AUDIO PLAYING, COPYING AND SOUND EDITING FROM THE KEYBOARD BY JOHN WILSON Second Edition Copyright 2006 ******** TABLE OF CONTENTS (To find a particular section or heading, use your word- processor's or editor's search facility, e.g. type ">section 6" to find that section. Putting a > sign (capitalised full stop) before the word section will ensure that you do not stop on an earlier cross-reference to that section. Type the string "Using the Winamp Media Library" to find that subheading or just type "11.5." to find it via its paragraph number. Additionally, all main sections are separated by a centred row of eight asterisks.) Foreword and Restrictions Available Manual Formats Target Group Conventions Suggested Approaches for Effective Learning with this Tutorial Section 1: Introduction Section 2: Types of CD Drives, DVD Drives and Disks 2.1. Types of Recordable CD Disks 2.1.1. Write-Only Compact Disks 2.1.2. Re-Writable Compact Disks 2.2. Compact Disk and DDCD Capacities 2.3. Types of CD Drives 2.3.1. CD-ROM 2.3.2. CD-R 2.3.3. CD-RW 2.4. CD Labels and Duel Case Inserts 2.5. Types of Recordable Digital Versatile disks (DVD) 2.5.1. Write-Only DVDs 2.5.2. Re-Writable DVDs and DVD-RAM Disks 2.6. DVD Capacities 2.7. Types of DVD Drives 2.7.1. DVD-ROM 2.7.2. DVD-RW 2.8. Combined CD and DVD Drives 2.9. CD and DVD Cleaning Section 3: Installing an Internal CD Drive 3.1. Hardware components 3.2. CD Drive Description 3.3. Installation Procedure Section 4: Basic Compact Disk Music Playing Directly from the CD Drive 4.1. Features of the front Panel of a CD Drive 4.2. Enabling the AutoPlay Feature of Windows 4.3. Windows Music CD AutoPlay 4.4. Changing CD Playback Volume and Quality Section 5: Windows CD Player 5.1. Playing a Standard Music CD with the CD Player 5.2. The View Menu--CD Player Volume Control 5.3. The Options Menu 5.4. The Disk Menu 5.5. The Playlist 5.6. Windows CD Player Shortcuts Section 6: Sound Cards and Windows Volume Control 6.1. Sound Cards and Their Capabilities 6.1.1. Types of Sound Cards 6.1.2. What Does Such as 5.1 and 7.1 Surround Sound Mean? 6.2. Putting Your Screenreader to Sleep 6.3. Enabling a Multi-Channel Sound Card 6.4. The Windows Volume Control 6.5. Example of Changing a Sound Property--The Microphone Settings Section 7: What are MP3 Files and Where can They BE Downloaded From? 7.1. What is MP3? 7.2. Where to Find MP3 and Other forms of Compressed Audio Files 7.3. Sources of Legitimate MP3 Listening and Downloading 7.4. Commercial MP3 Download Sites where MP3s are Sold 7.5. MP3 Specific Web Search Engines 7.6. Peer-to-Peer Music Sharing Sites 7.7. The Ask MP3 Link Portal 7.8. MP3 Lyrics Databases 7.9. The Wavethemes Theme Music Download Site Section 8: Using Stand-Alone Encoders to Create MP3 and Other File formats from Standard Digital Compact Disks--the CDEX Audio Ripper 8.1. What is an Encoder or Ripper? 8.2. Why use a Stand-Alone Encoder? 8.3. The CDEX Freeware Encoder Version 1.51 8.3.1. System Requirements to Run CDEX 8.3.2. Downloading CDEX 8.3.3. Installation 8.3.3.1. Installing CDEX 8.3.3.2. Installing the Adaptec ASPI Manager 8.3.4. Launching and Initial Configuration of CDEX 8.3.5. Extracting Tracks to WAV Files with CDEX 8.3.6. Extracting Tracks and Encoding/Converting them to Compressed Formats with CDEX 8.3.6.1. Ripping Tracks to MP3 Format with the Lame Encoder 8.3.7. Where Did My Extracted or Encoded Tracks Go To? 8.3.8. Obtaining Album and Tracks Information from the Online Compact Disk Database and Saving this Information to Your Hard Disk 8.3.9. Uploading Details of Your Own CDs to the CDDB Database 8.3.10. Normalising Tracks to make them all the Same Volume 8.3.11. Viewing and Making More Changes in the Configurations Dialogue 8.3.12. Recording Vinyl, tape and other media from Analogue Input 8.3.13. The Main CDEX Menu Features 8.3.14. Using the CDEX Help System 8.3.14.1. Help Contents 8.3.14.2. Searching in Index Help 8.3.15. List of CDEX Keyboard Shortcuts 8.4. Other Stand Alone MP3 Players and Rippers Section 9: The GoldWave Digital Audio Editor Version 5.1 9.1. Introduction 9.2. System Requirements 9.3. Downloading and Installing the GoldWave Demo 9.4. Launching GoldWave 9.5. Registering and Purchasing GoldWave 9.6. Pen-Picture of the GoldWave Screens 9.6.1. The Main Window 9.6.2. The Control Window 9.6.3. The Sound Windows 9.7. A Few Essential GoldWave shortcut Keystrokes to Get you Started 9.8. GoldWave Configuration 9.8.1. General Configuration and Configuring GoldWave to Work with Screenreaders from the Keyboard 9.8.2. Script, Set and Map Files for GoldWave 9.9. Recording 9.9.1. How to Make a Recording from Microphone, Turntable, Cassette Recorder or Other Sound Source Plugged into Your Sound Card 9.9.2. Recording Streaming Audio from the Internet 9.10. Saving and Resaving a sound File to Different Formats 9.11. Opening a Sound File 9.12. Checking Your Position in a Sound File 9.13. Editing a Whole Sound File and Applying Special Effects 9.13.1. EchO 9.13.2. Dynamics 9.13.3. Pitch 9.13.4. Reverb 9.13.5. Stereo 9.13.6. Time Warp 9.13.7. Sample 9.13.8. Compressor/Expander 9.13.9. Filters 9.13.10. Inverting a Sound 9.14. Editing Part of a Sound File 9.14.1. What are Start and Finish Markers and How Do They Work? 9.14.1.1. Manually Inserting markers 9.14.1.2. The Set Marker Dialogue and Goto Facility 9.14.1.3. Recording and Recalling Marker Positions 9.14.2. Example of Editing Using the Square Brackets 9.14.3. Making Fine Adjustments to Edit Selections and Changing the ZOOm ratio 9.14.4. Recording More Material to the End of an Existing Sound File 9.15. Speeding up Editing by using GoldWave in RAM Rather Than in Hard Disk Mode 9.16. Inserting, Finding and Editing Que Points 9.16.1. Inserting Que Point Place Markers for Quick Re-Location in a Playing or Paused File 9.16.2. Inserting Queue Point Place Finding Markers in a File as You Record it 9.16.3. The Queue Point Markers List and Editing Dialogue 9.16.4. Automatically Dropping Que Points into Spaces in Music Files or at Specified Intervals in a file 9.16.5. Using Que Points to Split a file or Album into Several Separate Files or Tracks 9.17. Normalising Recording Levels with the Match and Maximise Features 9.17.1. Maximising the Volume of a Single File 9.17.2. Matching the Volume of several Sound Files 9.18. Working in More than One Sound Editing Window at a Time 9.19. Inserting One Sound File into Another 9.19.1. Inserting without Overwriting Current Data 9.19.2. Inserting and Overwriting Current Data 9.20. Mixing One Sound with Another 9.21. Changing the Volume of a Sound file 9.22. Fading a File in or Out 9.23. Cross-Fading One Sound File with Another 9.24. Inserting a Segment of Silence into a File 9.25. GoldWave Configuration Setting and Property Options 9.26. Editing or Applying Effects to One Channel Only of a Stereo File 9.27. Noise Reduction and Pop, Click and His Filtering 9.27.1. Removing Background Noise from Your Recordings 9.27.2. Removing Pops and Clicks from recordings 9.27.3. Removing Background Hiss from Recordings 9.28. Making Tonal Changes to Recordings with the Graphic Equaliser 9.29. Automatically Removing Unwanted Silence Gaps in Sound Files 9.30. Transferring Audio from a 4-Track Tape using a 2-Track Stereo Playback Tape Recorder and Separating the Tracks 9.31. the Delayed Automatic Recording Timer 9.31.1. Setting the time and Day for Recording 9.31.2. Starting Automatic Recording 9.32. Using Batch Processing to Convert a Set of Files from One Format to Another and to Apply Effects to a Set of files 9.32.1. Batch Converting a Block of Files to Other formats 9.32.2. Batch Applying Effects to a Block of Files 9.33. Step-by-Step Guide Consolidating the Previously Demonstrated Recording, Remastering and Editing/Effects Skills-- Restoring Your Old Vinyl and tape albums to Their Best for burning onto CD 9.33.1. Remastering Old Tapes and Records 9.33.2. Tidying up and Improving Voice Recordings 9.34. Creating Your Own GoldWave Presets from which to Run Routines 9.35. GoldWave's Music CD Tracks Extractor/Copier 9.35.1. Extracting Tracks from CDs to Hard Disk 9.35.2. Automatically Downloading Album and Tracks Details from the Online CDDB Database 9.35.3. Viewing Music Track Album and Tracks Information 9.36. Joining Files into a Single file with the File Merger 9.37. Using the GoldWave Help System 9.37.1. Help Contents 9.37.2. Help Index 9.37.3. Obtaining Dialogue Box Help 9.37.4. Using the on-Disk Help Manual 9.37.5. Changing the Font and Screen Colours for Help Text 9.38. List of GoldWave Keyboard Commands Section 10: Winamp Lite Version 5.0X 10.1. General Introduction and Configuration for Screenreader Users 10.2. Screenreader Support for Winamp--Sets, MAPS and Scripts 10.3. Winamp Minimum System Requirements 10.4. Downloading Winamp Lite from the Internet 10.5. Installing Winamp Lite and Disabling the Winamp Agent 10.6. Playing a Single MP3 or Other Format of File 10.6.1. Playing a File 10.6.2. Using the Jump To Command to Choose a File for Playing or go to a Place in a Sound File or Determine Where You are or How Long the File is 10.7. Playing all of the MP3 or Other Tracks in a Folder 10.8. Playing Standard HI-FI CD Audio Disks 10.9. Playing Non-Consecutive Tracks 10.10. Playing MP3 Tracks from the Internet 10.11. Playing Streaming Audio Radio from the Internet 10.12. Making Personal Tone Changes in The Winamp Graphic Equaliser 10.13. Making PreSet Tone Changes in The Winamp Graphic Equaliser 10.14. Using the Playlist Editor to Create Playlists of Media for Playing Together 10.14.1. Creating and Saving a Playlist 10.14.2. Opening a Playlist for Playing its contents and Deleting 10.14.3. Changing the Title or Position of a Media File in the Playlist Editor 10.15. The Winamp Menu Structure 10.16. Obtaining Attribute Details of a Sound File 10.17. Winamp Preferences 10.18. Manipulating a File via the Winamp Context Menu 10.19. Sending an MP3 File as an E-Mail Attachment 10.20. Increasing the Winamp Playback Volume without Increasing the Volume of Your Screenreader Speech 10.21. Making Winamp Your Default Media Player 10.22. Using MP3 ID3 Tags to View and Record Track Information 10.23. Winamp Shortcut keys Section 11: Winamp Full Version 5.0X 11.1. Downloading the Full Version of Winamp from the Internet 11.2. Installing Winamp Full and Disabling the Winamp Agent 11.3. What Do You Get with Winamp Full which is Not in Winamp Lite and What are its Main New Features? 11.4. Playing media without using the Winamp Media Library 11.5. Using the Winamp Media Library 11.5.1. Screen View and Layout of the Media Library 11.5.2. Opening the Media Library Window 11.5.3. Contents of the Media Library 11.5.4. Adding Items to Your Media Library 11.5.5. Playing Media from Within the Media Library 11.5.5.1. Playing Media From your Hard Disk or from A CD or Other Disk Drive 11.5.5.2. Playing Streaming Audio and Video Radio and TV Stations from the Internet 11.5.6. Searching for Music, TV and Radio Station Media Files in Your Media Library 11.5.7. Using the Enqueue feature to Queue Selected Files to a Playlist Before Playing Them 11.5.8. Burning Files, Folders and Playlists to a CD 11.5.9. CD Ripping from CD to CD With Winamp 11.5.10. The Winamp Media Library Context Menu of Commands 11.6. Bookmarking Items for Quick Location 11.6.1. Inserting a Bookmark 11.6.2. Finding and Playing Bookmarked Files 11.7. Using Winamp Plugins 11.7.1. How to Convert an MP3 File to a WAV File Section 12: Basics of Burning Data and Audio disks with Nero 5.5 12.1. Introduction 12.2. Burning Data Files via Windows Explorer 12.3. Converting .CDA HI-FI music Tracks to .WAV Files Before Burning Them Appendix 1: List of Shortcut Keystrokes for all Software Covered Appendix 2: Glossary of Audio and General Computer Terms Appendix 3: Other Tutorials Written by and Available from this Author ******** FOREWORD AND RESTRICTIONS I have written this manual and tutorial for the use of blind and otherwise visually impaired computer users and/or their trainers. It is free of charge and only available from its author's Website and from no other distributer. No individual or organisation is permitted to sell copies of this tutorial either as a stand-alone tutorial or as an integral part of any other literary, software or training package. ******** AVAILABLE MANUAL FORMATS The manual is only available in ASCII text format, as a free download from the author's Website at: http://web.onetel.com/~fromthekeyboard This tutorial and guide has been created with a minimum of formatting, in plain text, so that any word-processor or text editor can read it. In this format it should also be suitable for any one to run it through an embosser but, with some embossing software, you may still wish to make some line spacing and heading format changes to suit yourself and your software. A simple construction such as this should also make reading by arrowing up and down in your word-processor less labour intensive than would be the case with columns, shorter lines, and the like. Colloquialisms, such as don't, haven't, doesn't, etc, have been avoided in this guide in order to make it easier to follow and understand via a speech package. Hopefully, any loss of conversationality and warmth will be compensated for by increased clarity. ******** TARGET GROUP Visually impaired computer users are the target group for this tutorial. Keyboard access methods and descriptions, using screenreaders and no mouse or monitor, are the basis of this work. The guide assumes that the user has a basic understanding of Windows operating systems and an understanding of how to use the Internet would be an advantage when working through a few of the sections. ******** CONVENTIONS In the writing of this tutorial, terms have the following meanings: ALT F, A Means hold down the left ALT key and whilst still holding it down press the letter f, then release both and press the letter A. CONTROL S Means hold down the control key and whilst keeping it held down press the letter S and then release both. SHIFT END Means hold down the SHIFT key and whilst keeping it held down press the END key. ALT E, C, and press ENTER Means hold down the left ALT key and whilst keeping it held down press the letter E key, then release both and then press the letter C key followed by the enter key. When a key combination such as ALT T (for Tools), O (for Options) is suggested to go into the "Tools" menu and run the "Options" menu option, the user may follow this method of operation or may prefer to ARROW up and down a menu and press ENTER. In this latter case, the keystrokes would be: press the ALT key and release it, right ARROW to the "Tools" menu heading, then ARROW down (or up) until the "Options" line is spoken, then press ENTER. ******** Suggested Approaches for Effective Learning with this Tutorial It is, of course, entirely up to the individual as to how they glean information and work through this tutorial, but a few suggestions might assist the learner who is relatively new to computers. I would propose that you read through the whole of a section before attempting to practise it to obtain an overview of what is being done. There are a number of approaches which might be taken to make reading the tutorial as a text file and simultaneously carrying out the instructions more fluid and easier to follow. Try one of the below methods. Ideally, if you have two computers, you can load the tutorial into your text editor or word-processor on one PC and have the software program running on the other. You can then listen to the directions on one computer whilst practising them on the other. Alternatively, as is likely to be the case, if you only have the one computer, you