Big Wheel

It's amazing how much better EAC does when I make sure to give the disc a thorough wipe with a soft cloth before ripping. Last night I tried to rip a CCR album and there were tons of errors; today I gave the same CD another good wiping and it blazed through at about 10x. I think EAC may slow the whole CD down if there are errors on the very first track (in other words, it doesn't speed back up again very much even if the rest of the CD is nice and clean).

I don't own it yet, but did buy it as a gift for someone else. The little I've heard is great.

I just made a big alldirect order that included a bunch of OJCs. In an interesting coincidence, most of the ones I ordered feature alto players who are new to my collection: Simmons/Lasha -- Firebirds Ernie Henry -- Seven Standards and a Blues Roy Haynes -- Cymbalism, with Frank Strozier as the lone horn Lennie Niehaus -- Octet #2 Gigi Gryce -- Rat Race Blues

I think the confusion stems from there being no Newton title in the list Scott posted. edit: looks like this is the one-- 1023 James Newton Suite For Frida Kahlo

I just ordered the Octet disc. Any idea why it's called "The Octet #2"? Edit: Just checked and realized it's because Zounds is with an octet as well.

Well, I do have some tapes I made of two August 1998 concerts at the Stanford Jazz Workshop. The first show, I think, was Joe Lovano/Cedar Walton/Rufus Reid/Billy Higgins/Tootie Heath (yes, two drummers, with Harvey Weinapel guesting on alto) and the second was Jackie McLean/Walton/Reid/Higgins. However, I recorded them to some shitty Memorex 120 minute cassettes on a portable walkman, so I'm sure the sound is absolutely atrocious, if even audible.

I think it's probably that jazz fans everywhere are just more likely to be somewhat more irreverent and questioning of traditional authority and institutions. (If your only source about American politics was this board, you'd assume that George Bush was despised by 85 percent of Americans, and a dig through the BNBB archives would leave you scratching your head as to how he was ever elected in the first place.) It sort of reminds me of when I went to London for the first time a few years ago and a the subject of the British royals came up in a conversation with an older guy in a pub. I was expecting all but a few Brits to be fairly equanimous about the subject and was promptly shocked when he loudly proclaimed them the biggest waste of life and money he'd ever had the pleasure of subsidizing.

The program gives me a choice between "Actual" speed, and then a bunch of speeds from 4x to 24x. Should I choose "actual" or 24x? Also, how should I set the extraction/compression priority and error recovery settings? They're both set to "medium" now, but I wasn't sure if that was the default.

Thankfully, it was just that one disc. Everything else I've ripped today has been very speedy--averaging about 5x. Crazy what that one little scratch can do!

Ah, but I'm still only 23. Seems like my weight hovers between 150 and 155 without exercising, ballooning to around 160 when my diet is shitty for long periods. I bet if I went to the gym every day I would drop to about 140-145--and would be so godawfully hungry all the time that I could put away half of that giant burger, no sweat.

True, but Kobayashi also has his special technique, and that helps his speed dramatically. Although he can put away a pretty ridiculous quantity, too. I wonder if my metabolism is still what it used to be. When I was a kid my mom used to joke that I had a hollow leg--because I couldn't possibly have put all that food anywhere else!

They all have their charms and there's no way I could pick a favorite. I think my most lasting impression of each country, strangely, is just a mental snapshot of scenery, often from some high place: --The commanding view from Shirley Heights, English Harbour, Antigua; --Standing atop Chichen Itza, in Mexico; --The valleys of the Bernese Oberland, Switzerland; --Looking down from the hill temple of Wat Doi Suthep, northern Thailand, as a monk calmly tosses water on worshippers; --The endless turquoise of the South China Sea, off Sabah, Malaysian Borneo, as well as the gorgeous foothills of Mt. Kinabalu (someday I will climb it!) I wish I had pictures to do all of these justice...

I've always found the Mr. Cranky review enlightening: Four words: hot naked lesbian sex

Maybe for copying, but I've never had any playback problems with them.

What's odd is that this disc is, at least as far as I can tell, cleaner than most of the others I've ripped so far. There is one one scratch running along the radius of the disc but it's very faint and doesn't appear deep at all. There's also some dust on the surface, but no more than on other CDs I own...guess I'll experiment and make sure that not everything is taking this long.

That thought just occurred to me also. How much did yours run you? Fortunately, EAC has a "cool down drive" feature, so I've set it to cool down for 15 minutes after every hour of ripping. But it's still an awful amount of use for the drive.

Arggghhh....I'm trying to rip Jessica Williams's Live at Maybeck disc right now and it's taking FOREVER with EAC--about an hour per track. At this rate I'll burn out my notebook's CD drive before long. Has anyone experimented with higher speeds and tested for quality? Or should I just suck it up and clean the disc as best I can before copying?

Cool! Thanks. Right now it's running with "%l--alt-preset 128%l%h--alt-preset standard%h %s %d" in the command line. Is that similar? It looks like UNITY didn't rip at one bitrate, so I'm assuming it's also on variable bitrate right now.

Thanks for the tip! I now have EAC and LAME going as well and am listening to a nice clean rip of UNITY right now. I do have a couple of questions: What does that "alt--preset--standard" line do? I sort of sped through the LAME installation and don't really have a good handle on how it works. If the dust and dirt on my CDs causes read errors when ripping, why don't I have similar audible problems when I play the CDs on a CD player? Is there any way to optimize speed without sacrificing too much accuracy? The first CD took about a half hour. At that rate it'll take forever to rip all my discs.

Wow, that site shut down linking to that first pic real quick--it actually displayed not five minutes ago. Random trivia: Though Kirstie Alley played Saavik in The Wrath of Khan, Kim Cattrall was actually the director's first choice for the role.

Try that in a union-friendly environment and see what happens.

Clearly any record called THINK is out of the question in a post 9/11 America, for obvious reasons...

Hal Galper--The Guerrilla Band (Mainstream) James Moody--Never Again, Feelin' it Together Joe Chambers/Larry Young--Double Exposure

Since I got an mp3 player for my birthday, I've been ripping a lot of CDs to mp3 and toting them around with me. It's mostly a great little gadget, with one problem: some of the mp3s come out with sonic problems. Occasionally a few of the tracks will be completely unlistenable, with a regular, rhythmic "skipping"; more frequently there are brief bursts of static/fuzzy noise that definitely don't occur on the original CDs. Is the problem that: 1) my sound card is crappy (I'm ripping from a Dell notebook--obviously great sound isn't a priority with the overwhelming majority of notebook sound setups); 2) the sampling rate isn't high enough (I think right now it's at 128 KBps); 3) something else entirely? I've tried to be better about not doing anything on the computer while tracks are ripping, in the event that running lots of tasks does weird things to the reading from the CD or the writing to the hard drive. Thanks for the help!

Reissued on CD, but not in the US. Thanks for reminding me--I must have forgotten to pack my JRVG copies when I moved back to Boston (damn cardboard sleeves, screwing up my binder system).