So I just thought I'd put fingers to keyboard, so to type, since I had a couple thoughts...

(Yes, that was a not-so-subtle parody of Nat's post here.)

-Part 1-

Well, over the course of our vacation/trip, we've been staying at the houses of various friends and relatives (similar to Linux distro-hopping, I daresay) and one of the features that varies between locations is the reading selection. At one of my uncles and aunts' house, they had a number of Frank Peretti books; I've read several of his: The Oath, Hangman's Curse and Nightmare Academy, some from the Cooper series, and also Piercing the Darkness. However, I had not read Monster or House, a book he co-authored with Ted Dekker, nor had I read This Present Darkness, to which Piercing the Darkness is a sequel. They had all three of these books, and I read all three last weekend.

This, I imagine, puts me in a somewhat qualified position to review and comment on Peretti's literary offerings, and that is what I intend to do.

Peretti's books might be generally described as supernatural thrillers; he gives angels, demons, and spiritual warfare a very real place in everyday life. In addition, he provides insight on modernity and culture from a biblical perspective; his plots depict the consequences of fallen human nature in a gripping and lively fashion. His simple and unrefined dialogues and almost over-the-top vivid descriptions combine to create an urgent, driving story.

In Monster, for example, the story begins with a handful of people taking a weekend retreat into the wilderness, but an ongoing thread of perplexing hints and puzzle pieces races through the building tension to form an entire web of intrigue that involves Sasquatches, hair-raising hunts and gruesome deaths, and the ruthless advance of Atheistic science. House deals with a deadly game of manipulation and greed, fueled by fear and Satanism, and ultimately exposes our bondage to Sin in our own hearts, and liberation through Christ and sacrifice.

"Light came into the darkness, but the darkness did not understand it."

This Present Darkness and Piercing the Darkness vividly depict the struggle of the Remnant against the onslaught of Humanistic (and ultimately Satanistic) agendas, power struggles for the education system, government, and even entire towns. But beyond this superficial picture, the awesome conflict between angels and demons, good against evil, is beautifully portrayed. These books are a powerful testament to the efficacy of prayer, with the prayers of the saints providing "prayer cover" for angels to carry out maneuvers, and strength to meet demons in battle. Finally, the assurance that shouts so gloriously from the pages is that God IS ultimately in control, and "light will always pierce the darkness." Shades of C.S. Lewis's deeper magic. I get goosebumps.

So, as the angels say, "For the saints of God and for the Lamb!"

-Part 2-

Now, a bit on mewithoutYou (mentioned of course in many previous posts), arguably my favorite band. To be perfectly honest, my estimation of mwY may have been somewhat lowered by what I've recently learned. Then again, maybe I've just *altered* my preconceptions, while still holding their work in the same esteem. I think that really is the key word-- preconceptions. Not to flood this post with C.S. Lewis references or anything, but I think there is something to be said for his (if somewhat Universalist) account in The Last Battle of the dialogue between Aslan and Emeth (a Calormene), where Aslan explains that, while Emeth thought he had been worshipping Tash, he had in fact been serving Aslan, "For I and he [Tash] are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him." Okay, so it isn't just Lewis's idea either... maybe that's what Paul was getting at in the Areopagus, eh?

The point I'm trying to pose for consideration is the possibility that, despite maybe not holding the correct understanding/belief of Scripture, it is still possible to worship and obey the one true God. That does seem to be validated by Paul's speech. Of course, you don't yet know what I'm referring to, do you? Sorry...