could launch your word-processor and load the tutorial into it for reading. You could then simultaneously launch the program you wish to learn how to use in order to practise the lessons. You would have to keep cycling between each running program by pressing ALT TAB in this case. Yet another approach might be to take a tape recorder or dictaphone and get your screenreader to read the contents of a given section or sub-section onto the tape. You could then play the tape back and follow the instructions through on your PC without having to keep moving from one running program to another. Other options would be for you to print out a copy of the tutorial in large print if you can use this and work from this hard copy, or you could get your local library or resource centre to produce a Braille version for you to work from if you have one in your area and you are a Braillist. ******** >SECTION 1 INTRODUCTION This tutorial aims to introduce the beginner to computer generated sound files, including playing standard CD music, playing MP3 music files, converting standard CD, tape and vinyl disk music to compressed MP3 music files, recording music and speech to disk, and so forth. It will also cover an introduction to sound and speech editing with programs such as Sound Forge and Gold Wave. These sound programs will be operated without the use of a mouse or monitor, so a keyboard only plus a screenreader will be used. You may, of course, additionally or as an alternative wish to use a Braille display or screen magnification program together with keyboard commands. You will learn how to find and download MP3 audio files from the Internet and play them on your PC as well as making your own standard CD music audio files for playing on a regular HI-FI system. You will also learn how to convert an MP3 file to a HI-FI audio wave (.wav) file to play on your home or car stereo. You will additionally learn how to create an MP3 file from other formats and how to save audio files to several other formats. Many of the programs reviewed and demonstrated are the most common which are supplied with modern compact disk read/write drives, e.g. the essentials of Nero Burning-ROM. Others will be shareware or freeware programs, such as CDEX and the free version of Total Recorder. Remember, as many of the packages covered here will have tool tips, you should run your screenreader's automatic graphics labeller on them for maximum speech feedback, e.g. INSERT G with JAWS and Window-Eyes and left CONTROL right BRACKET with HAL. Be aware that, whilst you can download many types of files directly to your hard disk or floppy disk (if it has sufficient capacity), you cannot normally download a file from the Internet and immediately get it copied to a CD. To do this you must firstly download the file to your hard disk and then use your CD burning software, such as Nero or Easy Cd Creator, to burn it from the hard disk to the CD-RW drive. These days more and more music CD production companies are employing copy protection methods to stop you from copying CDs. There are several Websites which specialise in helping you to get around this copy protection by giving advice about how to circumvent it or letting you download programs to assist in beating copy protection. Two such sites are: www.gamecopyworld.com www.cdmediaworld.com ******** >SECTION 2 TYPES OF CD DRIVES, DVD DRIVES AND DISKS 2.1. Types of Recordable CD Disks There are two main modern kinds of recordable blank CD disks: 2.1.1. Write-Only Compact Disks Write-only disks, once written to and closed or finalised, cannot be used again. However, if you do not close a disk after half filling it, you can normally write more to the end of where you last copied MP3 or data files but you will not be able to play an audio disk until you close it. An Audio (HI-FI music) disk falls into the write-only category. It is a disk capable of holding digital audio tracks recorded in CDDA format (compact disk digital audio). Such audio files have a .CDA extension. These audio CDs are usually 74 or 80 minutes long and can hold up to 99 separate tracks--but the tracks would have to be very short to get this many on in the 74 or 80 minutes! 2.1.2. Re-Writable Compact Disks A re-writable disk, as its name implies, can be used over and over again in the same way that a hard disk or floppy disk can be re-used. You can either write music files straight to the disk with a program such as Easy CD Creator or you can configure (format) the disk and use it like a hard or floppy disk by creating folders or directories and sub-folders and sub- directories, for instance, with Adaptec Direct CD or Nero IN-CD software. 2.2. Compact Disk and DDCD Capacities Typically a 74 minute write-only or re-writable CD disk will hold around 650 Mb of music or data files. From a music point of view this means that it can hold 74 minutes of regular audio, HI-FI style music tracks. Some CDs, if your copying software and/or Cd drive will support this, can hold 80 minutes of traditional music or around 760 Mb of data. Very recently 90 minute CDs have come into being but, again, your software and CD-RW drive will have to support this new standard. On the other hand, if you wish to format a re-writable disk, in order to create folders and use it in the same way as you might use a floppy diskette, then the resultant disk space is reduced, because the formatting itself takes up some of the disk's capacity. After formatting a 650 Mb re-writable CD, you will be left with around 545 Mb of disk space to copy files to. Another kind of CD, which is a kind of halfway stage between a CD and DVD, is a "DDCD". this is a double density compact disk (DDCD) and can hold 1.3 Gb of data. 2.3. Types of CD Drives There are three main standards for modern CD drives: 2.3.1. CD-ROM A CD-ROM drive (compact disk read-only memory) is only able to play sound files and allow you to remove programs and other data from it. It cannot itself record onto blank CD disks. This is the traditional CD drive which has been supplied with most computers for a few years now. The CD-ROM is the type of drive which you would install your Windows programs and other software from. You can play traditional HI-FI music CDs from a CD-ROM, as well as speech or music compressed MP3 files. The first CD-ROM drives were very slow at reading data from a cd disk but modern ones are much faster. 1-speed CD-ROMs can only read data on a disk at around 150 kilobytes per second and it is this benchmark reading figure which is multiplied to derive the speed of faster CD-ROMs, e.g. a 50 speed CD-ROM would read data at a maximum speed of about 50 X 150 Kb per second. Modern CD- ROMs can read a CD at 50 or 60 times faster than the first drives. Today's CD-ROM drives run at typical speeds of 52 or 60 speed but it is true to say that the increase in speed is not exactly proportionate to the number a drive carries, as there are diminishing performance returns the faster a CD drive is rated. You must also be aware that, when using a CD-ROM drive to burn (copy) audio tracks from such as a music CD to a second CD drive (a CD-RW drive), the copying speed is likely to be much slower than the 40X or 50X speed which can be obtained when copying plain data files. Some CD-ROMs can only achieve a speed of 2X or 3X when copying audio tracks by this drive to drive method. 2.3.2. CD-R CD-R (compact disk recordable) drives have now mainly been replaced by CD-RW drives. A CD-R can read files as with a CD-ROM but, in addition, it can write (copy) music and other audio media and data to a blank disk, such as copying HI-FI music or MP3 files. However, it cannot re-write to a re-writable CD disk in the way that a CD-RW can. 2.3.3. CD-RW A CD-RW drive (compact disk re-writable) is a drive which can read, write and re-write to a compact disk. This means that, in addition to being able to perform what the above two drives can achieve, you can insert re-writable disks into this type of drive and use them over and over again. For example, you can format a CD disk in a similar way to formatting a floppy disk and copy files to it, make folders/directories on it, etc, and then delete these later and re-write other files or folders to the same disk to over-write the space which the first files occupied. CD-RWs typically quote specifications such as 12X8X32 speed. These figures mean that the drive is able to read the information on a disk at 32 speed, write data to a blank write-only disk at 12 speed and write data to a re-writable disk at 8 speed. The speed at which data can be written is also based on multiples of the 1-speed benchmark of 150 Kb per second, e.g. a 12-8-32 speed CD-RW drive can write data to a disk at approximately 12 X 150 Kb per second. Thus, it would typically take around 7 minutes to completely fill a 700 Mb CD if writing at 12-speed. 2.4. CD Labels and Duel Case Inserts A CD label is the small round sticker which you would stick to the centre of the back of a CD with the CDs title, artist's name, etc, on it. A duel case insert is the double-sided information insert which you read through the see-through plastic case, with such as CD title, artist's name, individual track titles, artist's picture, etc, on it. You can create and print out such labels and inserts on plain or coloured A4 paper and then cut them out with scissors or you can purchase specially printed and die-cut labels and inserts which do not require cutting with scissors from shops such as PC World, Staples, etc. Most CD burning programs like Nero Burning-ROM and Easy Cd Creator provide software to permit the creation of these labels and inserts but not all of them are very accessible. You can also buy all-purpose packages from PC World and no doubt other computer suppliers which contain the die-cut labels and inserts plus a round spindle or template to use to ensure that you get your label onto the back of the CD in the correct centred position. You place the label onto the spindle in its centre, adhesive side up, and then lower the CD down onto the spindle to pick up the label. There is also a Website where you can go to create or download CD labels and to produce paper inserts from A4 paper. Its URL is: www.papercdcase.com 2.5. Types of Recordable Digital Versatile disks (DVD) As with CDs, there are several types of DVD disks. 2.5.1. Write-Only DVDs Similarly to with CDs, you can only fill a write-only DVD once, after which it can no longer be used again. The standard capacity of a disk is 4.7 Gb, allowing it to hold around 1.5 to 2 hours of video in the usual mpeg-2 format. You can obtain disks with larger capacities, which are double sided and even double layered, but these will normally only play on recorders which are enabled for playing double layered recordings. 2.5.2. Re-Writable DVDs and DVD-RAM Disks rewritable DVDs can be used over and over again just like a rewritable CD or floppy disk. You can clear the disk by burning its contents off (erasing it) and then refill it by burning new data to it. In this category of DVD disk comes the DVD-RAM disk, which is a rewritable disk but which has the added facility of you being able to edit video directly on the disk. However, be aware that DVD-RAM disks will not work on most DVD players, unless the manufacturer states that they will. 2.6. DVD Capacities A DVDs capacity ranges from 4.38 Gb to 15.95 Gb. This depends on whether it is single sided, single layered; single sided, double layered; double sided, single layered; or double sided, double layered. However, the most common capacities are single sided 4.7 Gb disks and double sided with twice the capacity. 2.7. Types of DVD Drives At present there are two format standards with DVDs, one being DVD+ and the other DVD-. Most computer drives can normally play both formats, but external DVD recorders can usually only play their own format and not the opposition's, although there are some more expensive stand-alone external DVD units which can deal with both formats. 2.7.1. DVD-ROM A DVD-ROM drive (digital versatile disk read-only memory) is only able to play sound and video files from a DVD disk and allow you to remove programs and other data from it. It cannot itself record onto blank DVD disks. This is the first kind of DVD drive which has been supplied with most computers for a few years now. You can play traditional HI-FI music and video DVDs from a DVD- ROM drive, as well as speech or music compressed MP3 files. The benchmark single speed which DVD drive speeds are calculated from is different from that of CD drives; it is a faster starting point. The original 1-speed DVD-ROM drive could read at 1.25 megabytes per second, so 4 times DVD-ROM speed would mean that it could read data at 5 Mb/s. In comparative terms in relation to the speed of a CD drive, this means that a 1 times speed DVD is approximately equivalent to an 8 times CD-ROM. 2.7.2. DVD-RW A DVD-RW drive (digital versatile disk re-writable) is a drive which can read, write and re-write to a DVD disk. This means that, in addition to being able to perform what the above drive can achieve, you can insert both write once only disks and also re-writable disks into this type of drive. If using rewritable disks, you can use them over and over again. You can fill a disk and then erase its contents and refill the disk with new data at a later date if you like. The typical speed of a DVD-RW drive would be something like 20 times 12 times 8. The way the speed figures are written is often the opposite to how CD drives express them. So, with a 20 times 12 times 8 specification, you would have a DVD drive which reads DVDs at 20 speed, writes to write-only DVDs at 12 speed and can write to rewritable DVDs at 8 speed. Note: Some DVD drives only specify two speeds, e.g. 16 times 8, in which case this drive would have a 16 speed reading ability and an 8 speed ability for both writing to write-only and rewritable disks. 2.8. Combined CD and DVD Drives You can purchase drives which will read, write and rewrite to both CDs and DVDs. Such a drive will not normally be as fast as dedicated stand-alone CD or DVD drives, as there is usually a trade-off or compromise in speed with combination drives. For example, a combination drive may have a specification of such as 16 times 4 times 2.5 for DVDs and it may have such as 16 times 12 times 24 for CDs. 2.9.CD and DVD Cleaning Remember, you can purchase special CD and DVD cleaning fluid from many outlets. If you cannot get hold of any of this or prefer to keep your cash in your pocket you should try the following. Always follow the specific cleaning and general maintenance instructions which come with a particular make of CD or DVD. In the absence of any instructions, the below-described means of cleaning CDs and DVDs when they are not performing correctly should work fine. 1. Take a very soft, clean cloth and wet it with warm clean water. 2. Wipe the CD or DVD from the centre outwards. Do not clean in a circular motion, as this could damage the tracks. 