Tom & Nan Dot Com

Ok, So it’s been a little longer than I intended, but here is part 2 of this series.

Digitizing Vinyl: Part 1 (and Part 1-A)

Digitizing Vinyl: Part 3

This part of the series will cover chopping the individual music cuts out of the long album sides.  Here goes:

Step 11. (picking up where we left off in part 1)

Find the beginning of the first beat of music at the beginning of the record side and then click just before the music starts.

Step 12.

Click the “Edit” menu, then “Select” and click “Track Start to Cursor”.

Step 13.

Hit the “Delete” key on your keyboard.  You’re deleting the leader up to the point where your cursor is, so make sure you really put the cursor before the music starts.

Step 14.

Find the end of the first song and put your cursor at the end of it where you want the first mp3 file to end.

Step 15.

Click the “Edit” menu, then “Select” and click “Track Start to Cursor” and then CTRL+X to cut the song out of the file onto the Windows Clipboard.

Step 16.

Select “File” and then “New” to Open a second copy of Audacity and hit CTRL+V to paste the first song into the new copy of Audacity.

Step 17.

This step is not required, I do it in case I need to tinker with the audacity file if I don’t like the way the mp3 turns out.  Save the file as “Track01” in audacity’s native format “.aup”.

Step 18.

Click the “File” menu, Select “Export”.

Step 19.

This window pops up:

Click the Options Button.

Step 20.

This screen pops up:

On the “Specify MP3 Options” screen, select the options you want to use to encode the mp3 file.  I like constant bit rate, 192 kbps and “Joint Stereo, then click the OK button.

 

Step 21.

You’re back on the previous screen. Name the file “Track01” and click the save button.

Step 22.

Select OK from the window that pops up, don’t worry about adding tags to the file just yet.  We’re going to do them later in part 3 with MP3TAG.

Step 23.

Repeat Steps 11 – 22 for each cut on the album (both sides) except make sure you name them sequentially. Side 2 track 1 would be “Track06” if there are 5 songs on side 1 of the record…

When you’re done, you’ll have the same number of MP3 files named Track01.mp3 through Track10.mp3 (or however many songs are on the album).

This is the end of cutting the file into individual songs and exporting them to mp3. In Part 3, we’ll tag them and add album art to the files.

This is an added part to part 1 of my 3 part series on digitizing vinyl:

Digitizing Vinyl: Part 1

Digitizing Vinyl: Part 2

Digitizing Vinyl: Part 3

Need to add a couple of items to part 1… this does NOT supersede part 1, it adds a “what to do if”…

I bought a copy of Herb Alpert’s Rise album, Originally released in 1979. It was in the 50 cent bin at Homers in Omaha, one of 12 albums I bought when I was on my trip last month.  The record is pristine.  Initially I wondered why it was in pristine shape and noticed a sticker on the front of the album cover… It’s encoded in dbx.

Not many of those dbx encode/decode units around anymore, right?  Well I just happen to have one laying around… I picked it up cheap at a yard sale when I was stationed at McGuire… you don’t know how many times this thing was almost dumped in the trash bin over the years.

So… I’m in the process of digitizing this album as I’m building this post.  The most notable thing to point out is the DEAD SILENCE between tracks.  I didn’t expect this but there’s absolutely no surface noise from the record:

This section is of the leader at the very beginning of the last track on side 2.  Notice how flat the wave form is before the first beat of the music starts.  There’s no additional audio processing there, just the decoding provided by the dbx box that I’ve had on the shelf in the garage for 15 years and before that was moved from place to place over the years while I was in the military… I’ve NEVER used it to decode anything before today, most tapes were recorded in Dolby-B or Dolby-C so it didn’t see much use… I did experiment with it, but found I couldn’t record tapes with it and expect them to sound good in the car unless the car stereo had dbx decode in it…

As far as digitizing, except for putting the dbx encode/decode box in-line between the turntable and the sound card on the computer, I followed the exact same steps to capture the album as part 1 of this series.

I’ve gone to the dark side… Partly gone to the dark side anyway. I went out today and bought a Mac mini.  Yes, I agree with Nan that I didn’t NEED it, but I wanted it so I could learn all about Mac’s. I still have the Windows 7 64bit beast and I won’t be giving it up any time soon, All of our pictures, my development tools, and my music is on it.

