciated by developers who will find a bunch of little improvements (like CSS gradients).

This is not only a great story to read. This is a great browser and you should consider downloading Firefox 3.6 now!

If you are not completely convinced, you should also consider downloading the newest Opera browser. Opera v10.10 has been available for a few months now and it also offering these advantages, plus some neat features like:

• Opera Unite: to easily share information between Opera users and browsers, without using a web site or a share folder on some social network.
• Opera Turbo: to adapt Opera to very slow Internet connections.
• Speed dial: to get a faster access to some web sites you choose (bookmarks on steroids).
• Mouse moves for faster commands.
• Opera link: to share bookmarks, speed dial configurations between several machines where you use Opera.

Opera is clearly my preferred browsing solution (even if I need to test my web sites on everything I can find, Opera is the central hub of my Internet browsing). Go and download Opera v10.10 now.

And, if you are not sure yet, I can also offer the small and fast browser from Google: Chrome. Since it all started around Google and China, it was worth mentioning, of course.

All this has been going so fast that Microsoft needed to do something. Of course, they have a newer version of Internet Explorer (IE8 is included in Windows 7 and can be downloaded freely. But this was not enough, too many people were starting to complain that Microsoft may wait about a month before updating IE6 in the normal update cycle. Even worse, some experts started telling the world that Microsoft actually was aware of this flaw in IE6 for many months. In such conditions, not doing anything usually turns out to produce a public relations nightmare and prepares for bad wind.

So, Microsoft rushed an out-of-band update to IE6 and Windows Update is now offering the correction to all Windows users still using IE6 (of course, you still have to use Windows Update and it is well known that too many people do not have this configured or do not accept the proposed updates – this is wrong and one the reasons so many PCs are infected with Trojan horses, virus and adwares). Now, if you did not move to a later Windows version and if you did not take advantage of the much better IE7 or IE8, it’s time to upgrade your old hag.

We can expect to see a few more updates to this story in the future, but there is a lesson to be learned (by Google, and most Internet users):

Always keep your browser up-to-date and refrain from clicking on any link in a mail message you did not expect.

Additionally, there is a lesson for Microsoft:

Sorry! but even the older software has to be kept alive when you are or have been the near-monopoly on this technology. This comes with responsibilities.

Use Google.

Now, Google is able to search images by size. Just enter your screen size and you will be treated to a galore of images. If you also search for the word “wallpaper”, you are sure to find exactly what you need.

For my own 24″ screen, I could find brightly colored pictures or elegant designs. All designed to be wallpapers, even when no wide-audience web site had found it yet.

did I mention that it also works for dual-screen wallpapers? And did I mention that it’s free? (for a commercial use, this would not be an acceptable practice)

You can notice that these images being free of copyright will allow to produce impressive posters if you agree not to make it a commercial venture. Idea?

I have been really impressed by the quality of such a software program. It may need to get some interface polish for Opera users (I had a couple of little display bugs), but the operation is fully adequate for many projects.

• PDF-XChange (Windows, Basic: free, Pro: $34): loads real fast (much faster than the Adobe viewer), has all the basic options (annotations, graphic annotations, etc.) and the Pro version allows to reorganize the pages of a document or to extract text from it.
• Foxit (Windows/Linux, Basic: free, Pro Pack: $39.99): loads even faster, allows annotations (but only the Pro versio does it without watermark).
• Sumatra PDF (Windows, free): is even simple; everything is done for sheer speed.
• Apple PDF Preview (Mac, free): is very powerful (and it’s free, remember) and included in the MacOS offering; annotations, extraction, reorganization, all is available

I just took one part of the simplest category: Rain drops.

I’m sure that you will find whatever you need for your web site, for your Windows desktop or any other icon-based application.

Then, I checked for Roumazeilles.net itself, and I noticed the same situation:

It appears that Firefox is moving very fast. Who would have thought -a few years ago- that Microsoft’s world domination would be toppled like that?

A rather interesting article of DownloadSquad tells us about the trial version that Nero offers for its Nero 9. I had already mentioned that there are solutions to pay nothing in order to get Nero 8 in free download (see lower), but it goes quite far.

1. You must give them your email address to download the trial version for Nero 9 – What do they want it for? Some Spam database address?
2. The installation brings an Ask.com tool bar – Why do we want this?
3. At the end of the installation, you are requested to transmit (anonymously) some additional information – What data? Why?
4. At first launch, you are requested your email address again – Those guys have no memory, I guess…
5. The free version does only data discs (no audio discs) – This is nothing more than the really free software programs shown below
6. Knowing that, the splash screen start only use is to show you what you don’t have in the free trial version – Speak about teasing me!
7. Of course, the uninstall process does not fully clean your machine – They are not even able to do it, or not even polite enough to do it…
8. With 55MB to download, this is only 20 to 50 times bigger than the real free alternatives!

So, I suggest that you turn to other options that are really free and well-polished:

• Download free Nero 8 CD/DVD burner
• Download 5 free replacements for Nero