3. If a disk is very dirty or sticky, you might also use a little mild toilet soap on the cloth as well and then thoroughly remove this from the disk with clean water. ******** >SECTION 3 INSTALLING An Internal CD DRIVE As a visually impaired person the idea of opening up your computer and installing a Cd drive may not appeal to you. Others may have sighted friends to help them in this and may relish the challenge. This section will help you install a new CD-ROM, CD-R or CD-RW into a desktop PC or at least give you an insight into what has to be done and the components involved. Alternatively, you may wish to take the easy way out, albeit a little more expensive, and purchase an external CD-RW instead of an internal one. This is also the route you are likely to have to take if you have a laptop and not a desktop computer. External drives simply plug into a port on the back of the computer, such as a USB or serial port, if you have a spare one. If not, you may have to purchase a port splitter or fit another port to the PC or connect it via a SCSI card. Whether you connect an internal CD-RW drive via the IDE socket on the motherboard or via a SCSI card in a slot on the motherboard there will be no difference in performance, although the latter method will be more expensive. By contrast, if you connect an external CD-RW using the parallel port, this will result in slower performance than if you had attached it with a SCSI card. Please note, however, that opening your own PC and installing new components may invalidate your hardware warranty, if it is still running. You should therefore check the warranty clauses to ensure that you do not invalidate this, unless, of course, you are confident of what you are doing and not too concerned about the possible ramifications of doing your own upgrade work. 3.1. Hardware Components The three types of CD drives all have the same essential components. These are: * The disk drive box itself. * Four securing screws. * A thin audio cable. * A wide IDE cable about 30 or 40 cm long. 3.2. CD Drive Description For a description of the front of a CD drive, see Section 4 below. For the present, a description of the back of the CD drive box is all that is required. If you hold the CD drive in front of you, with the back facing you, the right way up, the following plugs and switches can be observed: 1. At the very left side there is usually a small square or oblong hole, which can be ignored. 2. Moving right by a centimetre or so, will bring you to the plughole for the audio cable plug. 3. Now move a further centimetre or two to the right and you will encounter a small oblong cavity which holds a "jumper". A jumper is a small squarish, thin piece of plastic which has a thin vain of metal running through it and can therefore conduct an electrical signal. It slides between two small pins in this jumper bay, which grip it fairly tightly. Normally, a jumper will be factory set to the "slave" (SL) position, which is in the middle of the jumper bay. If the jumper is pulled out with the finger nails or a pair of tweezers, it can be reinserted a millimetre or two to the left to place it in the "master" (MAR) position. There is also a third jumper pin position to the right of the middle slave position but this does not affect this type of installation. 4. Another centimetre or so to the right of the jumper cavity is the biggest socket at the back of the CD drive box, which is a 40-pin IDE plug socket. It is about 5 centimetres long and quite thin. 5. Just to the right of the IDE socket you will find the last component at the back of the drive. This is the power supply plug socket. 3.3. Installation Procedure 1. With the computer switched off, remove the PC cover, after detaching the cables at the back. 2. To remove any static from your body, earth yourself by touching the box metal of the PC frame with both hands. 3. Remove one of the plastic covers at the front of the computer to reveal a spare drive bay. There may also be a metal plate-like tag behind this to pull off as well. 4. Slide the CD drive box into the slot at the front of the PC where you just moved the plastic facing cover from and use the four securing screws to hold it in place flush with the front of the computer box. They insert through the metal housings provided in the interior of the Pc case. You may not wish to fully tighten them up immediately, as you may have to slide the drive backwards and forwards a time or two whilst completing some of the below steps. Afterwards make sure that the drive box is flush with the front of the PC and the screws are tightened up. 5.A. If you do not already have a CD-ROM in your PC, you can connect your new CD-RW onto the same IDE cable that your hard disk is connected to. The IDE cable will have two identical plugs near its end. This means that you do not have to use the extra supplied IDE cable which came with your drive. Genteelly insert the second IDE cable plug into the IDE Socket at the back of the CD drive. It will only normally go in one way. This means of connecting the CD drive to your motherboard is the "slave" method, which means that the jumper should be in the slave position. This is likely to be the way it is set up when you receive the drive. 5.B. Alternatively, if you already have a CD-ROM in your computer and are fitting your new CD-RW as a second CD drive, you will have to use the new cable which came with the drive. Insert one of the two plugs at the end of the IDE ribbon cable into the IDE socket at the back of the drive and plug the other end onto the second IDE socket pins on your motherboard. Most motherboards have two IDE sockets which are normally located very close together and parallel to one another. Just follow your hard disk IDE cable to where it is plugged into the motherboard and the second IDE plug connector should be next to that one. In this configuration, you will need to move the jumper from the slave position to the left and reinsert it in the master position. Note: A PC normally only has two IDE sockets on its motherboard (a primary and secondary connector) and each can only take two drives. This means that, if all four connectors are already in use, you will have to purchase a SCSI card to connect your new CD-RW drive to. Warning: Do not place your CD-R and CD-RW drives on the same single IDE cable, as this may cause your burning software to generate error messages when you try to fast copy on the fly directly from your CD-R drive to your CD-RW drive. 6. Take the thin audio cable and plug it into the audio cable socket on the back of the CD drive box, which is almost at the very left. The other end of the audio cable should be plugged into the sound card, if your sound card is separate from the motherboard and is the PCI type, or plug it onto the pins on the motherboard if it is the sort of card which comes as an integral part of the motherboard itself. If the latter, you may need sighted assistance to find these motherboard pins amongst all of the other cables and bric-a-brac as they are only small. Your motherboard manual will tell you which are the correct pins. 7. You should now take one of the unused power cables which sprout out of the side or bottom of your computer power supply at the back of the PC and plug it into the power in socket at the very right of the CD drive box. It should only go in one way round but if you find that it can be inserted both ways, then do not switch the computer on before getting sighted help to tell you which is the correct way to plug this in. Switching your computer on with this plugged in the wrong way is likely to damage the drive and may also damage your motherboard. 8. This is the end of the installation, so replace the computer cover, plug everything into the back, screw everything up and turn the PC on. If there is no blue flash or loud bang, chances are that you've done it correctly! 9. The plug-and-play facility of Windows 9X, ME or XP should find your new CD-RW and recognise the new CD drive automatically. It should be working OK at this stage. 10. If you also like your CD drives to be accessible from DOS, you should install a suitable generic or specific CD drive driver which permits access via the command line. It is likely that your new CD-RW came supplied with one of these on a standard floppy disk. Just insert the floppy and type "A:\install" and press ENTER to install it. If this does not work, consult the readme or other file which should be provided on the disk for instructions. Note: You are now ready to commence testing your internal or external CD-RW drive. You may have received at least two complimentary CD disks with your Cd drive purchase. Typically, one of these will be a standard disk which you can write to only once but the other should be a re-writable disk which you can use to practise on without wasting several standard disks. ******** >SECTION 4 BASIC COMPACT DISK MUSIC PLAYING DIRECTLY FROM THE CD DRIVE 4.1. Features of the Front Panel of a CD Drive Typically, your CD-ROM or CD-RW drive front panel is likely to be the same as or similar to this description, although some very basic CD drives feature only a CD drawer open and eject button. Usually the panel has one or two lights to show that it is powered up and working. Obviously, it also has a drawer which ejects to permit the insertion of a CD disk in the same way you would insert a music CD into your HI-FI CD player. On the left side of the panel you are likely to find a mini jack stereo plug socket where you can plug in headphones. Next to this will be housed a small wheel for increasing or decreasing the volume of the headphones only. On the right of the CD drive there is likely to be two press buttons, the right of which is the CD drawer close/eject button and the one just to its left is the skip/recommence play button for skipping from the current music track to the next one. Just above the close/eject button there is generally an emergency eject hole, which should only be used if the automatic eject button fails. You activate this by inserting something like the end of a straightened-out paperclip into the whole until the disk drawer pops out a little, then you gently pull it out the whole way by hand. 4.2. Enabling the AutoPlay feature of Windows The AutoPlay feature is what makes your audio music CDs commence playing as soon as you insert one into the CD drive and shut it. If you do not want AutoPlay to start up immediately, you should hold down the left SHIFT key and then shut the CD drive drawer and keep the SHIFT key down for several seconds before releasing it. AutoPlay for CDs should already be enabled by default but, if it is not, you can turn it on by: 1. Press Windows key followed by S (for Settings), then press C (for Control Panel) and lastly press S several times until you get to System, then press ENTER. 2. You will land in the "General" property sheet, so press CONTROL TAB to get to "Device Manager" and then ARROW down or press C until you reach "CD-ROM". You then open this folder by pressing right ARROW. ARROWing down will now reveal your single or several CD drives by manufacturer names. With the focus on the one you wish to enable AutoPlay on you should TAB to "Properties" and press ENTER. 3. From Properties you should CONTROL TAB to the "Settings" property sheet and then press TAB until you reach "Auto Insert Notification" and if this is not already checked, press the SPACEBAR to check and therefore enable it. 4. After this TAB to "OK" and press ENTER and do the same on the next dialogue, followed by pressing ALT F4 to exit the Control Panel. 4.3. Windows Music CD AutoPlay 1. As stated above, when AutoPlay is enabled, all you need do to hear a standard HI-FI music CD is insert it into the CD drive drawer and press the close/eject button. It should start playing automatically within a few seconds without you doing anything else. If it does not start playing, just press the skip/recommence play button. The disk will play until the last track has been played and then stop. 2. Whilst playing, if you wish to skip to the next track, just press the skip button. Repeated presses will move you further into the CD track by track. 3. If you wish to pause the playing of a track, you can press the close/eject button once. To recommence the playing of the track, press the skip button once. 4. To eject the CD, press the close/eject button twice. Note: To hear music using the headphone socket at the front of the CD drive you do not need a sound card. On the other hand, if you wish to hear tracks via your PC external stereo speakers, you would require a sound card on your computer's motherboard. 4.4. Changing C D Playback Volume and Quality 1. Whilst a CD is playing you can alter the music volume in several ways: A. If using headphones, adjust the volume wheel to the right of the headphone jack socket. B. If listening to speakers, either use the volume knob on the speakers; or C. If the speakers do not have a volume knob or the volume knob does not increase the volume sufficiently, you may be able to increase the playback volume in a more permanent way via the Windows Volume Control. You can go straight to this from within the menus of some music playing programs, or through the System Tray or by navigating to it via: C:\Program Files\Accessories\Multimedia\Volume control in Windows 95, or C:\Program Files\Accessories\Entertainment\Volume Control in Windows 98. (See Section 6 below to discover how to use the Volume Control). 2. You can also make adjustments in volume and quality of music output from the Multimedia section of the Control Panel. Do this by: A. Press Windows Logo key followed by S (for Settings) and then C (for control Panel). B. Then press M several times until Multimedia is selected, then press ENTER to open it. C. You will fall on the "Audio" property sheet. TAB down this and make your desired changes to the "playback volume" and Recording Volume" with the ARROW up and down and PAGE up and down keys. D. Then TAB to "Preferred Quality" and ARROW through the choices. You should set this to CD quality for best quality playback results. E. Press ENTER on "Apply" and then press CONTROL TAB to look at the other three property sheets in this multi-sheet dialogue box. They include "Video", "MIDI", "CD Music" and "Advanced". Make any changes you think would suit your particular needs and set-up. For instance, if you can make use of large scale pictures/print on a monitor, you might wish to ARROW to the "Double Original Size" option in the "Video" sheet and therefore select this. In the "Advanced" sheet you have a tree of multimedia audio, video, mixer devices, etc, which you can change, select, view the properties of or remove, as you like, but you are likely to have to go into navigation or mouse mode to be able to use your right mouse key to open and thus view or change any of a particular device driver's properties. F. You should ensure that, in the "CD Music" sheet, "Headphones" is set to 100 per cent by pressing PAGE down to achieve this. G. Then TAB to "OK" and press ENTER to finish. ******** >SECTION 5 WINDOWS CD PLAYER If you are still running a copy of Windows 98(SE) or earlier, a basic but more flexible way of playing your music CDs rather than just using the CD drive front panel buttons is to launch the Windows CD Player to do this. You can then use keyboard shortcuts to play, skip, repeat play, pre-select which tracks to play and which to never play, etc. From Windows XP, however, the CD Player's duties have been taken over by the Windows Media Player and the old style CD Player is no longer supplied. The most up-to-date version of the Windows Media Player is a much more sophisticated and fully-featured piece of media playing and recording software. This section is about the older CD Player only and not Windows Media Player, which I may cover in some depth in a future edition of my series of audio sounds tutorials. If you do not have the CD Player in your Entertainment sub-folder, just skip this section, unless you simply wish to skim it out of interest. 