My News

A new tour de force in my history of unsolvable PC-related problems! I was trying to get the audio from a DVD Video for improving the pronounciation of German text for actors etc which Line's father asked me for... Well this seems to be easy, if you're not in the middle of the Bretagne without any Internet connection to mention, or in other terms if you have the appropriate tools for this... This, of course was not the case, and I had to use the diffferent programs on Line's Laptop, which were not very resourceful, otherwise, there wouldn't even be an article like this one. First, I had to open the DVD in Windows Media Player... The exercises were seperated into little movies. As there were around 50 such movies, and because the DVD returned after each movie to the main menu, you basically had to be aroun all the time... I recorded with a strange AvRack program I found on her desktop after finding out that the MS SoundRecorder tool could only record for some seconds... After finding out that I had to use StereoMix as an input, the show could begin... This was the easy part! After finishing the recording, and after some frozen 10 or 15 minutes, the program output a 1.17 GB wav file (his MP3 player only had 512 M. Great stuff! Now what to do if you have no encoder, yet the codecs to encode? First I tried opening the file with the MS SoundRecorder that you fin on every XP... Worked fine, but saving it in a diffferent format turned out to be impossible, probably because the file was simply to big... AvRack could not change its format... Cyberlink Powerproducer – no wav editing at all... Then I got the crazy guess that the suspect app NTI CD maker could have such a tool. And it did... After some thorrow inspection, I found that it had indeed a special encoder function (which was difficult to find). Problem was that they had a different definition of Encoder than I had... It could only downsample the music from 44 to 22 kHz and change it from stereo to mono... So I tried both at the same time... After 15 minutes of calculations, the output sounded more like a record player on LSD than the original file... OK, then simply encode it to mono, if you prefer... It preferred, as the output had a decent quality... Open it with SoundRecorder, after 15 minuted : too big... D'oh! Open it again with NTI, downsample the mono file...Waiting...waiting... Output ok! Import into SoundRecorder...waiting...encoding...waiting... Output: horrible quality... Doesn't matter, just copy to the Player... Copy... Waiting... Open the file on the player...No file.. Great! Then another crazy idea: what if the program could not open files encoded in MP3 because it had still the .wav... Changing the file format... And there it was... Horrible quaility but anyhow, still a small success!