Tallitsch

Growing up in the cassette and vinyl record age, I purchased many many records some of which cannot be found on any of the online services like iTunes, Rhapsody, etc.  so I got an ion turntable to help me in my vinyl conversion. It is pretty much plug and play, but I had several issues. First I was using this in a Windows 7 system, so that may have caused one of my problems which was audio input level. I just could not find a way to keep the level at 31, every time I would start a recording the level would jump to 100 and I would have to manually adjust it, which made the beginning of the first song record oddly. Next I had to fiddled with the weight on the back end of the arm to try and stop the skipping. What was happening is that about half way through the recording it would skip so badly I had to stop the recording. I kept adding weight to the needle, but that did not help. I even dug out my high end Techniques turntable and played the records to see if it was the records itself. After further testing I came to the conclusion that the arm of the ion turntable must be sticking somehow as it reached the half way point of the record. So I returned the ion to costco for a full refund. Seeing that I still had my Techniques turntable and a nice Dennon amp, I tried to record to the computer through the amp via the tape out. I was unsuccessful with recording to the computer this way. What I ended up doing is getting a movable magnetic pre amp from Phonopreamps. This works like a charm, the key I found was needing to remove the hum from the turntable, which I did by grounding the turntable properly. So I use RCA jacks from the turntable to the pre amp then an RCA to mini jack into the mic in on the computer. As for the software I am using Audacity, a free software from Sourceforge (a trusted place for free software without ad ware, etc.) With Audacity I record the entire side of the album then I highlight each of the songs and use the “save selection as MP3″ command. You can also do some tag editing with Audacity, but there are other software packages that do a better job. You will have to download LAME for Audacity, but the instructions are on the Audacity site and is easy to follow.

As most tech heads I subscribe to a few feeds on my home page. Today I ran across a nice little program called Synergy, which allows you to use one keyboard and mouse to control several computers. The key here is that it is only the keyboard and mouse not the monitor, so you view the monitor of the computer you wish to control. My test setup is I have my Windows 7 computers screen to the left of my main screen and my work laptop to my right. I hate working on my laptop keyboard when at all possible and my Windows 7 computer has a super small keyboard and a normal mouse. Even though the keyboard is small it still takes up valuable desk space. I have to admit this little program works well, but has some issues. I don’t know if this is just a Windows 7 problem or what. One of the problems I have encountered is that you are unable to use the mouse when a window on the client computer pops up. You have to click on the desktop with client mouse then you can use the server’s mouse again.

So seeing that I am a MS Certified Partner, I get some cool software to mess around with. I decided to try and get a Windows 7 BetaOS to work with my Xbox 360 so that I could watch movies stored on the NAS. Using the Windows Media Center and the Media extender for Xbox, I got all that working together without too many problems. I did get some BSOD, but I think it had to do with either my video card or the NIC. After an update the OS seems to be working well. I did find that AVI’s work well as do Divx. You do have to download the divx player to install the necessary codex for that all to work, both on the Windows machine and the Xbox itself. The only issue I have is with MP4 and that is frame dropping. I found a web site that explains it better HERE. In short it has to do with Zune compatibility and videos need to be between 23-29 fps. 

I have now rebuilt my Window 7 box and am again testing it with my Xbox 360 and NAS playing music(mp3), avi and dvix videos. So far it seems to be working just fine. I did need to install Divx on the Win 7 computer along with DivX Tech Preview. This I got from the DivX site. There is also a very nice video on the DivX site explaining all this. I found other methods that are out on the Internet that say they can do the same thing, do not work with Windows 7.