5.1. Playing a Standard Music CD with the CD Player 1. Launch the CD Player from an icon on your Desktop if you know how to place one there. Otherwise, run it by navigating to it via: pressing Windows Logo key, then P (for Program Files), A (for accessories), E (for Entertainment) and lastly C (for CD Player) The player will load. In Windows 95 the path is slightly different, as you are going to: Program Files\Accessories\MultiMedia\CD Player 2. With a CD in the drive, press CONTROL P to commence playing from track one. 3. To pause the current track, press CONTROL P again. Another press of CONTROL P will recommence play. 4. To stop play, press CONTROL S. 5. To jump to a future or earlier track, press ALT K and then ARROW down or up. You are in a list of all the tracks on the CD, so if you wish to move to a track several further on, just keep pressing the down ARROW until you reach it. Each track as you press the ARROW keys will automatically start playing for you. 6. Pressing the TAB key will cycle you through several buttons which hold some useful information, such as the name of the artists on the CD (if you have labelled this CD with this information in the Playlist dialogue), the number of the current track, etc, but most of the rest of these buttons will be found to be of little use, as pressing ENTER on them does not achieve anything unless you go to the trouble of using your screenreader's mouse or navigation mode. Whilst in the "Artist" field, you can ARROW up and down your CD drives if you have more than one and change from playing one CD to another in a second CD drive. Instead of TABBING through to the "Artist" field, a press of the A key will take you straight there. 7. To exit and close the CD Player, press ALT F4. 5.2. The View Menu--CD Player Volume Control Whilst the CD Player is running, pressing ALT V then V again takes you to the Windows Volume Control, where you can increase the default volume of music output if it is not already on full. This may or may not be necessary, depending on the type and quality of your sound card and speakers. If the volume knob on your speakers will not give sufficient volume, have a look in the Volume Control as follows: 1. As mentioned, press ALT V, V to open up the Volume Control. 2. Then press SHIFT TAB several times to the "CD Audio" Volume field and Page UP to increase the volume in large jumps or use the up ARROW key to move in smaller stages. 3. A further press of SHIFT TAB takes you to the "Balance" control where you can use ARROW or Page keys to change the sound balance in the speakers.Fifty per cent is obviously the correct balance ratio. Do not check any of the "Mute" buttons or you may loose the sound all together, possibly including the sound to your software speech synthesiser if you use one! 4. To leave the Volume Control and keep your new settings, just press ALT F4. You can also find other viewing features in the View Menu by pressing ALT V and pressing ENTER on any of the options, when things like the amount of time already played of a track or disk will be displayed on screen, or you can change this to the time still left, or you can turn on or off on-screen disk and track information. You will have to go into mouse mode to view most of these details. 5.3. The Options Menu This is where you can make selections for how your CDs will play, in a similar way to what you can do on a traditional HI-FI CD player. For instance, press ALT O (for Options) and then by pressing ENTER on "Random Order" you will check this and this will mean that all of your CD disks will now play with the tracks out of their normal disk order, randomly. After doing this, check the result by pressing ALT K to get to the tracks list and ARROW down this to observe that the tracks are no longer in track 1, 2, 3, etc, order. Some of the other options in the Options Menu are "continuous Play" and "Intro Play", where only the first 10 or so seconds of each track on a disk will play, perhaps useful if your looking for a particular track and can't remember its title. There is also "Preferences" in the Options Menu, where the way that disks play can be further fine tuned. For example, "Show Tool Tips" may be checked and you may wish to press SPACEBAR on this to uncheck it so that your screenreader is not distracted by such messages. The "Intro Play Length" editfield is also found here where you can change the default 10 seconds that IntroPlay will play a track for to any other value you personally prefer. Just use the up or down ARROW keys to change the time. TAB to "OK" to save any changes you have made. 5.4. The Disk Menu This only contains "Exit" and "Edit Playlist" but the latter is of interest. The Playlist is where you can ensure that CD Player can recognise any Music CD you place in the CD drive and all of the tracks on it or just your own selection of tracks, if you wish to exclude a few tracks which you do not like so will never wish to hear. 5.5. The Playlist To use the Playlist: 1. Place a CD in the CD drive and press ALT D followed by ENTER to bring up the Edit Playlist dialogue. 2. You will fall in the "Artist" editfield, so type the name of the group or individual who recorded the music CD. 3. Press TAB to the next editfield, which is "Title", and type the CD title in here. 4. Press TAB until you reach the "Available Tracks" list and use the ARROW up and down keys to put focus on one of the tracks you wish to have played when you play this CD. The tracks will be named "Track 1", "Track 2", etc, at this stage but you can replace these default titles with the correct track names if you wish, as directed in 7 below. 5. Press TAB to the "Add" button and press ENTER or just press ALT D to achieve the same thing. 6. You can carry on in this way for all of the tracks you wish to have played regularly on a CD. Then TAB to "OK" and press ENTER. 7. If you wish to replace the default track numbers with the actual track titles, you can also do this during the track selection stage at 4 above by TABBING on once to an editfield and replacing the track name/number shown there. Do this by pressing BACKSPACE and then typing the actual track title in. Then press TAB to the "Set Name" button and press ENTER. 8. There are also "Clear All", "Remove" and "Reset" buttons which appear at certain stages to remove track selections, put things back to how they first started, etc. 9. At any time you can go into this Playlist dialogue and observe the tracks which you have selected for automatic play by TABBING to the "Playlist" list of tracks. 5.6. Windows CD Player Shortcuts Press the letter A: To jump to the "Artist" field in order to be able to ARROW up and down your several CD drives, if you have more than one, to change from playing one CD to another in a different drive. Press ALT F4: To exit the CD Player. Press ALT K: To jump to a past or future track with the ARROW keys. Press TAB: To cycle through buttons displaying information such as CD title, artists name, title of current playing track, and so on. Press CONTROL P: To start a CD playing from track one. Pressing CONTROL P again will pause play. Another Press of CONTROL P will re-start play. Press CONTROL S: To stop play. ******** >SECTION 6 SOUND CARDS AND WINDOWS VOLUME CONTROL 6.1. Sound Cards and Their Capabilities The many different sound cards can have massively different input and output abilities and may support varying sets of surround speakers. 6.1.1. Types of Sound Cards For best results, you will need a good quality sound card. The more up-to-date Creative Labs Sound Blaster cards should meet this requirement, such as the Sound Blaster 128 or 1024 Live (preferably the latter as it is multi-channel whereas the former is not). Even more recent and better Sound Bllaster cards are the Sound Blaster 5.1, the Audigy I and the Audigy II cards, which provide such as extra speeker support and greater depth of sound sampling. Another range of good multi-channel sound cards is made by Roland and there are also the Turtle Beach Montigo and Santa Cruz cards. You can listen to music and voice recordings with more basic 16- bit sound cards but the quality may be substandard. You can also make music and voice recordings with basic 16-bit sound cards but, again, the quality of the recording may be affected, for instance, you may get more background hiss and you may find that the volume of the recording, even with the Volume Control levels on full, is well below that obtained with a better quality card. Using the option to increase the volume of a recording after it has been made, which some recording programs provide, may succeed in bringing the volume of a recording up but you may also experience a proportionate increase in background noise, crackle and hiss. This type of substandard audio input recording result is often found with the on-the-motherboard varieties of 16-bit sound cards, so you may have to upgrade these to Sound Blaster Live or equivalent standards. Just because your software synthesiser works well and is plenty loud enough through a basic sound card does not mean that music or voice recordings will be as loud or clear. Note: Some sound cards may not allow a software synthesiser and music or speech from such as an MP3 file to work together. This may be because your sound card is single-channel, not the recommended multi-channel type. In this case, you would have to unload your screenreader before the music or other sound file can play, e.g. with HAL do this with CONTROL SPACEBAR, then ALT SPACEBAR followed by Q and then ENTER; with JAWS use INSERT F4 and then press ENTER; and with Window-Eyes use CONTROL \, then ALT F4, X and ENTER; after first placing focus on the link you wish to play, then press ENTER to hear the audio content. Alternatively, if your screenreader has a "sleep" mode, you may find that using this has the desired result (see "Putting your Screenreader to Sleep" in the section below entitled "Putting Your Screenreader to Sleep"). 6.1.2. What Does Such as 5.1 and 7.1 Surround Sound Mean? A couple of years ago sound cards were produced with 5.1 surround sound capabilities, e.g. the Sound Blaster 5.1 card. This means that you have a six speaker system with two stereo speakers in front of you, two stereo speakers behind you and a bass speaker located anywhere else in the room you like. the sixth speaker is the dialogue speaker, which you would normally place at the source of any speech which may come through your system, e.g. on top of or underneath your TV set. More recently, 7.1 systems have been supported by sound cards, such as the Audigy II and the Video Logic Sonic Explosion DVD sound and video cards. A 7.1 system replicates the type of all- round sound you would expect to hear at a cinema and has the same speaker configuration as that just described for a 5.1 system but also features two more stereo speakers, one immediately to your left and another to your right. You can purchase the above-mentioned types of 7.1 surround sound sound and video cards from such as: Audigy II: WWW.Creative.com Video Logic: www.puredigital.com Turtle Beach: www.turtlebeach.comYahamah: www.yamaha.com Terratec: www.en.terratec.net Yamaha: www.yamaha.com 6.2. Putting Your Screenreader to Sleep You may wish to silence your screenreader by permanently putting it to "sleep" whenever a particular program is launched rather than unloading it if it prevents you from getting the required sound card throughput or if the screenreader speech chatters at the same time as you are trying to listen to other audio output. This may be especially annoying if you are trying to record speech onto disk via your microphone in programs such as Windows Sound Recorder and Sound Forge. You should consult your screenreader manual to find out how to do this. However, I have provided below an example of how this is done with the JFW screenreader: 1. Launch your audio program, e.g. RealPlayer, and then press INSERT F2 to load the JAWS Manager. 2. From the list provided, press ENTER on "Configuration Manager", which will open the RealPlayer configuration file. 3. Press ALT S (for Set Options" and ARROW up to "Advanced Options" and press ENTER. 4. In the Advanced Options dialogue you will immediately be on "Sleep Mode Enable". You should press the SPACEBAR to enable this and therefore reduce the chance of JFW speaking and interrupting the flow of streaming audio. 5. TAB to "OK" and press ENTER twice, followed by CONTROL S to save the change and then ALT F4 to leave the manager. You will have to unload and then reload JFW to have the changes recognised. 6. If you wish to return to how things were before, you should, without Realplayer running, open and edit the realplay.jcf file in a plain text editor such as Notepad (not in a word-processor unless you then know how to save the result as a text file) and change the line which reads "sleepmode=1" to "sleepmode=0", save the file and then unload and reload JFW. The realplay.jcf file is found in the folder: c:\jaws37\settings\enu\realplay.jcf Note: Putting JAWS into sleep mode will, of course, drastically reduce the amount of screenreader feedback which you get whilst using such programs and you will have to be able to remember the keystrokes to make things work, so some users may not be happy with this and may rather leave their screenreader as it is and just unload it at times when it conflicts with other sound files. You may also find the JAWS INSERT S hot key of use as it toggles between speak all changes on the screen, speak highlighted only and speak none modes. Warning: Do not mess with these settings if you are likely to be unable to reverse the above procedure or if you are not comfortable with reinstalling your screenreader should you get into trouble. 6.3. Enabling a Multi-Channel Sound Card Somewhat in contrast to what we have just done above, but just as essential for general PC use, a multi-channel sound card may need to be enabled before it will work properly. With JFW, to ensure that a multi-channel sound card works properly, allowing your synthesiser and other sounds to be heard simultaneously when this is desirable, rather than operating as a single-channel card: 1. With no program running, press INSERT F2 again and hit ENTER on "Configuration Manager". 2. Press CONTROL SHIFT D to open the "default.jcf" file. 3. Press ALT S (for Set Options) and then S (for Synthesiser Options). 4. TAB to "Allow Wave Files with Software Synthesisers" and if it is not already selected, press SPACEBAR to check it on. 5. Tab to "OK" and press ENTER. 6. To save this change and leave the manager, Press CONTROL s, then ENTER followed by ALT F4. Now unload and then reload JFW to have the saved changes recognised. Note: Obviously, this type of enabling will not be necessary if your sound card already works satisfactorily with both your synthesiser and other sound files. 6.4. The Windows Volume Control You can enter the Volume Control by going to the Windows System Tray (if your screenreader is able to take you there, e.g. INSERT F11 with JAWS, INSERT S or Windows key B with WE or left SHIFT Numpad SLASH with HAL 5) or by: pressing Windows Logo key, P (for Program Files, A (for Accessories), M (for Multimedia) and then V (for Volume Control) in Windows 95; or Pressing Windows Logo key, P (for Program Files), A (for Accessories), E (for Entertainment) and then V (for Volume Control) in Windows 98 and ME. You can also open the Volume Control via the Windows Run dialogue by pressing Windows key and R and then typing into the editfield which opens up: sndvol32 and pressing ENTER. When in the Volume Control you can change the various levels of volume, the balance between left and right channels and mute a particular type of sound if you do not want it coming through. You can do this for various types of input and output media, such as the volume of sound out of your speakers, the volume of ringing tone you hear when your modem dials, the volume of your line in and microphone sockets at the back of your computer where the sound card interfaces with the outside world, etc. When you first enter the Volume Control, you can TAB through several balance and volume adjusters. The most important for output and input of audio data are "CD Audio Volume" which, depending on the quality of your sound card, you may need on between 70 and 100 per cent. The "Volume" option may also need adjusting, depending on your sound card and how loud you want output volume as against input volume, e.g. if you are using a headset with its own microphone, you may wish to have the "Playback" setting lower for your ears and the "Microphone" setting louder for any voice recording you are doing. 