*deep breath*

Well, being on vacation and all, I was able to take some time to do a bit more research on mwY, the band philosophy and background, etc. And I came across a few things that I found a bit unsettling. First there's the fact that their lyrics and philosophy are influenced by Sufi Islam teachings (Aaron was raised in a Sufi household before he converted to Christianity; his father converted from Judaism and his mother from Episcopalian). Then again, it isn't as if such beliefs are *necessarily* in contradiction with a Christian aesthetic. However, it does indicate to me that they aren't on the page I thought they were, at least not nominally, and sometimes nominally can be important. More on that later. Next, I found a couple of interviews with lead vocalist Aaron Weiss found here and here. From the first interview, we find this excerpt:

It’s not like I’m offended if someone says we’re a Christian band. I just don’t think it’s true. I don’t think we live up to that calling, so I’d be reluctant to go saying that, and God knows the truth. Our hearts are very far from Jesus.

Now that concerns me somewhat. However, if you take that in perspective with their lyrics, what do you end up with? They certainly don't seem "far from Jesus" in the many references to Jesus in their songs and the story that they tell. Eh. Hmm.

From the second interview:

I'm trying to understand the Bible, and um, but I definitely don't put it on the same pedestal that I used to. You know, where I'd say, "this is the word of God that I'm holding in my hand and this is infallible and perfect, and there's no contradictions and is scientifically accurate," and all the rest...

And then he goes on to point out reasons he now regards it as more of collection of holy Jewish stories and poems. In this list he cites various "inconsistencies," and how he just wasn't convinced by efforts to sustain their validity. I'm glad, however, to see that he goes on to say, "There's just some things that I pray to God to guide me in the right way and to guide me to the truth in the best way." He's evaluating things that the Bible says by what is written on his conscience, and I hope God will grow him that way.

So, to conclude, I want to express a few final thoughts about the worship/worldview issue. Looking at Romans 1, we seem to find another indicator of God's natural revelation and the potential to worship Him with the knowledge given. Is one absolutely required to have received the gospel to be included in God's kingdom? I hope not... what about those far-flung tribes who have lived for centuries "without excuse"? Then again, I do think it's important to claim the name of Christ if you've received the gospel. I don't know how that all works out... I realize this is sort of a whole different topic, but it is one that pertains directly to the subject at hand, so I'm trying just to briefly set up a framework. C.S. Lewis (last reference, I promise), in Pilgrim's Regress, outlines such a model, where he describes the heathens as being given a "picture" of "Sweet Desire" by God, and in striving towards that, they were living by His law. The Christians in Puritania, however, have the law without the picture. At any rate, I think it does make sense.

However it may be, I love the poetry and passion of mewithoutYou and believe their theme is in worship to God, and I certainly pray for them and hope to see them in Heaven. Can't wait to listen to It's All Crazy! It's All False! It's All a Dream! It's Alright when I get home in a week or so.

Bonus material: check out http://improveverywhere.com. Hilarious stuff, but language disclaimer.

-Matthew

So I just thought I'd put pen to paper, so to speak, since I had a couple thoughts.

First thing: the free culture music scene. I don't really have a lot of experience there, but I do know this so far: there is some great talent there. For instance, I've downloaded all of JT Bruce's released albums on the fabulous Jamendo (which I gushed about back here). I have some other music from there, but his are probably my favorites so far. And I've heard about Jack Conte… sounds interesting. In fact, I find the whole culture interesting. In a related channel, some of this vibe seems to be seeping out into mainstream music. Notably, Nine Inch Nails (and by implication, its sole member, Trent Reznor). Reznor seems to have gotten sick of major label trash, and in fact gave some thoughts for new and unknown artists recently on the NIN forums.

So, while I don't think I would completely abandon the mainstream industry, I respect this free culture. It's really a fascinating thing to me and I do want to learn more. I'm still coming to grips with what I think about copyright law (well, okay, maybe I should say I haven't sat down and given it a deep think-through yet). I think it's right to obey copyright law, because it's the law and there doesn't seem to be anything inherently evil about it, but maybe it does need to be revised (I'm talking U.S. here). When Congress finally gets around to it (2014 maybe?), it's going to be a doozy, whatever happens. The explosion of the digital age cannot be ignored. Anyway, it's an interesting thing, and I want to learn more about all of it (did I already say that?). Hopefully, I can eventually make my music collection 100% legal (meaning buy copies of all the stuff I don't own and want to keep; some CD's and some single downloads).

