Picasa 3.5 Incorporates Photo Tagging, Google Maps

Picasa 3.5 Incorporates Photo Tagging, Google Maps

This message was shared via my6sense

V/r

Ray

How To: Rip Your Music Like a Pro

Sent to you via Google Reader

For most people, dropping a CD into their disc drive and clicking “Import” in iTunes is good enough. For music freaks, though, it’s not—and with good reason. Here’s how to digitize your tunes, the right way.

First off, some reasons to take this road: iTunes is a decent audio encoder, and it’ll get your music from point A—the CD—to points B, C and D—your computer, your MP3 player and your backup drive—without much trouble. But it’ll do it with a less-than-great encoder, with occasionally inconsistent tagging, with album art that’ll only work on Apple devices, and without support for the best lossless audio formats and MP3 encoding options, which you probably want, whether you know it or not.

In short, the ripping process deserves a little more care than iTunes or Windows Media player can give it. You can pay people for this, which feels dumb and wasteful, or you can do it yourself. It’s not difficult, at all. Here’s what you do:

Get Your Software

The first step to ditching iTunes is to, well, ditch iTunes. What we’re looking for is ripping software that offers more encoding options than iTunes, but more importantly, a better encoder. And as far as MP3 encoders go, the open source LAME is as good as they get. There’s plenty of software for both Mac and PC that leverages this encoder, but here are two programs that do lots, lots more.

Mac OS X: Max

From the makers:

When extracting audio from compact discs, Max offers the maximum in flexibility to ensure the true sound of your CD is faithfully extracted. For pristine discs, Max offers a high-speed ripper with no error correction. For damaged discs, Max can either use its built-in comparison ripper (for drives that cache audio) or the error-correcting power of cdparanoia.

What this translates to: Great error reduction, fantastic sound quality, and tons and tons of encoding options—not that you really need those to do a good rip, but hey, they can’t hurt. On…

V/r

Ray

Integrated Gmail Transforms Your Inbox into a Website Hub

2
COMMENTS

For the longest time I’ve been wanting Google to bring all of their services together into some sort of unified interface. A place where I could read my email, manage my calendar, catch up on news in my RSS feeds, search for a place on a map, and so on. Just one central page that does it all so that I only need one tab open to have access to all that information.

Even though Google hasn’t brought everything together themselves it’s still possible to do on your own, but only if you’re a Firefox user. Thanks to an extension called Integrated Gmail you can bring all of your Google services plus any third-party sites right into your Inbox. As seen in the screenshot to the right I’ve got everything I want fast access to in a series of expandable boxes. I can pick and choose the order that I want them in, add whatever sites I want (such as Pandora for streaming music), and I can also add Google gadgets.

There are a few nice interface designs that demonstrated to me the detail the designer put into this. For one the Gmail and Google Reader icons both show the unread counts on them so that even if they aren’t expanded you’ll still know when you have new items.

You might be thinking to yourself that having the unread count on the Gmail icon doesn’t really matter because you can always see it in the sidebar. Well, that’s where the other nice touch comes in. In the bottom-left corner of the screen you’ll see the green arrow that can be used to collapse the sidebar. This is awesome for anyone working on a small netbook screen so that you can maximize your precious viewing area. The cherry on top is that you can also collapse the header thereby maximizing your vertical space as well. It’s a minimalist’s dream.

I’d like to see something like this come out of Gmail Labs, but I’m doubtful anything they’d release would match some of the features this has. They surely wouldn’t let you add third-party sites, because that could mean you’d add another email service like Yahoo! Mail to your Gmail Inbox. At any rate this Firefox extension will serve me well until Google figures out some sort of plan.

Integrated Gmail Homepage (Firefox only; freeware)

August 26th, 2009 Written by Ryan

Share, Bookmark, and More

Tags:

• Firefox, Freeware, Google, Web Sites, Features, Firefox, Firefox Extensions, Gmail, How To, Screenshots

Related Posts:

• Best Greasemonkey Scripts: Google Reader Feeds in Gmail
• New Google Reader Greasemonkey Script

Login You have to login to track comments
or CyberMark articles.

1. 

   AndyDrumAugust 26, 2009 at 9:35 am

   It’s that the idea behind iGoogle? This does look nicer though.

   Reply

AnonAugust 26, 2009 at 8:18 pm

Ummm, having things together on one page isn’t new? iGoogle? Also, just wait a lil longer and you’ll have Google Wave

Reply

Your Account

There are currently 7594 users
[Register] [Forgot your password?]

Sponsors

Advertise Here

Poll

You don’t have JavaScript enabled so you’ll have to vote here

Most Popular Articles

7 Days

• “Reusable” 10% Off Best Buy Coupon
• CyberNotes: How to Copy a DVD Movie
• And The Best Antivirus Is…
• CyberNotes: Create Free iPhone Ringtones Using iTunes in Windows
• CyberNotes: Add Album Art in iTunes
• CyberNotes: Facts and Photos of Bill Gates’ House
• Real Windows 7 Screenshots?
• CyberNotes: Map a FTP to a Drive in Windows
• CyberNotes: Three Fantastic Sites for Kids
• Online Regular Expression Builder

Sponsors

About CyberNet

• About CyberNet
• About the Authors
• Commenting Policy
• Privacy Policy

• Contact Us
• Send Us a Tip
• Advertising
• Logos & Icons

All-Stars

• El Guru
  748 stars
• netster007x
  665 stars
• Omar Upegui
  520 stars
• M1ke
  424 stars
• Jack of all Trades
  265 stars

• CoryC
  706 stars
• Pieter
  548 stars
• Change
  514 stars
• Max
  354 stars
• leland
  206 stars

Become an All-Star!

Archives

August 2009

M	T	W	T	F	S	S
« Jul
	1	2
3	4	5	6	7	8	9
10	11	12	13	14	15	16
17	18	19	20	21	22	23
24	25	26	27	28	29	30
31

Copyright © 2005-2009 CyberNet News. All Rights Reserved. Affiliated with Learn Firefox.

via cybernetnews.com

Introducing the Google Chrome OS

This is a bomb of an announcement by Google, this is totally different from Chrome the browser this is an Operating System.  It is targeted for netbooks and is separate from Android, I’ll be following the progress and news about this new Google project.  Read the Official Google Blog about the OS.

 

Technorati Tags: Google,Chrome OS

GFI Backup

Found this Windows freebie, just about to download, test and compare it with TotalMedia Backup which came with the portable HDD that I just bought.  Saw some great comments about it.  GFI Backup, maybe for you especially if you don’t have any backup solution in place yet, you can’t beat the price.

 

Technorati Tags: Backup,Software

Nokia turns to Android in Smartphone wars

Finnish mobile phone giant Nokia is trying out the Android platform to try and cut into the critical smartphone segment as it is the only part of the mobile phone market which is growing.  The Symbian platform is growing staid and old.  Consumers are looking for phones that can go on the internet, send emails and download third party applications.

 

Technorati Tags: Nokia,Android Smartphones

iPhone 3GS Jailbreak out

The first iPhone jailbreak is out on the web.  The unlock process used for the iPhone 3G won’t work. George Holz has released a jailbreak process codenamed “purplera1n”.

 

 

Technorati Tags: iPhone 3GS,jailbreak

Ricoh launches Quanp

Japanese copier maker Ricoh launches quanp (quantum paper) which is a online storage service.  What makes it different from the other cloud storage service is that it is more visual, even has 3D views.  Check out this post on TechCrunch.

 

Technorati Tags: quanp,online storage