6.5. Example of Changing a Sound Property--The Microphone settings To change the microphone settings you would: 1.A. Launch the Volume Control by the Program Files\ path method outlined above; or 1.B. If you elect to launch the Volume Control via the System Tray, you should press ENTER on the (Open Volume Control" choice. Do not get side tracked at this stage with this--come back to it later--but Note that there is also an "Adjust Audio Properties" choice in here as well which, if you press ENTER on it, will give you a list of five or so preferred recording devices, such as SB Live, Use any available device, game compatible device, etc. In this second choice dialogue, you can also press ENTER on "Playback Advanced Properties" and select from several types of playback speaker types, such as Desktop stereo speakers, Stereo headphones, laptop mono speakers, etc, and you can CONTROL TAB to a "Performance" property sheet to reduce speaker performance playback demands to less than 100 per cent if things are not working as well as you would like because your computer is not powerful enough to take the maximum settings. You can also TAB to a slider to move the "Sample Rate Conversion" from zero to either 50 or 100 per cent to further enhance sampling conversion quality but be aware that increasing the levels in here can also slow down the speed of response of your computer due to extra CPU overhead. Experiment with the various options to see what is best for your PC set-up. 2. Press the ALT key to open the "Options" menu. Then ARROW down to "Properties" and press ENTER. 3. You will land on the line which tells you the type of sound card in your PC which is being used, e.g. SB Live . . .. 4. Press TAB once to "Adjust Volume For" and the first option will be "Playback". ARROW down once to "Recording" and then TAB once to a list of recording options. 5. ARROW down this list to "Microphone", ensure that it is checked (pressing SPACEBAR will do this if it is not already checked) and then TAB to "OK" and press ENTER. 6. You will now have entered the Microphone adjustment controls where you can make alterations to the input volume for your microphone input to the jack on the sound card at the back of the computer. If you are not already on it, TAB forward to "Microphone Volume" and view its volume level, increasing or decreasing this as suits your PC set-up, microphone and sound card sensitivity. Use the PAGE up or down and ARROW up or down keys to increase or decrease this. ARROWING or PAGING up increases the volume, although some screenreaders may announce decreasing levels of calibration, making this a little misleading. 7. Then TAB to the "Select" button and press the SPACEBAR to turn it on if it is not already selected. 8. Sometimes you can just TAB again at this stage to the "Advanced" button and press ENTER; otherwise, see how to get into advance settings in 9 below. In here you can make a few further fine advanced adjustments, such as checking on the "Mik Boost (20 Db)" box for further volume increases if these are required. Then TAB to "Close" and press ENTER. 9. If you did not find the "Advanced" button as described above in 8, you can now press ALT O (for Options) again and press ENTER on "Advanced" to enable the advanced features, which may vary depending on the type of sound card you have. If you do not enter the advanced features box when you do this, it is because the advanced features are already enabled. In this case, you can enter the Advanced dialogue to view the Mik boost feature by pressing ALT and then ARROWING to "Advanced" and pressing ENTER or SPACEBAR. 10. Lastly, press ALT O (or just ALT if ALT O does not work) and ARROW to "Exit" and press ENTER to finish. Note 1: Some of the features in the Volume Control can vary, depending on the type of sound card your PC is fitted with, so some may have, for instance, more "Advanced" features and some may have none. The above example was done with a Sound Blaster Live 1024 card fitted. Note 2: You will normally use the microphone jack plug on your sound card and the microphone settings in the Volume Control for your mic and the line in jack plug and line in setting in the Volume Control for inputting sound data such as from a tape recorder, record deck, mini Cd player, etc, if you have a good sound card. The mic input is usually much more sensitive than the line in socket. However, if you have a poorer sound card, such as an on-the-motherboard type, you may find the line in socket not sensitive enough and so wish to use the mic jack socket for both mic and tape recorder input. You will have to experiment with sockets and various volume levels until you find out what is best for your requirements and sound card. Note 3: If you would like to experiment with a different way of manipulating the Volume Control, which may suit some screenreaders, you can try a utility called "Sound Control Plus". This is downloadable from: http://software.reallyeffective.co.uk ******** >SECTION 7 WHAT ARE MP3 FILES AND WHERE CAN THEY BE DOWNLOADED FROM? 7.1. What is MP3? Basically, an MP3 file is a compressed audio file, making it more suitable in size for storing on your hard disk and for up loading to and downloading from the Internet. An MP3 file can be compressed to around one tenth or one twelfth of its original size without seriously affecting its musical sound quality, but there are different intensities of compression, depending upon the quality of the sound file you wish to create. MP3 files have the extension ".MP3". MP3 is the layer 3 audio equivalent of the MPEG video standard set by the Motion Picture Experts Group. The first MP3 files were copied at a constant bit rate (C.B.R.), meaning that the same consistent bit rate through the whole file is used during the encoding. More recently, MP3 V.B.R. (variable bit rate) has become available, which allows you to select the bit rate to be used so that different sections of a sound file will be allocated different bit rates, according to how complicated given parts of an audio file are, more complicated parts of the file being allocated higher bit rates than simple parts. This helps to ensure that distortion does not occur or is minimised in parts of a sound file which feature much sound activity, such as when there is much singing and instrument playing in a particular section of a music file. In a similar vein to V.B.R. there is also A.B.R. (average bit rate) which also averages out the bit rate so that more complicated parts of an audio file are allocated more bits than simpler parts. In 2005 the creators of the first MP3 encoder (Fraunhofer of Germany) developed a surround-sound version for the MP3 audio format for 5.1 surround-sound systems. This MP3 encoder/player features a multi-channel format and you can download an evaluation copy from: www.mp3surround-format.com In recording this encoder will create five or six channel.wav files. 7.2. Where to Find MP3 and Other forms of Compressed Audio Files There are thousands and thousands of sites on the Internet which hold MP3 files, of news items, shows, tutorials in speech and, of course, many music tracks. "MP3" has been the most frequent search request typed into Internet search engines for the past several years. Many MP3 music sites are perfectly legitimate and the music held there is freely and legitimately downloadable, e.g. from www.mp3.com. However, there are many sites of doubtful legitimacy which provide either directly or indirectly MP3 sound files which contravene the artists' copyrights, e.g. Morpheus and Kazaa. I have no intention of moralising on these points. You will have to follow your own inclinations and curiosities. Below is a small selection of both legitimate and not so legitimate Websites for you to browse. It is up to you whether you participate in their offerings or not. There is one point about up and downloading of MP3 files, however, which should be mentioned. Despite the fact that MP3s are normally compressed files to around 25 to 8 per cent of their original size, they are still, nonetheless, substantial files to download. With a standard 56K modem, it could take you around four hours to download an album of MP3 music which would play for an hour on your PC. For quick up and downloading of MP3s you need an Internet connection like universities and commercial companies use, such as a T1 or T3 connection. Otherwise, a home user could invest in a broadband ISDN or DSL high-speed connection, if they were serious about regularly downloading MP3 files. 7.3. Sources of Legitimate MP3 Listening and Downloading The MP3.COM Site This is to be found at: www.mp3.com and is where many up-and-coming musicians deposit tracks of their music for free download as a means of getting publicity and becoming better known. You can sometimes download whole tracks of music and, in other cases, you may only be able to download a snippet of several tracks for evaluation. Emusic.com Similar to MP3.com is Emusic.com at: www.emusic.com Hitsquad Another music Website, which has thousands of MP3 files, players, audio editors, monthly and weekly news and review e-mail magazines and news letters, and much, much more is Hitsquad. It can be found at: www.hitsquad.com AT Hitsquad you can download a small free utility which permits you to split MP3 files into smaller files, e.g. if you wanted to post one to someone on several floppy disks or just work with it in smaller chunks. However, this software is not particularly screenreader-friendly and you will have to play with it a bit to get used to how to use it, what buttons and graphics to what, etc. Alternatively, another MP3 file splitting utility called MP3 Scissors can be downloaded from: www.tfm.ro 7.4. Commercial MP3 Download Sites where MP3s are Sold Some commercial sites to purchase video, MP3 and other music formats from and pay for them by credit card online are: www.apple.com This is where you can access the Apple i-Tunes catalogue from. i-Tunes can only be played on Apple's own i-Pod players and on computers as they have their own specific format for compression. In the second part of 2004 Apple launched an i-Tunes Website music store in Europe. In June 2004 the UK music store became available. www.eclissical.com www.musicstore.com www.musicmatch.com www.audiogalaxy.com (This is now part of the Rhapsody online music shop) www.napster.com This latter site is the new commercial Napster 2 site owned by Roxeo but at the time of writing it was only usable by US residents. Those outside of the US were not able to download the playing and shopping software required to use it until the second half of 2004 when Napster partnered with NTL's Broadband Plus service to allow downloading of music files for European residents. US citizens can download individual music tracks for around 99 cents each or whole albums for around 10 dollars each. www.sonicselector.com This is the OD2 music store which permits you to download a plug- in for Windows Media Player to enable you to access more than 300,00 songs both for downloading and for streaming and listening to online. The service is called Sonic Selector and you get access to this music via online mucic stores from either MSN, Tiscali, Packard Bell or NTL . Individual downloaded songs cost from 49p to 75p and you can even listen to streaming songs online at a cost of 1p each. 7.5. MP3 Specific Web Search Engines With these you can narrow your search for MP3 files to sites which specialise in MP3 provision. Some such search engines are: www.scour.com www.imesh.com www.listen.com (This is part of Rhapsody.) 7.6. Peer-to-Peer Music Sharing Sites Peer-to-peer music sharing sites are illegal but there are still dozens of them around. The first, as you will know, was the original carnation of Napster but this has now been closed down. It has been replace by Napster 2, which is no longer a file sharing site but rather a legal, commercial site to purchase and download music files from. Peer-to-peer file sharing sites spring up all of the time and can just as quickly be closed down. I am not touting the use of such sites and neither am I moralising about them. If you wish to participate in such file sharing, it is up to you and none of my business. I simply list several such sites below for your information. The normal modus operandi of file sharing communities is that you download specialist participation software from the peer-to-peer site and you then create a folder on your computer to hold music MP3s and other files for free sharing with others. The other participants do likewise. Examples of such peer-to-peer free file sharing sites can be found at: www.kazaalite.com www.grokster.com www.blubster.com www.slsknet.org/download.html www.musicseek.com www.xolox.com www.winmx.com www.sonicnet.com www.audiofind.com www.toadnode.com www.bearshare.com www.morpheus.com www.peerbuddy.com www.filetopia.com Note 1: At any time one or more of the above download sites could disappear as legal suits catch up with them. Note 2: Your screenreader maker's e-mail discussion and help list Website may hold several of these music download programs plus set or script files for using them, e.g. www.jfwlite.com holds Win MX and special scripts for using it on its "Programs" page. 7.7. The Ask MP3 Link Portal The Ask MP3 portal has hundreds of links on it to MP3-related sites and information. It is at: www.askmp3.com It links you to places where you can find MP3 players of all kinds, MP3 files, video players, MP3 FAQs, MP3 books, free and legal MP3 music, MP3 search engines and numerous more MP3 resources. If you go to the "Free and Legal MP3 Music" download link, you will find many sources of free MP3 music. 7.8. MP3 Lyrics Databases In a similar vein to obtaining MP3 music itself, there is a freeware program called MP3 Lyrix which you can download and is reasonably usable with a screenreader. You search for a particular song and the software interrogates a number of Internet-based song lyrics databases and will display the words of the song if it is there. You can personally add more databases to its list if you know of any more. MP3 Lyrix is downloadable from: www.killersoftware.com/software/mp3lyrix.exe 7.9. The Wavethemes Theme Music Download Site You can download many Radio, TV and film theme music clips, such as the Dr Who theme music, from: www.wavethemes.net ******** >SECTION 8 USING STAND-ALONE ENCODERS TO CREATE MP3 AND OTHER FILE FORMATS FROM STANDARD DIGITAL COMPACT DISKS--THE cdex AUDIO RIPPER 8.1. What is an Encoder or Ripper? An encoder is a piece of software which takes a digital audio file or full disk of files, like a music CD, and converts the file contents to another format. Typically, you will be taking standard HI-FI cd tracks and converting them to other formats such as compressed MP3, OGG Vorbis and Windows WAV audio files. An encoder essentially does two jobs: extracts and encodes the original audio file and then converts it to one of a number of alternative formats. Some encoders can only create two or three alternative formats, whilst others may have a dozen or more output choices. 