Second thing: Rockbox. If you're the type who might run Linux, you might like Rockbox, the awesome alternative firmware for jukeboxes (mp3 players). OK, maybe you don't need to run Linux, but I just thought maybe there's a similar appeal. Anyway, I've been running Rockbox on my Sansa e200 version 1 since fall or early winter last year. I was running the few week old 3.0 release then. Now, it's up to 3.3. This seems like a growing up release to me; support for JPEG album art finally and native USB support on some players in Rockbox (thought at least on mine it uses the original firmware if plugged in while off). In any case, it has support for bunches of codecs (including, of course, unprotected iTunes). It also has a load of plugins, many of which can be used while playing music, divided into applications, games, and demos. Anyway, enough with the infomercial. All I'm saying is if you have a supported player (more in development!) and want some more out of your MP3 player, check it out.

Edit: July 25, 2009: As an addendum, I really enjoy the playlist management Rockbox brings to my e200. I couldn't do it with the original firmware but using Rockbox I can follow my habit of making custom playlists consisting of songs from different albums. This was sort of possible with the OF, but was fairly painstaking (you had to play songs you wanted in the list and add them to a 'go list').

I wouldn't call myself a music connoisseur, but I definitely enjoy music. Thus I share this with you. It's an instrumental album; modern orchestral rock, as one reviewer on Jamendo called it, seems to be a good description. There are no lyrics, but some backup vocals, and just some straight talking on the last track.

The music in and of itself is superb; the technical workmanship is excellent. The artist is JT Bruce, but I know not how many individuals may hide behind such a title. The story is somewhat intriguing. I listened to the album, and then I found out in the last track. After the music comes to an end, a voice begins to speak about The Dreamer's Paradox. Here it is in a nutshell: "One third of your life will be wasted. You’ll lie in an unconscious, catatonic state and sleep your life away. What if you could take those years back?" The music of the album represents a person's journey of escape into dreams, and their subsequent blending of dream and reality… until one is the same as the other.

Pretty scary. I confess it freaked me out the first time. I had to like… conquer it -- by sleeping through a night. Even then it took a little longer, I think.

The whole album runs about 74 minutes, but the last track may not be as enjoyable for listening as the others… it's rather anarchic and part of it is just speech. The preceding tracks total about 64 minutes, though, which is a pretty good amount of listening.

The Dreamer's Paradox on Jamendo 

P.S.  It doesn't really happen… I'm pretty sure you're awake. Well, I think so…

I'll start this post with a brief overview of some work I did on my computer, mainly over Christmas break. Vista was beginning to feel a bit sluggish, and since I had some time to mess with it, I decided to plunge into the adventure of tinkering with partitions, boot flags, installations, and so forth. I was also planning to try, once again, to get my Dell Media Direct button to boot Ubuntu. I removed Media Direct a long time ago (it's not all that useful, and takes up more space than a Linux distro), so the button didn't do anything, except maybe bring up the MD flash screen. I had tried this process before, following this guide, and failed then. It didn't work this time either, but don't stop reading; this could still be informative. Here is a thread on the Notebookreview.com forums that details my progress, since I don't feel like recounting it all here.

I now have a running computer, resplendent with the most recent version of Ubuntu, and a fairly customized version of Vista, even if I didn't get it vLited like I wanted too. Maybe next time... I'd need a DVD, a DVD burner, a lot of time and patience, etc. And I've set my MD button to turn off my screen in Windows! See this thread (I use Monitoroff.exe instead of the provided utility). Pretty smooth, and I think it's actually more useful than having it boot Ubuntu. GRUB does a good job.