The Mac mini entry level system has an Intel Core i5 running at 2.3 GHz and 2GB of 1333 RAM. FOr the non-geekers out there it’s kind of on the slow side if it were a Windows PC… BUT, I’m told the Operating System is slimmed down. It doesn’t have to support the wide range of hardware that Windows tries to support… It only has to run on systems built by Apple… so, I was initially expecting it to be a little sluggish, but it’s not. It came with OS X Lion 10.7 and hooks to a standard keyboard, mouse, and monitor.  I’m surprised at how smoothly it runs.

So… Now I get to learn all about how the innards of how this system works too, and I’ll get to play around with interoperability of it with both Windows 7 and Ubuntu Linux. Will probably be playing a lot with remote desktop so that I don’t need extra monitors, keyboards and mice.

You can read all about the Mac mini on Apples’s web site (www.apple.com). When you get there just pick the Mac menu and then click on the Mac mini.

I included the picture so you could get an idea of how small the box is, EVERYTHING fit inside of the box.  Power cord, video adaptor, user manual, and the Mac mini.

Since I’ve been asked… Here’s how *I* digitize vinyl… there are many ways to do it, There are lots of different tools that you can use.  This is how *I* do it at the moment on my Windows 7 computer.

The procedures I use make it a tedious process but the results are well worth the effort to preserve all of that keepsake vinyl a lot of people still have stashed in closets. Since there are a lot of steps, I’m going to break this up into three posts over the next week or so. When you’re done you can play the files on your IPod, or any other device that can play MP3s.

Other parts of the Digitizing Vinyl series:

Digitizing Vinyl: Part 1-A (additional info for dbx encoded records)

Digitizing Vinyl: Part 2

Digitizing Vinyl: Part 3

This is Part 1 – Capturing the file and performing limited digital processing.

In this section you’re going to capture a side of an album, process it and then save it.

Stuff you need:

1. Turntable (line level preamp included)
2. Computer with line input (duh)
3. A copy of Audacity (Awesome Free Software)
4. A copy of the MP3 CODECs (Code/Decodes sound to MP3)
5. A copy of MP3TAG

Do this for each side of the record:
If you have a record cleaning brush to clean the grooves use it… The more lint, dust and other crud you remove from the record, the better.

Steps:

Step 1.

Capture the entire album side with Audacity in 1 run. If you have skips you’re going to need to work them as you see fit; I try to manually hold the tone-arm back when I know there are skips, I’ve surprised myself by making recordings of a few scratched albums that you can’t tell were scratched in the final MP3.

Step 2.

Save the file in Audacity’s native file format (.aup)

 

Step 3.

Select the entire album (ctrl+A)

Step 4.

 
Select the Effect Menu, then Select Click Removal, Then select the remove clicks button… Wait

 

Step 5.

Use the left scroll slider on the bottom of the screen to select the very beginning of the album, it’ll be as far to the left as it can go.

Step 6.

Find an area at the beginning of the record where there’s surface noise from the record but no scratches or pops and NO MUSIC. Select a VERY NARROW area in the noise.

Step 7.

Select the Effect Menu, Select Noise Removal, and then click the "Get Noise Profile" button.
Note: if you select a large area of noise, the final product won’t sound very good.

 

Step 8.

Select the entire album again (ctrl+A)

Step 9.

Select the Effect Menu, Select Noise Removal, and then click the "Remove Noise" button.

After the noise removal procedure completes the noise signature goes almost flat as depicted in the next image:

Step 10.

The last step is to Save the file again so that you save all of the work you just completed… Select File, and then select Save.

That is the end of the capture and processing and the end of Part 1 of this series…

Part 2 of this series will describe chopping and exporting the individual tracks into individual mp3 files.
Part 3 will tell you how to tag the file and add album art.

When I was making rules for the firewall earlier this week, I set up logging for when people attempted to connect to our network using automated tools.  Many times people who know nothing about the underlying ports and protocols will use automated tools to try and break into a computer on the Internet; they’re called “script kiddies”  They connect to a machine that has a Secure Shell server running and repeatedly connect to it trying different passwords hundreds if not thousands of times hoping to guess the password.  I have the rules set up so that I connect in case I need to connect from the outside, but if someone uses one of these tools the packets get dropped on the floor.  This is what this set of rules looks like:

