Apr 29 2011

Ripping woes

Well it hasn’t exactly been the most fun of days in the world of troubleshooting. I bought a bunch of used CDs recently, and decided that I needed to rip them to my new machine. I started on the process, but then three of the new discs didn’t rip. They just sat there. I put the discs in an older computer, and they ripped just fine. I then decided to try them again on the new machine. They ripped incredibly slowly, but they worked. However, they skipped all over the place, but the rips on the old machine didn’t. I concluded that I have a bad optical drive.

However, I just noticed something. My new machine has version 2.1 of Asunder, and my former machine has 2.0. I tried downgrading to 2.0 on my new machine, and the CDs ripped just fine with no noticeable skips. There was one minor one that I don’t think I heard on the older machine, but that could have been due to a multitude of other factors.

After these trials, I believe that the issue may stem from this line in the changelog:

3 Jan 2011 – 2.1
================
…
– No longer passing -Y and -Z options to cdparanoia, for better quality rips. This was reported to freeze on badly scratched disks, but perhaps the cause was different.

I will likely file a bug with the developer of the application regarding this situation.

Apr 28 2011

Epson Perfection V30 scanner inside a VM

I had forgotten about my scanner that I bought a while back for scanning old family photos. Since scanner support in Linux (via the SANE backend) is not all that great, and considering I often wanted to manipulate the photos in Photoshop, I rarely even hooked it up to my main computer. Now that I use VirtualBox for a Windows XP VM, and use Photoshop inside of that environment, I thought it might be worth a shot to attempt installing the scanner inside the VM. The scanner was surprisingly easy to set up under VirtualBox 4.0.6. I simply hooked it up to the host machine, started the VM, went to Devices –> USB Devices –> Epson V30/V300 [0100], and checked it in order to enable USB passthrough. The scanner was readily recognised. For this particular scanner model, I had to install three separate drivers in order to allow for all of the scanning functions (TWAIN import in Photoshop [standard scanning], direct scanning from the buttons on the scanner itself [the event manager driver], and the copy utility).

I like it when things “just work.” 🙂

Apr 26 2011

Thunderbird and external notification sounds

So, I decided that I don’t want to listen to the default system sound whenever I receive a new email. In Thunderbird, there is a field in “General Preferences” for one to specify a particular sound file to be played when new mail arrives. Easy enough. I chose the file I wanted it to play (went and found a .wav file that was tolerable, as it seems to prefer .wavs), and hit “Play.” Nothin’. Searching around the tubes, I found that PulseAudio was required for this feature. Certainly not, right? Turns out that that is only one option for playing a custom sound on message arrival. A more suitable, much lighter, alternative is to install the enlightened sound daemon (esd). In Gentoo, this is done with:

emerge -av media-sound/esound

That’s all it takes. The esd is also required for many other applications sound playback functionality, so you may already have it installed. 🙂