Our local Radio Shack is been going out of business, so they recently had a liquidation sale, with prices half off. At the sale, I got a Sandisk Sansa 2GB Clip, a Vanguard MP-4 Monopod, a CB radio, and some electrical components that were purported to, if assembled correctly, act as a wireless FM microphone that transmits at (legal) low power with a 45ft range, to frequencies between 91 and 97 MHz, depending on the tuning of the coil and the frequency picked up by the microphone. Wicked awesome, I thought! However, the assembly was another matter. That PCP chip was smaller than I thought, my soldering skills are less than satisfactory, and I think I need a new tip for my soldering gun. However, somehow, when I finally got things put together late at night, it worked. I had to add a SPST toggle switch and 'N' battery and holder to the kit. Pictures below.












































































Oh yes, and I've also uploaded my first Youtube video. I was trying to get Youtube to automatically include a High-Res option, but it's not really worth it anyways, since the video isn't high-res to begin with, and the Youtube version isn't too bad. Just don't watch it in fullscreen.

A couple more things... more along the politics and art veins. This may make an interesting read, if for no other reason than to expand and circulate thoughts on economy and the principles that apply. It should be noted that the creator of this program is a successful entrepreneur. The other thing is about the band mewithoutYou. I could talk for quite some time on the subject, but the telos of what I have to say is really that their aesthetic is much more subtle, poetical, and powerful than a lot of what passes as art or music. Their lyrics and instrumental style portray a much broader, deeper, more sober and yet more beautiful picture of life than just about any current buzz songs that come to mind. Here are the lyrics to a song by mewithoutYou called "Silencer".

Don't waste your lips on words I've heard before
Kiss my tired head.
And each letter written wastes your hand, young man
Come and lead me to your bed
You gave me hope that I'd not lost her
And then thought it rather strange to see me smile-
as I don't do too much smiling these days.

She put on happiness like a loose dress
Over pain I'll never know
"So the peace you had, " she says,
"I must confess, I'm glad to see it go."
We're two white roses lying frozen just outside his door
I've made you so happy and so sad,
But which should I be more sorry for?

Come kiss my face goodbye,
that space below my eye and above my cheek
Cause I'm faint and fading fast, I see a darkness
And I shall be released.
I'll pass like a fever from this body,
And softly slip into his hands
I tried to love you and I failed,
But I have another plan.

My Lord, how long to sing this song?
And my Lord, how much more of this pretending to be strong?
When she stands before your throne
Dressed in beauty not her own
All soft and small, you'll hear her call
"you brought me here, now take me home."

I think they evidence a profound grasp of theological principles, the struggle of life, pain, beauty, and the true source of strength. At any rate, listening to a song like this gives me a whole lot more contemplate than many songs I could think of.

And finally, for what it's worth, here is a list of what I've read, am reading, and will be reading for a while.

Phantastes: A Faerie Romance
Call it Courage
A River Runs Through It
All the Pretty Horses
Camp 4
Royal Robbins: Spirit of the Age
The Great Gatsby
The Importance of Being Earnest
The Man Who Knew Too Much
My Name is Asher Lev
The Ball and The Cross
The Red Badge of Courage
The Princess and The Goblin
The Princess and Curdie
The Liberated Imagination
A Tale of Two Cities
Hans Brinker/The Silver Skates
The Silmarillion
Les Miserables

Well, actually, I know what it means, but I wonder what the implications are. Here are my thoughts.

The iTunes Store is already very popular among those who buy music by the file. But, it ties into the Apple system: iTunes (the app) and iPods. Nota Bene: the majority of mp3 players/DAPs out there are iPods. Not hard to notice.

Enter a DRM-free movement that puts pressure on Apple. Apple eventually concedes; at first part of the Store, and then they're going DRM free (I don't know if it's happened yet). Seems like a smart move to me. After all, why should we buy from Apple's closed system when we can buy from the myriad of other digital music sellers, torrent it, or rip it off a friend's CD? Two things that spring to my mind are convenience and the very wide range of materials available in the iTunes Store (to my knowledge).