8.2. Why use a Stand-Alone Encoder? Many sound and video players, such as Winamp, are good players but not so good from a screenreader point of view as file and disk encoders. They can do the job via the keyboard but it may be difficult and time-consuming to achieve this. You may, therefore, find that some stand-alone CD encoders are more accessible. The one which I have chosen to demonstrate below certainly is. Encoders are also known as "rippers". 8.3. The CDEX Freeware Encoder Version 1.51 CDEX is freeware, so you can download and use it as much as you like. However, CDEX will not work in isolation; it requires what is known as the Adaptec ASPI Manager software to work through and be able to communicate with your CD-ROM (Version 4.54 or higher). Therefore, you must have a copy of these ASPI files installed on your PC as well as CDEX itself. You will have such ASPI software if you already have a copy of Easy CD Creator 4X or later installed on your PC. Alternatively, you can independently install this ASPI Manager (see the later section for how to do this). ASPI stands for advanced SCSI Programming Interface. When I wrote my first audio sounds tutorial around three years ago, I included in it an example of using a simple audio extractor and encoder called Freerip.MP3. This was a very basic but good encoder which only carried out basic CD ripping to a few formats. In contrast, the latest version of CDEX (Version 1.51 at the time of writing) is much more capable and it has many more formats it can encode to. It also has an ability to interrogate online Internet music CD databases to find track, artist, album, etc, details and insert them into your extracted or encoded albums for you. I will be covering the essentials of CDEX in this section so that you will be in a position to build on what I tell you to access even more of CDEXs good array of features yourself. 8.3.1. System Requirements to Run CDEX For CDEX to run on your computer you must have at least: 1. A Pentium or equivalent computer. 2. Adaptec ASPI Manager for Windows 95 or higher installed on your PC. 3. Windows 95 or higher. 4. A digital audio extracting capable CD drive. 8.3.2. Downloading CDEX To download your free copy of CDEX: 1. Load your browser and surf to: www.cdex.n3.net 2. TAB to the "Downloads" link and press ENTER. 3. On the next page move down to a "CDEX 1.51" heading and underneath that either press ENTER on the .zip version of the download or, just below it, on the .exe version. The latter will be the easiest to deal with after you have downloaded it. If you choose the zip file, you will have to use such as Winzip to unpack it. 4. You now come onto another page and have to move down it to a "Mirror" heading, under which, if you ARROW down a few times, you will come to a "Europe" sub-heading (or choose the region which you are in if not Europe), which has below it a "Download" button to press ENTER on an commence the download procedure. 5. You will have an "OK" and a "Save" button to press ENTER on to start the download and the default file name which will download to your Desktop or wherever else you normally do your downloads to will be called "cdex_151.zip" or "cdex_151.exe". 6. The file you download is just under 2 MB in size and should take less than 10 minutes to download with a 56K modem. 8.3.3. Installation 8.3.3.1. Installing CDEX Having downloaded CDEX, you would install it by: 1. Go to the "cdex_151.exe" file wherever you downloaded it to and press ENTER on it. 2. The program will install itself at: C:\Program Files\CDEX\ It will set up three sub-folders in here plus around 16 other files. The "Lang" sub-folder is where four languages to use CDEX in are installed, including German, English, Italian and Spanish, but you can download more languages from the CDEX Website. The second sub-folder will be called "CDDB" or "LocalCDDB" and will eventually hold any information about the Cds you have ripped and their titles, artist details, etc. Thirdly, the "Plugins" sub- folder holds at least three DLL files for encoding and ripping CD tracks into different formats, e.g. MP3, Vorbis, etc. Note that the program may later create other sub-folders in here as well, e.g. if you do not change the default place extracted and encoded tracks save to, a "My Music" folder will be created as well to hold these extracted tracks. Note: If you have downloaded the .zip version of the file, you will need to tell Winzip exactly which folder to install these files into. 8.3.3.2. Installing the Adaptec ASPI Manager You have to have Version 4X or later of Easy CD Creator installed on your PC for CDEX to work through or you must obtain and install Version 4.54 or later of this ASPI Manager independently. You can download the free Adaptec ASPI software from the Adaptec site at: www.adaptec.co.uk If, for whatever reason, CDEX will not work on your system with these ASPI drivers, download the appropriate ASPI software for your system from the above URL. If you want a more up-to-date version of the ASPI software, which works with Windows 98X upwards, download this from the Adaptec site. Just go to the above URL, move to the "Search" editfield, press ENTER and then type in "ASPI", TAB once and press ENTER. The next page you come to has several tables of many ASPI drivers you can download, depending on your system. Make sure that you read the provided installation instructions for the version you download, e.g. it is different for Windows XP from earlier operating systems. 8.3.4. Launching and Initial Configuration of CDEX To launch CDEX and carry out some basic but important configuration: 1. Go to the CDEX executable file and press ENTER on it to launch it. It is at: C:\Program files\CDEX\CDEX.EXE Note: You may wish to create a shortcut on your Desktop or Start Menu to launch CDEX from for ease, if you like. 2. When CDEX loads you should view and/or make some basic configuration changes to start with, as follows: A. To enter the CDEX multi-page settings configuration dialogue press the F4 key and then CONTROL TAB to the "Filenames" property sheet. B. TAB to "Output Filename Format and Directories" WAV -> MP3" and note that the default place/directory/folder which is used to put WAV files in to be compressed is: C:\Program Files\CDEX\Mymusic\ C. TAB once more and note that the default place for the recorded files you have compress to be stored in is also: C:\Program Files\CDEX\Mymusic\ Note: You can press ENTER on either of the above pathname lines to open a directories/folders browsing list and replace them with alternative paths/folders of your own choice if you like which might be easier to get to, e.g. C:\myMusic, after firstly creating the "mymusic" folder from C:, of course. D. Now CONTROL TAB or right ARROW when you are on the property sheets labels to "Remote CDDB" and TAB in here to "Your Email Address" and type this in here, so that you can send and receive CD album titles, track titles, artist's details, etc, to and get this information from the CDDB database on the Internet. If you do not have an e-mail address just make one up in the correct format rather than leaving this editfield blank, e.g. john@nowhere.com E. Now left ARROW or CONTROL TAB to the "Encoder" sheet. In here TAB to a list of around 13 encoders you can elect to use during your ripping. It is likely to be on "Lame", which is an MP3 encoder, so leave it there for now. You can use some of the other encoders in later ripping sessions, if you like, e.g. the Windows MP3 CODEC", the "Microsoft WMA Encoder", the "WAVE Output Encoder", the "OGG Vorbis DLL Encoder" etc. You can view and change any of the settings for your chosen encoder by TABBING through them in this page with Version 1.51 of CDEX but in earlier versions it was sometimes necessary to do this in your screenreader's mouse mode to obtain access. Then TAB to and check off with the SPACEBAR "On-the-Fly MP3 Encoding", which then permits you to use CDEXs ability to normalise the volume level of all tracks ripped. F. You should now CONTROL TAB to the "Generic" sheet and TAB to "Normalize Volume" and press SPACEBAR to check this on, so that all files you rip are extracted at the same volume. G. CONTROL TAB to the "CD Drive" sheet and TAB once to a list of the CD drives on your computer. If you have more than one CD drive, ensure that you ARROW to and put focus on the CD-ROM drive you wish to use to extract tracks from, if it is not already highlighted. H. Lastly, TAB to "OK" and press ENTER to finish. Note that there are dozens of controls and lists which you can select from in these six property sheets. Many of these will be explained and advice given about what to do with them in a later section. 3. Always maximise the CDEX screen straight after launching it by pressing ALT SPACEBAR and then X. 8.3.5. Extracting Tracks to WAV Files with CDEX The tracks extracting feature is a one stage process. To extract tracks from a music CD in your CD-ROM or other CD drive to WAV files in your CDEXs default output folder (or any other you may have changed this to): 1. Place a CD in your CD drive, keeping the left SHIFT key depressed as you do this to stop the CD music from being played automatically. You can, of course, insert your CD after CDEX is already running if you like, it makes no difference. 2. Launch CDEX from your Desktop shortcut or via the path: C:\Program Files\CDEX\CDEX.exe You can get to the above cdex.exe file via Windows Explorer or by using the Windows Run dialogue, e.g. press Windows key R (for Run) and in the editfield you come into type: c:\program files\cdex\cdex.exe and press ENTER. 3. As soon as CDEX is launched or as soon as you insert a music CD with CDEX already running, it will detect the CD and provide you with a list of the tracks on that CD. However, at this stage the track names will not be the actual true titles of the tracks but rather substituted filenames, such as "Audio Track 01", "Audio Track 02", etc. straight after these substituted track names will come some informational figures indicating such as 0:07.15 2:55.22 29.49 MB. The figure after the track number indicates the time point on the CD at which the beginning of the track lies, e.g. 0:07.15 would be 7 minutes and 15 seconds into the disk. The latter two of these figures, respectively, are the size of the track in minutes/seconds playing time and the latter is its size in megabytes before it is extracted and/or converted. 4. You can TAB through the lists and editfields in this tracks dialogue box and observe that all of the normal information you would require on a CD has editfields for it to be typed in by you, such as "Artist", "Album", "year", etc. So you can manually type these facts in if you wish or you can elect to get CDEX to go onto the Internet and retrieve this information from an online CDDB (compact disk database) for you and automatically complete these fields, provided that the CDDB has the details for this CD in its database. It will have all but the very most recently- released CDs but, of course, it will not be able to deal with CDs you have compiled of your own with tracks from several different CDs. This automatic CD information completion ability will be demonstrated in a later section. 5. Now, in the tracks list, select/highlight the tracks you want to extract to WAV files in the normal Windows way, e.g. if you want them all press CONTROL A; if you only want the first three tracks hold down the SHIFT key whilst you ARROW from track 1 to track 3; if you want tracks 2, 5 and 9 ARROW to track 2, hold down the CONTROL key and then press the SPACEBAR, keep the CONTROL key down all the time and then ARROW to track 5 and press the SPACEBAR again, keep the CONTROL key down and ARROW to track 9 and again press the SPACEBAR, and so on. Your screenreader should feature a selected files confirmation hot key for you to check that you have exactly what you want selected, e.g. SHIFT INSERT down ARROW with JAWS, SHIFT CONTROL M with Window-Eyes and Numpad 1 with HAL. 6. Lastly, press the F8 key to extract the tracks to WAV files. The extracting will commence immediately and you should hear the CD in the CD drive start to spin. 7. You may not get any indication that the encoding has finished but when it has, you will be returned to the tracks dialogue box you started in and can extract more tracks if you like. The encoding may take several minutes for a 4 or 5 minute long track on slower PCs but should take less than a minute per track on computers with 1000 MHz CPUs or better. During the extracting your screenreader may give you some feedback in percentage countdown terms and you can view what is happening in mouse mode when you first do this to get an Idea of what is going on. You will also be on a "Cancel" button during the extracting and your Title Bar will also tell you what per cent stage the current track is at whilst it is being extracted. You are advised not to get your screenreader speaking too much during this process in case you cause slight audio clicks on the ripped track due to this. The information on screen whilst the extracting is going on advises you of which tracks are to be ripped, how large in Mb they are, what stage the extracting is at in percentage terms and then tells you that the tracks are being normalised for you, etc. 8. When finished extracting, exit CDEX by pressing ALT F4. Note: After extracting your tracks to WAV format, if you would like to place them on a blank CD for playing in your HI-FI at home or in your car stereo system, you can simply use a CD-RW drive (CD burning drive) and burn them to a CD. Remember to use the audio and not the data option in your burning software when doing this, e.g. with Easy CD Creator, Nero Burning-ROM and the like. You would also be advised to use the "disk-at-once" option when burning your WAV files so that you can then move from track to track on your HI-FI system. Of course, you will have to have extracted these WAV files with the correct HI-FI specification settings, i.e. at 44.1 Kbps/Hz, in stereo and in 16 bit sampling. Moreover, do not forget to "close" or "Finalise" the CD; otherwise, whilst it will play in your computer CD drive, it will not play on a standard HI-FI system. 8.3.6. Extracting Tracks and Encoding/Converting them to Compressed Formats with CDEX The extracting and encoding (converting to one of several possible compressed formats) feature is a two stage process. It goes through the steps in the last section up to step 5 and then you finish with a different shortcut key. What you do is: 8.3.6.1. Ripping Tracks to MP3 Format with the Lame Encoder The Lame encoder is CDEXs default ripping/encoding plugin, so to rip tracks to MP3 format: 1. Follow the steps in the last section exactly up to and including step 5. 2. At step 6 press the F9 key to start the extracting followed by the encoding and converting process. 3. You will receive a very similar amount of feedback to that given when just extracting to WAV files, except that you will first be told the percentage of the extracting which you are at per track and then the percentage of converting you are at on that same track. What is happening is that the tracks are being extracted to WAV files firstly and those WAV files are then being encoded/converted to your chosen compressed format via your chosen encoder, e.g. the Lame encoder, the MP3 encoder, the OGG Vorbis encoder, the Windows WMA encoder, etc. This means that encoding takes around twice as long as straightforward extracting to WAV files. 