###  ALLOW SSH FROM RED INTERNET
# Limit external attempts to connect to SSH to 3 per minute
$IPT -A INPUT -p tcp -i $RED –dport 22 -m state –state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT
$IPT -A INPUT -p tcp -i $RED –dport 22 -m tcp –syn -m recent –set
$IPT -A INPUT -p tcp -i $RED –dport 22 -m tcp –syn -m recent –update –seconds 600 –hitcount 4 \
-j LOG –log-prefix “SSH_EXT_GT3PKTS: ”
$IPT -A INPUT -p tcp -i $RED –dport 22 -m tcp –syn -m recent –update –seconds 600 –hitcount 4 -j DROP
$IPT -A INPUT -p tcp -i $RED –dport 22 -m tcp –syn -j ACCEPT

I chopped stuff out of the log file but kept stuff for analysis. There are some interesting things in this log excerpt that can be further used to create rules for the firewall.  I’ll explain after:

Oct 6 01:35:06 SRC=61.158.99.224 TTL=43 SPT=47787 DPT=22 SYN URGP=0
Oct 6 01:35:09 SRC=61.158.99.224 TTL=43 SPT=47787 DPT=22 SYN URGP=0
Oct 6 01:35:15 SRC=61.158.99.224 TTL=43 SPT=47787 DPT=22 SYN URGP=0
Oct 6 18:14:22 SRC=218.108.0.68 TTL=43 SPT=3091 DPT=22 SYN URGP=0
Oct 6 18:14:25 SRC=218.108.0.68 TTL=43 SPT=3091 DPT=22 SYN URGP=0
Oct 6 18:14:31 SRC=218.108.0.68 TTL=43 SPT=3091 DPT=22 SYN URGP=0
Oct 6 20:46:34 SRC=206.172.28.171 TTL=55 SPT=60242 DPT=22 SYN URGP=0
Oct 6 20:46:34 SRC=206.172.28.171 TTL=55 SPT=60340 DPT=22 SYN URGP=0
Oct 6 20:46:37 SRC=206.172.28.171 TTL=55 SPT=60242 DPT=22 SYN URGP=0
Oct 6 20:46:37 SRC=206.172.28.171 TTL=55 SPT=60340 DPT=22 SYN URGP=0
Oct 6 20:46:38 SRC=206.172.28.171 TTL=55 SPT=36291 DPT=22 SYN URGP=0
Oct 6 20:46:41 SRC=206.172.28.171 TTL=55 SPT=36291 DPT=22 SYN URGP=0
Oct 6 20:46:43 SRC=206.172.28.171 TTL=55 SPT=60242 DPT=22 SYN URGP=0
Oct 6 20:46:43 SRC=206.172.28.171 TTL=55 SPT=60340 DPT=22 SYN URGP=0
Oct 6 20:46:45 SRC=206.172.28.171 TTL=55 SPT=44009 DPT=22 SYN URGP=0
Oct 6 20:46:47 SRC=206.172.28.171 TTL=55 SPT=36291 DPT=22 SYN URGP=0
Oct 6 20:46:48 SRC=206.172.28.171 TTL=55 SPT=44009 DPT=22 SYN URGP=0
Oct 6 20:46:53 SRC=206.172.28.171 TTL=55 SPT=53125 DPT=22 SYN URGP=0
Oct 6 20:46:54 SRC=206.172.28.171 TTL=55 SPT=44009 DPT=22 SYN URGP=0
Oct 6 20:46:56 SRC=206.172.28.171 TTL=55 SPT=53125 DPT=22 SYN URGP=0
Oct 6 20:47:02 SRC=206.172.28.171 TTL=55 SPT=53125 DPT=22 SYN URGP=0
Oct 6 20:47:06 SRC=206.172.28.171 TTL=55 SPT=38358 DPT=22 SYN URGP=0
Oct 6 20:47:09 SRC=206.172.28.171 TTL=55 SPT=38358 DPT=22 SYN URGP=0
Oct 6 20:47:15 SRC=206.172.28.171 TTL=55 PT=38358 DPT=22 SYN URGP=0
Oct 7 06:19:15 SRC=212.150.184.184 TTL=51 SPT=36483 DPT=22 SYN URGP=0
Oct 7 06:19:18 SRC=212.150.184.184 TTL=51 SPT=36483 DPT=22 SYN URGP=0
Oct 7 06:19:24 SRC=212.150.184.184 TTL=51 SPT=36483 DPT=22 SYN URGP=0
Oct 7 07:28:50 SRC=211.118.104.11 TTL=53 SPT=38767 DPT=22 SYN URGP=0
Oct 7 07:28:53 SRC=211.118.104.11 TTL=53 SPT=38767 DPT=22 SYN URGP=0
Oct 7 07:28:59 SRC=211.118.104.11 TTL=53 SPT=38767 DPT=22 SYN URGP=0
Oct 8 09:20:54 SRC=60.191.222.84 TTL=52 SPT=39716 DPT=22 SYN URGP=0
Oct 8 09:20:57 SRC=60.191.222.84 TTL=52 SPT=39716 DPT=22 SYN URGP=0
Oct 8 09:21:03 SRC=60.191.222.84 TTL=52 SPT=39716 DPT=22 SYN URGP=0