Now what? Two venues: DRM free downloads from the Store and conversions of previously purchased material to DRM free.

It seems to me that new DRM free downloads will have the bigger impact. I don't know how well the news will spread, but I can guess that among average users, they might not hear about it for a while, if ever. Or if they even knew there was DRM, or even what DRM is (perhaps thanks to Apple's successful integration scheme). When an already popular source offers a sweeter deal, maybe it'll go boom even bigger. I can't really see it hurting Store sales. Now, the second part to this venue: the format. No longer will people have to use the notoriously clunky iTunes to play their purchased music. Heeello Foobar, Winamp, Amarok, Banshee, Songbird, and everything else that can handle .m4a. And this also means players; I have it in my head that some players out there do handle that format and I know that Rockbox does (Sansa e200 v1 FTW!). So, because of the last two things I mentioned, some people who didn't like the iTunes system before may now join up/come back.

The second venue is conversion of your old Store goods to the new DRM free format. Actually I suspect they're not so much conversion involved; I think Apple may be doing some file modding that just removes the DRM, as has been done before by, umm, certain tools. So how many people are going to pay Apple's fee to convert their collection? I can't say. But it would be interesting to get some statistics on it, or even some feelings from the public on converting their stuff.

One note here: I've assumed in this post that the conversion involves videos, and I'm assuming they are DRMed. I don't know either for sure; in fact, I've never bought anything from the iTunes Store, only witnessed a purchase once. I don't even have iTunes installed right now (Safari, though… free Lucida Grande font and I should use it a lot more for webdev testing, but then again, Chrome has WebKit, so… sigh).

And, on a somewhat related note, I find the lyrics of this song somewhat funny. It's about pirating music and bucking the system, I think. Lolz. Take a listen for you health.

MewthoutYou is releasing a new album in May! Suh-weeeet!!!!!!

It's called It's All Crazy! It's All False! It's All A Dream! It's Alright.

Pending track listing according to aholidayathesea on Last.FM:

1. Cattail Down
2. The Fox, The Crow, & The Cookie
3. A Stick, A Carrot, & A String
4. Bullet To Binary (Pt. Two)
5. Timothy Hay
6. The Angel of Death Came To David's Room
7. A Fig With A Belly Ache
8. Goodbye, I
9. The Beetle King On The Coconut Estate
10. Every Blade of Grass
11. Whatever Goes, Let It Go

This is going to be sickness, 11 new tracks of mewithoutYou! If it's true… as of right now it looks like it just popped up very recently; I'd say it's still rumor status.

I really like Catch for Us the Foxes, so… sweetness. Oh yeah, and I like what I've heard of [A→B] Life. Less sure about liking Brother, Sister from what I've heard so far, but maybe I'll change my opinion once I own the album (whenever that is).

P.S. Release date cite: here.

Thanks to a comment on that DownloadSquad free music post I linked to a while back, I wanted to see if I could grab some free music from brother-sister.net, mewithoutYou's official site for their latest released album, Brother, Sister. Four songs from the album are available for streaming.

So, like the commenter, I installed the Firefox add-on Live HTTP Headers, which is kind of fun… it let's you see the HTTP calls the browser makes. So I pointed Firefox to brother-sister.net, and it let me see the calls the Flash element, in this case, was making when I switched songs. I saw that it was pointing to .swf files, Flash files.

Yesterday I grabbed all the URL's and downloaded two of them with Free Download Manager. Since they were Flash files, my idea was to convert them to mp3 (or maybe something else) or grab the sound out of them via decompilation.

The two programs I grabbed to do that were HooTech's SWF FLV to MP3 Converter trial and Decompile Flash Free Version. Neither would open the .swf files. I admitted defeat.

But, later that night, I thought… I did download something… and they were several megs each. Then it occurred to me that maybe they were actually MP3's, so I tried it out, and boom! They absoballylutely were! So, there you are, four free mewithoutYou songs with a small effort.