4. When finished extracting and encoding, exit CDEX by pressing ALT F4. Note 1: Using the Lame encoder in its default state will result in tracks being ripped at a bit rate of 128 bits per sample (which is the most common bit rate for MP3 music files), in stereo and with quite good quality settings. Such an MP3 music track would have similar quality to listening to an FM radio with good reception. If you want to increase the quality of the ripped music file to, say, 192 bits and change any other settings, do this before you choose your tracks for ripping by going into the settings configuration dialogue by pressing F4. Similarly, if you are ripping speech files, you may wish to reduce the bit rate to something like 64 bit (similar to what you get on a copied cassette) or even 32 bit, as speech does not require as much quality as music and the speech files will therefore be much smaller. You may also want to reduce a speech file's size by half again by ripping it in mono rather than in stereo. Note 2: After extracting your tracks to MP3 format, if you would like to place them on a blank CD for taking elsewhere and playing on someone else's computer or for playing on an MP3 CD player, you can simply use a CD-RW drive (CD burning drive) and burn them to a CD. Remember to use the data and not the audio option in your burning software when doing this as MP3 tracks are data files and not audio files, e.g. with Easy CD Creator, Nero Burning-ROM and the like. Tip: If any ripper/encoder/sound editor you are using is not able to rip to or convert given audio file formats to what you require, you can try using an independent stand-alone audio file converter. The DBPoweramp converter can be downloaded from: www.dbpoweramp.com 8.3.6.1. Ripping Tracks to OGG Vorbis Format with the Vorbis Encoder To rip to OGG Vorbis format, which compresses tracks even more than MP3 does but also provides as good if not better sound quality: 1. Press F4 to open the settings configuration dialogue. 2. In the "Encoder" sheet, TAB to the "Encoder" combobox and ARROW down from "Lame" to "OGG Vorbis DLL Encoder" and leave focus on that. 3. TAB to "On the Fly Encoding" and press SPACEBAR to check this off. This then permits your encoded tracks to be normalised so that they are all of the same or a very similar volume, irrespective of how many different CDs you extracted them from. You cannot normalise with the on-the-fly option turned on. Note, however, that checking this on-the-fly option off does have the effect that CDEX will no longer extract from your CD directly to WAV files, thus missing out your sound card. The effect of this could be odd crackles and clicks in your ripped tracks. If you experience this and find that you would prefer cleaner tracks but not necessarily all of a consistent volume, do not turn on-the- fly ripping off. You will have to experiment to find which is preferable for your set-up and sound card. Most reasonable sound cards will probably not manifest this clicking effect, anyway. 4. TAB to "OK" and press ENTER. This encoder and the settings you may have chosen in its controls page will remain as your default encoder and settings until you change it again to a different encoder. 5. Now follow all of the steps in the last section to rip your track(s). Note: In the above settings, Encoder sheet you will view that the default bit rate for Vorbis files is 160 Kbps. This permits both better quality files than the MP3 default will provide whilst packing them into smaller spaces on your hard disk. 8.3.7. Where Did My Extracted or Encoded Tracks Go To? If you did not change the default sub-folder which CDEX saves extracted uncompressed WAV or encoded compressed files to, as mentioned in the configuration section above entitled "Launching and Configuring CDEX", CDEX will save all of its extracted or encoded tracks deep in sub-folders below its own folder. This may be a tedious place for you to play these tracks from or find them at, so I recommend that you change this to something more accessible like: C:\My Music\ But you will have to access this saving pathname browsing option by pressing ENTER when on the path line. However, if you have not changed the default (normal) saving folder, the extracted tracks will now have berried themselves at: C:\Program Files\CDEX\My Music\No Artist\No title\ and will have filenames such as 02-audiotrack 02.wav and 03- audiotrack 03.mp3. This happens when you have extracted a track but not completed the track, artist, album, etc, editfields which are available to you when you select the tracks for extracting. If you do take the time to complete these editfields (which I strongly recommend that you do), the folders path to the extracted files will now be of the order: C:\Program Files\CDEX\My Music\The Beetles\Let it Be\02- audiotrack 02.wav In other words, after you get to the "My Music" level, you will then get meaningful artist and album names instead of no artist and no track. If you had of changed the saving folder as just recommended above, the new saving folder path would now be: C:\My Music\The Beetles\Let it Be\02-audiotrack 02.wav Now this is all assuming that you also did not bother to change the individual track names in the tracks dialogue before you extracted them. It is also, obviously, a good idea to give the tracks their correct titles. You would do this by: 1. When the tracks dialogue box comes up after inserting your CD, you are in the tracks list. Just ARROW to the track you wish to manually name. 2. When on the track, press the F2 key to open up an editfield and then type the track's correct name in here without any extension, as the extraction or encoding process will provide the appropriate extension for you. For example, type in "Get Back" (no quotes) and then extract or encode with F8 or F9. 3. The correctly named track(s) will now extract or encode to the same artist and album name as any other tracks you have already extracted to that path, because CDEX now knows and remembers the name of your artist and album and can recognise this as soon as you again put the same CD into your CD drive, and it also knows which sub-folder to save future extracted tracks to from that same artist and album. Note 1: As another alternative, you may also want to specify the tracks saving folder to the same folder as you normally store your tracks in for playing with your favourite media player, such as Winamp or Windows Media Player. These players are much better from a keyboard point of view than CDEXs own media player. 8.3.8. Obtaining Album and Tracks Information from the Online Compact Disk Database and Saving this Information to Your Hard Disk When you launch CDEX with a CD in the CD drive and come into the tracks list in the tracks dialogue, you can, if you have an Internet connection, elect to get the CD tracks, album name, artist's name, etc, automatically completed for you by letting CDEX interrogate the Freedb Compact Disk Database (CDDB). You can also get CDEX to save this information to its "LocalCDDB" sub- folder just off of its main CDEX\ folder so that these album details will be known by CDEX the next time you insert this same CD into the CD drive. Here is how you do it: 1. Either before or straight after you launch CDEX, insert your music CD into the CD drive. 2. When the tracks dialogue box opens, with the tracks, album, etc, editfields either being blank or having made-up track names, press ALT D (for CDDB) and then R (for Read Remote CDDB). 3. You will be taken online, if you are not already online, and the CD album's details will be completed from this online CDDB within a few seconds. When finished, close your Internet connection if you like. 4. To save the album details just obtained from the CDDB on your hard disk, press ALT D again and then ARROW down to "Save to Local CDDB" and press ENTER. The information will be saved to: C:\Program Files\CDEX\LocalCDDB\ 5. You can use the "Read from Local CDDB" option in this same CDDB menu to view all of the tracks titles of your saved CD albums. 8.3.9. Uploading Details of Your Own CDs to the CDDB Database If you discover that the CDDB does not contain the information for a given CD which you have ripped, you will have to enter these yourself manually. after typing tracks, artist, album, etc, details into the editfields You can then press ALT D (for CDDB) and then U (for Submit to Remote CDDB) to be taken online and have your information uploaded to help anyone else who uses this database to get this information without having to manually insert it themselves. The place on the Internet where you are submitting your CD information is at: freedb-submit@freedb.org 8.3.10. Normalising Tracks to make them all the Same Volume You should have already turned the normalising feature on when you configured CDEX as outlined earlier in this section. If you did not, it is a good idea to do so, so that your ripped tracks have a consistently level volume and none is louder or quieter than the others. Do this in: 1. Press F4 to enter the configuration dialogue. 2. CONTROL TAB to the "Generic" property sheet if you are not already on it. 3. TAB down to "Normalise Volume" and press SPACEBAR to turn this on. 4. TAB to and press ENTER on "OK" to finish. 8.3.11. Viewing and Making More Changes in the Configurations Dialogue After pressing the F4 key, in addition to normalising, as described in the last sub-section, there are hundreds of things you can select by ARROWING to them in lists or checking them on with the SPACEBAR in the six property sheets of the configuration dialogue box. You can move between sheets by CONTROL TABBING or right and left ARROWING when on the sheet labels. For example: 1. The "Generic" sheet: This is mainly concerned with ID3 tags, which determine the type of tagging information which is used on your CD to record its information about tracks, album, artist, etc. So TAB through and view these facts and do the same in the other five sheets. 2. The "Filenames" sheet: This is mainly concerned with where your tracks will be ripped to and saved and you can check on in here a "Add Files to M3U Playlist" if you would like your tracks to be automatically added to a Playlist wrapper and saved in that album's sub-folder with a .M3U extension for you. When you play the tracks within such an M3U file, you can usually view its details to find out the information about it which was recorded with it when it was ripped, e.g. in Winamp you would pause the playing of the file and then press ALT 3 to view this information. 3. The CD Drive" sheet: TABBING through here will reveal your CD drives, the parameters set for your CD drive(s) operation and provides a list of "CD Types" you can select. If your CD drive is not in this list, just leave it on "generic" and it should still work OK. If your CD is not being detected by CDEX, you can press ENTER on the "Auto Detect" button to try to force CDEX to find and recognise your drive but you must have a CD in the drive when doing this. A very handy option to press SPACEBAR on in here to turn on is the "Eject CD When Ripping Has Been completed" option, so that, as soon as the music CD you are ripping from is ejected from the CD drive, you will know that the ripping process is complete. This will permit you to do your ripping with your screenreader turned off and with no other programs running simultaneously, to get the purest extracted and encoded tracks with no interference from other programs, if you find that you need to do this. Ensure that "Enable Jitter Correction" is turned on. If your CD drive will support it, you may wish to change the "Read Sectors" from its default of 26 to a much higher level, e.g. 400, because your tracks will then rip much quicker. If this results in failed rips, change it back to 26. Changing "CD Speed" from 0 to such as 60 might also speed ripping up if your CD drive can cope with this. By default, the "Use CD Text if Available" option is checked on, which is a good idea because some music CDs hold their own tracks, artist, album, etc, details, so you do not have to go to the online CDDB to retrieve this information. 4. The "Encoder" sheet: This, of course, is mainly to do with which encoder you are using to rip through and, depending on the encoder you select in the "Encoder" list, you will get different types and styles of other options you can adjust with checkboxes, lists and sliders. So ARROW to different encoders, e.g. Lame, WMA, OGG Vorbis, etc, and then TAB through and view the options each gives you. For example, with the Lame MP3 encoder, you can change the type of MP3 file from MPEG 1 to MPEG 2 or MPEG 2.5; you can change the "bit Rate" from its default of 128 to as little as 32 KBPs or as high as 320 KBPS but the higher you go the larger the resulting extracted file will be; you can change the "Quality" of the file to be produced from "Normal" to such as "Low", "Voice", "Very High Quality", etc, depending on how good you need the quality of the output file; you can change the sampling rate from "Auto" to such as 48,000, 44,100 (normal CD quality) or 32,000; and so forth. 5. The "Local CDDB" sheet: You are not likely to want to change anything in here, unless you would like to get CDEX to save its local CDDB information in a different path and sub-folder. 6. The "Remote CDDB" sheet: This is where you have to provide your e-mail address so that you can both receive and send music CD track, artist, album, etc, details to and from the online Internet database, if you wish. If you are keen on pulling in music CD information to CDEX from the CDDB for Cds you have not yet got this on, you may wish to check on the "Auto Connect to Remote CDDB" option, so that every time you put a CD into the CD drive which CDEX does not know it will automatically take you online and obtain the CD details. If you are using a firewall on your computer, you should check "Use Proxy" on; and if you have to use authentication to access files through your firewall, you should check on "Authentication"and complete the next editfield with your user ID and the editfield after that with your password. 8.3.12. Recording Vinyl, tape and other media from Analogue Input CDEX has a nice, basic but reasonably accessible analogue recording ability. You do have to do a little mouse cursoring and left clicking to recommence recording, pause and stop recording but not overmuch. You plug your external sound source into the line in jack plug or Microphone jack plug on your sound card, open the analogue recorder, configure it and then start it recording, followed by starting your external sound source playing. Do this by: 1. With your sound source plugged into your sound card, press ALT T (for Tools) and then R (for Record from Analog Input). 2. You fall on the "Sample Rate" combobox to ARROW up and down and select the quality in Hz of the sound file you would like. 44,100 is the normal CD quality but you may wish to reduce this to such as 24,000 or 32,000 rate if you are only making voice recordings. 3. TAB to "Free Length" and leave it hear if you want to record for as long as you like. If you would like to have the recording stop after a given period of time, ARROW down to "Record for Just" then TAB to an editfield and type in the number of seconds you want the recording to go on for before it automatically stops, e.g. 1800 in seconds for 30 minutes if you were recording a live TV or radio program which only lasts half an hour. In this way, you can use the analogue recorder like a timed tape recorder or video recorder for sound only. 4. TAB to "Input Device" and your sound card should be already selected but you can ARROW down and select other input recording devices if you like. 5. Next comes the "Output Filename" and the filename "Record" is in there by default, so over-type this with a filename you would like instead, e.g. Beatles. It will be automatically given an extension, which will depend on the format of recorded file you choose below. 