Eddie On Everything » mp3

How to transfer a tape to a CD or create MP3 files

eddie — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 00:22:29 +0000

My grandfather was an amateur singer and songwriter. He passed away many years ago, leaving the few old cassette tapes my mother owns the only recordings of his performances in existence.

Over the Christmas holiday, I convinced my mother to let me take these precious keepsakes and make digital copies.

I am very grateful to the author of this article at NSFTools.com that explains how to convert the tapes to MP3 format. It is well written and has exactly enough (but not too much) detail.

The writeup makes use of the freely available Audacity software to capture the audio, normalize it, remove noise, and, finally, save as individual MP3’s.

Dear NSF Tools: My mother & I thank you!

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Getting Pandora’s Jar to work with the Lastest Pandora Update – 6/10/06

eddie — Sat, 10 Jun 2006 19:03:23 +0000

The Pandora music service updated their code last night. If you’re a Pandora’s Jar user, you may have noticed that the Pandora player is no longer appearing on your Pandora’s Jar page.

Not to worry – here’s how you fix it.

Locate your Pandora’s Jar directory. If you followed my instructions when you set it up, that directory is c:\pandora . Open the Directory.
There’s a file in there called “pandoraGrabber.html”. Open it in a text editor.
Search for the string “https://www.pandora.com:443/radio/tuner_6_9_0_4.swf”. Change it to “https://www.pandora.com:443/radio/tuner_7_0_0_0.swf”. It appears twice, so you should make two replacements.

That’s it – restart Pandora’s Jar and you should be up and running.

If you’d prefer to make the edits, you can download a copy of the updated pandoraGrabbler.html here. Right click, choose “Save as,” and copy the file into your Pandora directory. NOTE that you’ll have to remove the “.txt” from the file extension!

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How to Fix Pandora’s Jar error: “unable to rip MP3 null”

eddie — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 16:42:50 +0000

If you’re looking for information on how to use Pandora’s Jar, check here for my article called How to save music from Pandora using Pandora’s Jar

Lemme guess – Pandora’s Jar was working just fine for you, but then all of a sudden it stopped working?

The reason is that the Pandora Music Service changed the way that Pandora saves temporary music files to your computer.

Fortunately, there is a fix available.

User “Cooper” at Hak.5 posts this update in the Hak5.org forum:

Seems Pandora once again updated their program to store the downloaded MP3 file using a different name format.
To fix this, please replace the pandora.jar file from your current installation with this one:
http://comicnut.speedxs.nl/pandora.jar

So there you have it – the fix is at http://comicnut.speedxs.nl/pandora.jar I installed the updated version of the java .jar file and was back to saving mp3’s with no problem whatsoever.

I imagine that the music service will keep making changes. As they do, check back here or the Hak5 forum for updates.

Happy Sampling!

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How to save music from Pandora using Pandora’s Jar

eddie — Sat, 03 Jun 2006 23:41:12 +0000

The Pandora Music Service is pretty cool – you tell Pandora which artists and songs you like, and Pandora then plays music that it thinks you will like, based on your stated preferences. It’s a fun way to discover new music, though there are a couple of limitations.

The biggest limitation is that you are not permitted to “skip” more than a few songs per hour. After a few skips, the next time you attempt to pass by a bad song a notice pops up explaining that one of the terms of their music licensing agreement is that they can’t let you skip too many songs. Unfortunately, this makes Pandora pretty limited in terms of the music that are able to discover – I don’t know about you, but when searching for new music, I can tell whether I’ll like a song in 30 seconds or less.

Also, when searching for new music, I don’t always want to sit through listening to a song that I’m already familiar with. For example, I set up a music discovery station based on the artist “Johnny Cash.” No less than three out of the first 10 songs that Pandora played for me were by Hank Williams – as if I don’t already know every song Hank ever sang by heart! When I went to skip over the third Hank song, I was told “Sorry, you’re gonna have to sit through it!”

Another limitation of Pandora is that you have to be sitting at your computer in order to use the service. I don’t know about you, but when I’m sitting at my computer, I normally have other things going on (eg “work”), and I don’t always have the attention span to discover new music. I would instead prefer to discover new music while working out, listening to my mp3 player. (Not an iPod, btw.)

Since Pandora does not allow the user to save music to their hard disk, these two limitations are significant.

Enter Pandora’s Box – this piece of open-source software automatically saves Pandora’s music as an mp3 file, complete with song title and artist ID3 tags. You can then transfer the mp3 files to your portable mp3 player, allowing you to discover new music while working out, on a car trip, wherever. After listening to each song, it’s then up to you to respect intellectual property laws by deleting the mp3 files from your portable device.

Here is a brief tutorial on how to set up Pandora’s Jar:

First things first – Your computer should be running Windows XP and have the Java Virtual Machine installed. (Yes, I know, Java sucks. I didn’t write the software.)
Download the latest version of Pandora’s Jar. You can find the latest version listed here, in this forum at hak5.org. When I wrote this article, the latest version was version 4. (A direct link to version 7.3.1, the latest version as of 20 Sept 2006, is available here. However, this may not be the latest version – be sure to check the forum if you have troubles.) Make sure you will be able to find the file after your browser is done downloading it. If you aren’t sure that you will, be sure to choose “Desktop” when your browser asks you where you’d like to save the file.
Create a directory called c:\pandora and extract all files to it.
If you don’t know how to do either of these things, here’s what you do:
- Go to Start->Run
- Type “c:” (no quotes) and hit “enter”
- Right-click on the window that pops open and choose “New Folder”
- Name this folder “pandora” (no quotes)
- Double click this folder to enter it
- Find the file you previously downloaded and double click it. If you can’t find it, look on your desktop. It should be called something like “pandoras-jar-beta.4.zip”
- Drag all of the files in the window that pops up to the folder that you just created
Go to Start->Run and type “cmd”
Type “cd c:\pandora”
Type “java -jar pandora.jar 5432″. What you’re doing here is starting a server that you will connect to with your browser. “5432″ is the port number that you are starting the server on. If you have a service conflict, you can choose another port by simply specifying another number. If you do this, be sure to use this number, not 5432, in the next step!
Open your browser and go to “http://localhost:5432″. Pandora’s Jar will then start up, and it will start saving songs to the c:\Pandora\mp3 directory.

That’s it! If the above scares you, don’t be too worried – it sounds a lot more complicated than it really is.

A few tips:

Don’t skip to the next song when one is being saved. It will cause the whole setup to crash, and you’ll have to repeat steps 6 & 7
Respect intellectual property rights. It is illegal to keep a copy of music that you don’t own a license to. (This usually means that you own the physical CD or have purchased the songs via iTunes or similar music store.)
It might be illegal to use Pandora’s Jar to save music for a one-time listen. However, if you listen only once, you are arguably using Pandora’s box as a time-shifting device and your use is thus “fair use” covered by the Sony Betamax case.
Nothing here should be construed as legal advice. I don’t know if this is legal or not.
I didn’t write the software.

Good luck, and happy discovering!