The following instructions are for Windows using Firefox, but the process is fairly similar with other operating systems and browsers.

The .swf links:

a Glass Can Only Spill What it Contains (track 5)
Nice and Blue (pt. Two) (track 6)
C-Minor (track 9)
O, Porcupine (track 11)

So, if those don't download and just sit there, just right click the links and select Save Link As… Or, if you have a download manager, add new downloads for the files… right click the links and select Copy Link Location to get the proper address and then paste them into your download manager.

Then, when the .swf's have finished downloading, open the folder you downloaded them to, and change the extensions to .mp3 (for example, change C-Minor.swf to C-Minor.mp3). This can easily be accomplished through right clicking the files and selecting Rename. If you can't see the extension (so C-Minor.swf would just look like C-Minor), you need to turn on known file extensions.

And there you go, you have your MP3's. And at a fairly good 112 Kbps quality. They don't have any tags, though so you could automatically tag them (put in information like artist, title, album, album year, etcetera) with Mp3tag or Auto-Tag in Winamp. Or you can manually tag them with a program such as Windows Media Player or iTunes (album information here).

Enjoy.

Also, I further tried out Decompile Flash Free Version and SWF FLV to MP3 Converter this morning using a real Flash file. SWF FLV to MP3 Converter seems to work OK, but it's only a trial; on exit you are told that it's a trial version and "The version only converts 50% audio and extracts 5 sound elements at most." Decompile Flash Free Version, however, extracted all of the elements of the same Flash file for me… for free. And it's not a trial. I extracted all the sound elements just fine. So, if any of you Windows users need a decent (to me) Flash decompiler and partial editor for free, this looks great.

If you have a fast connection, I'd say head over there RIGHT NOW. Jamendo. The interface is nice, and there is a lot of legal free music, most of it under Creative Commons licenses. Awesome… albums and albums of free music. Good stuff there, too.

This was one of the items on the list I linked to not too long ago, just so you know.

Edit by Nathaniel, January 08, 2008: It looks like that post was actually a rip, or a repost of this Download Squad post. Or possibly the other way around, but I would guess DLS had it first.

I ran across this list of legal free music a while ago and took a look at it again recently. It has 35 different sources, which sort of seems strange in a world where bootlegging music is just a matter of clicking on that strange looking "u" or that familiar lemon. The ones I've used before on the list are:

• mp3.com
• purevolume; free streaming of songs from loads and loads of bands, free mp3's from some
• music.Download.com; thousands of free mp3's… I've found and downloaded some stuff I liked (Armor of God, Pillow, andrew lawler); also some artists on there with just streaming
• Last.FM; I've never used their internet radio service before (except for an on demand song one time, I think), but I have snagged some downloads from the site. The download page has a tag cloud so you can see what genres are popular. Lots of music, and lots of variety, I would guess.
• Spiral Frog; downloaded three whole albums and then some from them. The cache? DRMed WMA files. The license expire after a couple months, I think, and you have to take a survey at the site, which isn't actually so bad. I suppose if you can stand DRMed music, and your device supports it (*cough* no iPods! *cough*), you might want to  take a look. They actually do have a lot, and I did buy a hard copy of an album after downloading it late last year. I've heard it said it's a good way to try out music you might buy, and I think I agree; it would be easy enough to pop it into your favorite media software (sans iTunes) and see if you like it (though the site does offer streaming, too… take your pick). Well, if your a Windows user and if you have broadband.

They also mention on the page Nine Inch Nails' free release of The Slip. I had actually heard about it before I saw that, but in any case, the music is still available, though a hard copy has been released, I think (or get it anywhere… it's legal to torrent and share it). The nin site has the files in all sorts of formats, and if you're an audio freak, you can always grab the FLAC files and transcode them to whatever you like. My track recommendations are Discipline and Letting You. And, by the way, this is industrial, so if you dislike such heavy music, you'll probably want to skip it.

