Monthly Archives: March 2002

Something Awful has outdone themselves – Fun with Children’s Books and Photoshop.

Well, finally got MediaMatch to work again. If you should run into the same problem, where MediaMatch crashes at startup, try searching for WNASPI32.DLL in your windows (or winnt) directory and it’s subdirectories. Move the file somewhere else (like your desktop) and reboot.

Looks like MediaMatch does not like other vendor’s ASPI drivers.

I love ripping CDs. I really don’t actually even use CDs in the house any more – I play MP3s off of my hard drive with WinAmp (Windows) or XMMS (Linux). So far I’ve ripped the majority of my CD collection, and have roughly 5500 MP3s stored on my Linux server.

My tool of choice for ripping has always been MediaMatch, but for some reason I just cannot get it to run under Windows XP Professional. It simply crashes at startup. So, I needed a new tool to do the ripping for me.

I had read that Windows Media Player 8.0 finally supported ripping to formats other than WMA. Well, you can, but it’s not an option available by default (of course). After poking around the web for a few minutes, I found the answer. It requires making a change to the registry, so don’t attempt this unless you know what you’re doing.

Copy this block of text into a file named mp3.reg:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\Settings\MP3Encoding]
"LowRate"=dword:0000dac0
"MediumRate"=dword:00017700
"HighRate"=dword:0002ee00
"MediumHighRate"=dword:0001f400

Now, in Windows Explorer, right click on mp3.reg and select merge. Reboot.

Start up Windows Media Player and select Tools->Options and click on the “Copy Music” tab. Look for “File Format” and select MP3.

If for some reason MP3 ripping does not work, you may need an MP3 codec. I’ll leave it up to you to search Google.

Even though I’m finding fewer reasons to actually need a RealMedia player these days, there’s always the odd file/URL that requires it. My new PC did not have a copy of RealPlayer installed, so I headed over to Real’s site to grab a copy. The latest version of the player is now called RealOne, and at first glance, it looked like Real started charging for the player, or at least required a valid credit card number before they would allow the download. Well, sorry, no way. I didn’t need it that badly.

After poking around the site for awhile, I found that they had buried the free download page deep in the bowels of the site. So, if you want to download RealOne and not have to give them your credit card number, head over to their free download page.