Ripping Yarns
You know when a piece of technology surprises you in a good way?
It does happen. When you get better at computers they don't necessarily get more explicable, you just learn better ways of coping with the problem. Software is sold on bling and features, but it happens with irritating frequency that the basics are neglected. The thing it absolutely definitely has to do is left half-finished. So when a piece of software does something basic really, really well, it's worth noting.This month, I finally had it with CDs. It was the kids. The rate of attrition was just too high. So, have been ripping my music to stick on an MP3 player. Yes, yes, I know that there's no fair use clause in UK copyright law and ripping your own CDs to put onto your own MP3 player is illegal. Somebody sue me. It would be an interesting case. Anyway, sorry, where was I? oh yes. Basic things done well. About ten percent of these CDs are in a very sorry state. Pitted and scarred by the elements: scored by the grit of ages: the very reflective foil rotting away in some cases. There has not been a single one that iTunes couldn't rip. Not one. Some CDs took several hours to rip, but it just wouldn't give up, the CD drive grunting away like crazy, reading a few bytes at a time. Yet the resulting rips are almost perfect. There's the occasional glitch, but it would be churlish for me to deny the generally amazing performance of the error correction algorithms in play. These are CDs that won't play in a AA class Technics CD player with dedicated hardware error correction. Good show.Now, if only they hadn't thought that administering your mobile phone through your MP3 player was a good idea I'd be almost completely happy....