If you look at the timing:

Packet 1, 2, and 3 are received before logging occurs
Packet 4 is dropped, the tool waits 2 or 3 seconds and sends another packet from the same source port
Packet 5 is dropped, the tool waits 5 or 6 seconds and sends another packet from the same source port
Packet 6 is dropped, the tool gives up

I don’t know how long the network stack on the far end waits before clearing the dropped attempts from their network queues but it’s pretty effective at reducing the number of brute force password guesses on my machine. Also if you look at the log you notice that 206.172.28.171 made numerous attempts from numerous source ports.  Looks to me like 6 attempts from 6 different source ports;  I think my rule treats attempts from an address on different source ports as separate entities.  Will keep things posted here as I learn more on how this stuff works.

WARNING:  This is a technical geeky post my Internet firewall… friends and family not interested need to read no further…

For friends and family still with me here, iptables is the software in my Internet firewall that keeps the big bad Internet hackers from poking at my computers and causing problems.

I’ve been studying  the docs and looking at other people’s examples around cyberspace and got it working…  One ot the problems I’ve run into was when I tried to ping out to the world.  if I tried to ping www.google.com I got this message back:

ping: sendmsg: operation not permitted

I’m running ubuntu server 10.04LTS as a border gateway/firewall.  Lots of discussion on the net, and a few gave me clues but didn’t solve the problem…  The hints were that it was a firewall issue… ok.. no worries…  here is the code I used to fix the problem:

iptables -A OUTPUT -o $extif -p icmp –icmp-type 0 -j ACCEPT

iptables -A OUTPUT -o $extif -p icmp –icmp-type 8 -j ACCEPT

iptables -A INPUT -i $extif -p icmp –icmp-type 0 -m limit –limit 10/s -j ACCEPT

iptables -A INPUT -i $extif -p icmp –icmp-type 8 -m limit –limit 1/s -j ACCEPT

The problem I had was I couldn’t remember which icmp type was the echo request and which was the echo reply… Time to look at the RFC (for friends and family, RFCs are “Requests For Comments”).  They are the specifications on how the Internet works.  Ping uses a language called ICMP or “Internet Control Message Protocol” and ICMP is just one of MANY specifications out there.  Turns out that the pings I was sending out were being blocked by my own firewall. A ping, known as an echo-request, is type 8 in the spec. The responses, known as echo-replies are type 0 in the spec. I had them backwards.  So I fixed it once I figured the problem out, and set it up so my system can also respond to pings from my ISP but you’ll notice I’m limiting stuff on my input to prevent misuse by people on the outside…  The four lines above do the following:

Line 1:  Allows my machine to send out ping replies.

Line 2: Allows me to send out ping requests

Line 3: Allows replies to pings I send out to come back.  I’m limiting the replies in case a hacker tries to flood me with unsolicited replies.

Line 4: Limits incoming ping requests, I’m limiting these to prevent hackers from flooding me with ping requests.

Now when I send pings out I get the replies back instead of bombing out with an error. I don’t claim the limiting I’ve implemented will stop all abuse that hackers might dish out, but it will slow them down enough so our home network will stay up instead of going down cold.