Finally, I thought I would discuss the YouTube way. You can find a lot… and I mean a lot of music on YouTube. Videos that are just blank or a picture or the like the whole way through just for the sake of the audio track are pretty obviously pirating (albeit low quality pirating) if it's copyrighted. But what about music videos? Is it fair use to upload a self made or mixed video with a copyrighted song? I don't know. How about snagging official music videos made officially available? It's pretty easy to grab the audio with FLV Extract. But is it legal and right? I haven't found out, but it is on my mind (at least in the back of it). Feel free to share anything you know or think about this or any additional legal free music sources.

You know what? I don't think rock music is going to die, to fade back to folk and classical… if we still have the skill and complexity of classical music (and the style is still alive… neo-classical, anyone?), we shall still have that of rock.

Viva la rock!

Dare to disagree? Say on.

Sigh. The royalty rates didn't go up, and Apple keeps on selling the tunes.

Other news: Nintendo shows off the DSi. It launches in Japan on the first. Hmmm… it has a web browser… this should be interesting.

And… watch the VP debate if you can. We don't have live TV, so it's a no go for me, but if you do, hit the tube tonight.

Not too long ago, I got my Switchfoot CD, Nothing is Sound. It was all good, until I noticed the CD case said that the content was protected. Ummm… hmmm. That made me think of DRM. I popped the disc into my laptop, and sure enough, a program autoran… a nice and shiny Flash app that would let me listen to the CD, burn copies (limited copies, of course), or rip the music to my hard drive. I ended up ripping it. Took long enough. Once it was finally done, it was easy enough to launch Winamp and play the tracks. And the catch? They were in restricted Windows Media Audio format, or WMA DRM. Ok, so that works… I can listen to it, and the MP3 player I had ordered supports WMA DRM. Even so, I found the DRM annoying, especially since I didn't know about it when I ordered the album… and the app would rip the music at a maximum level of 192 Kbps, which is OK, but not the best possible quality.

Time to experiment. And… Winamp won't play the disc as a music CD. The audio files couldn't be found from Explorer. I had heard of DRM being removable, so I looked around online. OK, it could be done, but the programs were not free, and according to a blog post I found, doing it that way is illegal. Supposedly there is a analog loophole as mentioned in the post, but I didn't go that way… I think my sound card might not even support it anyway.

I stuck the thing in my old CD player and hit play. And it played. Ok, so the standard music CD data was there. I booted Ubuntu to see what I could do from there. Sweet! I could access the music data from there. Turns out it had both music and data on it, something I believe is called a multi-mode disc.

OK, so simple enough. Rip the CD to FLAC from Ubuntu, encode into MP3 in Windows, using BonkEnc. Easy as pie… almost. Everything was good, except for the fact that a few minutes of garbage sound were getting tacked onto the last track. The CD played just fine in Ubuntu, but for some reason or another, there was a problem ripping the last track.

I ended up using BonkEnc to transcode the last track to WAV, and then fired up Audacity for a little down and dirty editing. I could get the exact length of the ripped WMA using Winamp, and so I planned to trim the file down to that length. Except, Audacity doesn't seem to have any jump to time function. Arg. I hit Google looking for a plugin or some sort of solution, but didn't turn up anything.

So, I had to do it the hard way: zoom waaaay in. I found the time, put the marker there, highlighted back, and trimmed. Saved the WAV, transcoded back into FLAC. Woot. Transcode into MP3, and it's ready for my MP3 player.

It took long enough, but I got a set of unrestricted FLAC files. Later I read that the band wasn't exactly happy about the copy protection Sparrow Records put on their album. They even posted a workaround online, but Sony took it down, and I haven't found out what it is. I did found out on Wikipedia that this stuff is called Extended Copy Protection. And it's evil… but more on that later… it got enough publicity in 2005 anyway.