What I (and perhaps other Troppodillians) am… (should this word be are?)

No. The trick is to avoid the clash in the first place. If you must have the parentheses, consider instead:’(perhaps like other Troppodillians)’.

Thanks to the link to Audacity, may have to give that a go.

You just download the .zip file rather than .gz file and its all good.

I think there is something weird going on with Gzip (which you need to unlock the LAME encoder for EAC). It installs but then does not create an executable file, while other versions do nothing at all.

Is there a reason to be concerned here? Could GNU no longer be safe.

Worried, any help appreciated.

Nevertheless, I bow to FXH’s far-superior insight on these matters (and thank him profusely for putting me back in touch with EAC – I used to use it but had forgotten what it was called and was unable to download it after a hard drive wipe)

So, I change my recommendation to Exact Audio Copy.

Haven’t tried this so can’t speak for it but if it is as easy to use as the audio version it might be worth the money if you have a bit of use for it. Just investigating it has half convinced me to try it (trial version is available).

If you want something guaranteed to record streaming audio, this program should do the trick. It pretends to be your sound card driver, but instead captures the audio to a file, which you can then convert to MP3 or whatever other format you like.

What the . . . ?

My tichy little MP3 player knows about MP3. I know about MP3. Why would something convert things into Ogg-Vorbis? This seems like such a small thing to a geek, but once I see this idea that it just happens to be in Ogg-Vorbis but hey that’s no problem – well everything I’ve ever learned about computers tell me that it is very likely to be a problem, that with a few hours it might not be – but these days I skip things that might rob me of a few hours.

Having said all this, I’ve now read your comment and it seems it may not be a problem unless I go over some bandwidth limit. Hmm – we’ll see.

It’s an abbreviation for “Raster Image Processor”. This is the bit in a laser printer that converts a printer file into the pattern of dots the printer actually puts on the paper. (A “raster” image is a “bitmap” image – a digital image made of dots).

These days every computer and laser printer does its own “RIPping”, but in the early days of digital graphic (mid 1980s), this was a separate process done on an expensive machine called a…RIP.

So people would say “can you RIP this file”, “I’ve just got to RIP it” etc.

In digital video, the terminology for (essentially) the same thing is “rendering).

When you’re converting analogue audio to digital, you’re doing more-or-less the same thing – making a digital file out of something else. So I guess people started picking up the graphics term.

Since then it has morphed into covering any kind of file extraction and conversion (probably because “ripping off” also seems to fit some of these activities).

There, aren’t you glad you know that now?

D

My other favourite (player) is Media Monkey – FREE – cos it plays FLAC as well as MP3 etc. It will also convert from superior FLAC straight to MP3. It will burn too but I like to use different programs for burning and extracting.

Gold Audio Geek Standard for extraction is FREE EAC (Exact Audio Copy)

I use JUICE a FREE GPL Linux/PC/MAC program to auto download podcasts and store then so that months later I can wonder what they are and delete them without listening.