Hilarious…

I just got an email that LOOKs like it’s from my ISPs tech support stating that my email box was over it’s size limit and that I need to send my username date of birth and my password.  I guess they think people are stupid… It is true that some people don’t understand how the Internet works and all that jazz, so here is an example of a phishing attempt:

Return-Path: <???@cox.net>
Received: from fed1rmimpo03.cox.net ([70.169.32.75])
          by fed1rmmtao105.cox.net
          (InterMail vM.8.01.03.00 201-2260-125-20100507) with ESMTP
          id <20101217020426.SCEQ14403.fed1rmmtao105.cox.net@fed1rmimpo03.cox.net>;
          Thu, 16 Dec 2010 21:04:26 -0500
Received: from fed1rmwml45 ([172.18.140.217])
    by fed1rmimpo03.cox.net with bizsmtp
    id k24R1f00V4hdPEs0424SSH; Thu, 16 Dec 2010 21:04:26 -0500
X-VR-Score: 250.00
X-Authority-Analysis: v=1.1 cv=nEJmMjsgzJU/SHHRi/ff9TR/+4hQZ6PdArDqWXwhaYs=
c=1 sm=1 a=7JPxGY7UWogA:10 a=Z6WwYdEpHsUA:10 a=IkcTkHD0fZMA:10
a=CA97L4c2R2SWvNNgQse4rQ==:17 a=3jeaj8TJhsEvuDWdkqEA:9
a=M0rs3pqq-AeiF7N4e-brOSH1j9MA:4 a=QEXdDO2ut3YA:10
a=CA97L4c2R2SWvNNgQse4rQ==:117
X-CM-Score: 0.00
Authentication-Results: cox.net; none
Received: from 76.163.252.90 by webmail.west.cox.net; Thu, 16 Dec 2010 21:04:25 -0500
Message-ID: <20101216210426.4HQ9A.504169.imail@fed1rmwml45>
Date: Thu, 16 Dec 2010 18:04:26 -0800
From:  <???@cox.net>
Reply-To: ba3@onfruit.cn
Subject: Information!!
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
X-Priority: 3 (Normal)
Sensitivity: Normal

Your MailBox Has Exceeded It Quota As Set By Your Administrator And you Can Not Be Able To Receive Or Send New Mails Until You Re-Validate. ToRe-Validate your account, enter your account informations below"

Email:
Password:
Date of birth:

Account owner that refuses to maintain his or her account will looseaccount. permanently from our site. Warning Email user that refuses tomaintain his/her account we have the account deactivated permanently.

Thanks for using Cox,
Cox Comm Team 2.0.1.0.

IF you happen to hit reply it goes to ba3@onfruit.cn which is where they harvest your email username and password and then lock you out of your own account.  The message certainly wasn’t going to go to MY ISP.

In this case the true stupid ones here are the originators of the message because they can’t spell or use proper English.

Always check stuff before you click on it.  It’s very easy to get a virus or lose control of your account.

Well, I got word from my brother and he seems impressed with the movie that I posted last month.  I need to recapture all of the film because I captured it as regular 8mm and it’s actually Super 8mm.  The sprocket holes in the film are smaller.

I had a hard drive failure over the weekend and had to replace the drive in my primary machine, fortunately I didn’t lose anything.  In an attempt to move away from pay-for operating systems like Windows, I’m giving Ubuntu Linux a serious try.  I loaded it up on this maching and so far I’ve gone 5 days without having any problems trying to find a piece of software to do what I would do on my windows machine (except the video editor).  Will follow up as time permits.

We bought a new game for the Wii called Wii Sports Resort.  Lots of fun… We’ve had what seems like ALL of Chris’ friends over almost every night.  It’s actually fun having them all around.

For now, that’s about it… I wanted to test out a new theme that I found on the WordPress themes site.

In case your Administrator account can’t seem to edit stuff it’s “supposed” to edit…

Just wasted nearly half an hour trying to mod my hosts file on my vista laptop… ya I know… why run vista when I could run a flavor of Linux… Truthfully I have a few Linux boxes here on the network, this laptop is actually used primarily when we’re on trips… and it’s got a cool touch screen and a swivel display that allows the machine to be used as a tablet PC as well…  Anyway, I digress… back to my annoyance for the day…  I tried to mod my hosts table to point to the internal IP for the web server (a linux box) and couldn’t save it now way, no how…  I even switched users to the Admin and administrator couldn’t write over the existing file…  Turns out you have to run Notepad (or some other test editor) as THE administrator as follows:

Step 1. Right-click on Notepad

Step 2. Select Run as administrator

Step 3. open c:windowssystem32driversetchosts

Step 4. Save your file as you originally intended.

Task complete…

Hopefully, someone else will find this BEFORE they run into this quirky situation… The truth is the Administrator log-in isn’t THE Administrator… To find this I googled “vista admin can’t edit hosts file” and I found this out…