6. TAB to "Output File Type" and you can ARROW through around 14 options, such as WAV, OGG Vorbis, the Lame MP3 encoder, etc. 7. Another press of TAB takes you to the "Record" button. If you press ENTER the computer hard disk will revolve and you will be recording, so start playing your external sound source which should be plugged into your sound card's Line In socket or start talking into your microphone which would be plugged into your sound card's microphone socket. 8. If you want to pause recording, you have to go into mouse mode, go to the bottom of the screen and press your screenreader's left mouse simulation key on the "Pause" button. You will be left on the "Pause" button and can then press ENTER at any time to recommence recording from where you paused it. You will then be left on the pause button and then henceforth you can just press the ENTER key to pause and recommence recording. A line or two up from the bottom of the screen there is a countdown metre of how many seconds you have been recording for. To avoid an unreasonable delay between you first pausing a recording via the "Pause" button at the bottom of the window and then being able to simply use the ENTER key for future pauses and unpauses, you might want to place the slight delay at the beginning of the recording by starting recording, then left mouse clicking on the "Pause" button, which will leave you on the more accessible "Pause" button for pauses and unpauses with the ENTER key in the middle of the recording. 9. To stop recording, in mouse mode, go to the bottom of the screen and left click on the "Stop" button. You can also get to these pause, stop and cancel buttons by ALT TABBING away from the CDEX window and then ALT TABBING back to it and then SHIFT TABBING to these buttons. 10. Press ENTER on or left click on the "Cancel" button when you have finished recording. 11. Unless you have changed this, your sound file will save to the usual place of: C:\Program Files\CDEX\My Music\ 12. If you use the "Pause" button to pause recording and then press ENTER again on "Pause", the recording, as would be expected, continues from where you paused recording to the same file. However, if you press ENTER on "Stop" and then press left click on "Record", then the last recording is terminated and given the filename you asked for but with a number to indicate that it is the first of several files with this filename, e.g. it would be called beatles-0.wav. Starting recording again after stopping, means that the recording countdown starts in seconds from 1 again and this recording will record to a different file with a slightly different filename, e.g. beatles-1. Stopping again and then restarting would result in another file being created with a filename of beatles-2.wav, etc. 13. You cannot do any sound file editing in the CDEX analogue recorder, it is just a straightforward recording device. Note: If your recording is either too quiet or too loud, you should make any volume changes in the Windows Volume Control (see the earlier section on this topic). 8.3.13. The Main CDEX Menu Features Many of the most frequently used menu options of CDEX can be carried out without having to go into the menu structure, if you prefer and can remember shortcuts. If not, use the CDEX menus to achieve the above actions. CDEXs menus work in the standard Windows way and are pretty self-explanatory. Just open the main menu bar with the ALT key and then right and left ARROW through the menus or open a given menu by holding the ALT key down and pressing such as F (for File), (E (for Edit), etc. Some menu options of interest are: In the "File" menu: Nothing of great importance, other than the exit command. In the "Edit" menu: "Copy Album Info to Clipboard" allows you to copy the details of the current CD in the CD drive to the Clipboard and then open such as MS Word and paste these details into the document screen with CONTROL V, perhaps for then printing out for someone or putting into a file and e-mailing to someone interested in it. In the "Convert" menu: This contains the options to extract tracks to WAV or extract to compressed files, the same as pressing F8 and F9 respectively. The next menu option here is "Extract a Section of the CD", which lets you select part only of a CD, e.g. tracks 2, 3 and4, and then choose this menu option or press the shortcut of F10 to extract these tracks to WAV or compressed formats as if they were a single track, i.e. playing this extracted file will play all three tracks as if they were one track with Winamp's shortcuts such as B (for jump forward a track), Z (for jump back a track), etc, not working. The "Re- Encode Compressed Audio file(s)" option, if you press ENTER on it and then check on "Look in Subfolders" and "Riff-WAV", allows you to re-encode compressed files to other compressed files but with lower bit rates. The "Convert WAV File(s) to Compressed Audio File(s)" menu option lets you select a WAV file on your hard disk--perhaps one which you extracted to a WAV file instead of extracting and encoding it--and then get the encoding done, under your normal encoding parameters as set up in the encoding sheet of the configuration dialogue. The next menu option does the opposite of that just explained, i.e. it uncompresses a compressed file back to a WAV file but, of course, the resulting WAV file will not be the same as the WAV file it may have originally been compressed from--it will only have the same qualities as were afforded to it when it was first compressed. In the "Tools" menu: The "Media Player" is best avoided as it is not very keyboard-friendly and you are advised to do your tracks playing in such as Winamp or Windows Media Player. The "Record from Analog Input" permits you to record such as audio cassettes, vinyl albums, midi CD tracks, voice recordings with a microphone, etc, through the line in or microphone jack at the back of your sound card onto your hard disk. In the "CDDB" menu: This simply duplicates the options available in the CDDB Context Menu mentioned above. In the "Options" menu: Here is where you turn on or off several toolbar views, which are usually all turned on. There is also the settings configuration dialogue option in here which has been mentioned in some detail above and can also be accessed by pressing the F4 key. 8.3.14. Using the CDEX Help System The two main types of CDEX help are on the "Contents" tab and the "Index" tab. 8.3.14.1. Help Contents The first method of using help contents is to press the F1 key and then: 1. TAB through several help topics to press ENTER on and read. 2. If there is more than one page of information, press PAGE down to hear the next page. 3. After listening to the help text, you can sometimes press TAB several times to access extra help sub-topics relating to the current topic to press ENTER on. However, you will find the help system easier to use and reliably view the text in it if you use the second method given below. 1. Press ALT H (for Help) and then H (for Help on Using CDEX). 2. ARROW through 13 subject headings and press the right ARROW key to open a list of sub-topics in any of them for reading. You can also press ALT O (for Open) to open up the list of sub-topics in any main heading . 3. When on a sub-topic you can press ENTER to get the text in their read out to you. 4. If there is more than one page of help text, press the PAGE down key to hear the next page of details. 5. To close the sub-topics list either press left ARROW or TAB to and press ENTER on the "Close" button. 6. To print the sub-topic help text TAB to "Print" and press ENTER or just press ALT P. 7. After listening to your sub-topic textual information, to jump forwards to the next sub-topic and get it rad out, press ALT . (full stop). Each time you press ALT . you will move to the next sub-topic in the current main heading list or to the next main heading followed by its list of sub-topics until you eventually get to the very end of the help manual. 8. To jump backwards through earlier sub-topics and get them read out press ALT , (comma). 9. To leave help, press the ESCAPE key. 8.3.14.2. Searching in Index Help If you want to search for sub-topic headings to open and read one of these: 1. Press ALT H and then H again. 2. SHIFT TAB back to the "Contents" Tab label. 3. Now right ARROW to "Index". 4. TAB once to an editfield and type in here any of the keywords you want to find something on, e.g. keyboard, to be taken to such as "Keyboard Shortcuts" which you will be on if you now TAB once. 5. To display the textual information in the Keyboard Shortcuts topic, press ENTER. You will have to press PAGE down to hear any second page of help text and you may also sometimes encounter a link at the bottom of the page to press ENTER on to open up a further related page of help information. 6. Press ESCAPE to leave help. Note: If you do not type a search string into the editfield in 4 above, you will be able to TAB once to the full available list of help topic headings in A to Z order and then ARROW down them to view them all and press ENTER on any of them for reading. 8.3.15. List of CDEX Keyboard Shortcuts CDEX supports the following keyboard shortcuts: Press F1: To open the help Contents and Index page. Press F2: to open the rename track editfield. Press F3: to view the status and progress of CD ripping. Press F4: To open the CDEX settings configuration dialogue. Press F5: to refresh the track list,, re-read the table of contents and re-read the CDDB information. Press F8: to rip the selected tracks to a WAV file. Press F9: to Rip selected tracks to a compressed file, such as MP3 and OGG Vorbis. Press F10: To start extraction of part of a CDs tracks only to one filename. Press F11: To convert WAV files to compressed files. Press F12: To convert compressed files to WAV files. Press ALT F4: To exit CDEX. Press CONTROL A: To select/highlight all tracks. 8.4. Other Stand Alone MP3 Players and Rippers Other rippers which you may wish to know about and experiment with yourself are: * Audio Grabber--From: www.whitestick.co.uk Its on the "Some useful Programs" link. Audio Grabber can also rip to MP3 via the line in jack on your sound card, e.g. from a tape recorder, mini disk, vinyl album turntable, etc, but you will have to buy the full version to be able to rip more than ten minutes of sound in this way. * Audio Catalyst--From: www.whitestick.co.uk Its on the "Some useful Programs" link. * Absolute MP3 Recorder--From: www.techlogic.ca * MP3 Pro Audio--From: www.thomson-multimedia.com This MP3 ripper is also an encoder and is said to be the next generation of MP3 rippers, being able to compress music to half the size of standard MP3 rippers and reproduce sound with better than average quality. Its only a 1.5 Mb download and you can also download a Winamp plugin for it from the same page as well. The download is a demo only. * Freerip.MP3 Here is a free ripping and encoding package from: www.mgshareware.com Freerip is quite basic but easy to use and very accessible to screenreader users. * Puls MP3 This is a blind-friendly MP3 player obtained from: www.blindsoftware.com It includes screenreader accessible buttons, an ID3 tag editor and reader, ability to convert MP3 files to wave files, you can create and open play lists, adjust volume and playback pitch and much more. You can also select which sound card is used to output music. You will need a multi-channel sound card and Direct X7 or higher installed. * total Recorder This can carry out many types of recording, including recording from Internet streams to MP3 and scheduling for recording at given times. Its for sale for about 12 dollars and you can also download a demo version for testing which will only record up to 30 seconds of audio from: www.download.com and www.highcriteria.com * MDIrecorder With this player and recorder you can record sound generated or requested by other computer programs such as RealPlayer, Windows Media Player and Winamp, etc. The resulting files are saved in Wav or MP3 formats. You can record streaming audio files from the Internet or conversations if you use an Internet telephony program or music from games programs, etc. MDIrecorder automatically configures your sound card, you can set the sample rate, mono or stereo and the bit rate of recordings and you can make use of hot keys to operate it, e.g. F9 to start recording, F10 to pause and resume recording and F11 to stop recording. You can start MDIrecorder first and then run your other program with the sound source and at any time use these hot keys to get MDIrecorder to start and stop recording without switching to MDIrecorder. You can obtain a free demo download from: www.realrecorder.net/ You can also obtain a DVD audio ripper from: www.imtoo.com ******** >SECTION 9 THE GOLDWAVE DIGITAL AUDIO EDITOR VERSION 5.1 9.1. Introduction This tutorial will be found to be suitable for all versions of GoldWave from 5.0 to the current version, which is Version 5.10. Since newer releases of Version 5 tend to be only bug fixes and possible slight improvements, it should also prove to be suitable for future releases of GoldWave 5X but, of course, I have no crystal ball to be absolutely certain of this and slight changes in GoldWave are being made and posted on the GoldWave site very frequently. I Have, for example, found no noticeable difference in GoldWave 5.06 and Version 5.08, so we must be talking about such small updates being for small bug fixes in the main. When you already have a copy of GoldWave on your PC, such as Version 5.06, and then download another slightly updated version, such as Version 5.10, you can simply install it as you did with the first version. The GoldWave update will simply copy itself over your old version and maintain any configuration settings you have already made to the program. It will also keep your original registration number. There is no extra charge made for these upgrade sub-versions. For those familiar with the Sound Forge audio editing software, GoldWave 5 has a very similar interface and general look to it to that of Sound Forge. It also has a very similar catalogue of features and supports a good number of keyboard shortcut keystrokes. For its price, GoldWave has an impressive array of audio creating, converting, special effects and editing features for digital music, analogue music and speech input. It can take digital audio from your CD drives and convert this to more than a dozen alternative formats such as WAV and compressed MP3, WMA and OGG Vorbis formats. It is also able to remaster and fix crackles, his and clicks on music and other sound files you record into it from external sources, such as from vinyl LPs, music cassettes, the radio and other sound sources fed into it via the jack plug on your sound card. As part of its standard installation it provides normalising and noise reduction features. Audio recording programs like Windows Sound Recorder and CDEX are fine for short passages of straightforward music or speech recording in a similar way to using a cassette recorder but they do not offer much in the way of editing the finished result. GoldWave offers more editing options and more flexible and easier to use keyboard sound editing hot keys. Whilst with GoldWave you can pause recording at any time and then continue, it is more likely that you will wish to finish a recording, mark any