A friend asked me about this, so I thought it’s good to share in a post.

You’ll need an audio editor/recorder. One that I highly recommend is the open source software Audacity, available for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Open source freeware Audacity

It’s pretty easy to use. Open a new project. Just click the record button when the music is playing, and stop the record when the music ends. If you want higher quality, just increase the sampling rate (default is 44.1Mhz). Export to Wav, mp3 or org vorbis when done.

Two tips that might help:

• Make sure that your line in settings are turned on and not muted. For Windows, this option can be found under My Computer->Control Panel->Sounds and Audio Device->Device Volume. Otherwise you might be wondering why there is no line input.
• To record in stereo (mono is default in Audacity), go to Edit->Preferences. Change the channels from 1(mono) to 2(stereo). For an FAQ for Audacity, you can find it here.

Besides YouTube, audio recorders like Audacity are useful for recording snippets from podcasts and streamed internet radio, especially for niche indie content.

In fact, I find myself sampling and converting to mp3 a lot more indie stuff nowadays as the internet makes it so easy to find great and unique music. Here’s a sample:

• Things so Singaporean, by Judith d’Silva and Ann Hussein (YouTube)
• Love Song for Singapore, by Mr Brown and folks (Mr Brown Show)
• Closer, by EN-X, Singapore band (MySpace)
• Miss Sunshine, by Postbox, Singapore band (MySpace)
• Code Monkey, by Jonathan Coulton, WoW machinima by Spiffworld (YouTube)
• Mario Kart Love Song, by BlinkTwice4y (YouTube)

I’m curious. What are you readers listening to out there? How do you find music?

Source: iKingyo.com

The goondus at Techgoondu wish one and all a Happy Chinese New Year… may the year of the ox not bring us more hard work and toil!

Here’s to a better economy!

Right after I wrote the annual Dream PC article for Digital Life in Dec 2008, I felt an itch to upgrade my existing PC, which was actually doing well as it was. For the DL article, I had played with an Intel Core i7-965 chip, some Corsair DDR3 RAM and a nice Lian Li case, and I couldn’t help the urge to upgrade my own rig!

Thus began the an almost two-month long sourcing plus building process for a new, souped up rig.

Spot the Windows crash

Unless you have a bigger screen at home, this is probably the biggest screen on which you’ll see a Windows error on.

Spotted this screwup at the big display ad at Suntec City, while I stopped at the traffic lights in my car about half an hour ago. Clearly, the PC used to splash the video advertisements had crashed and no one bothered to change it out.

If I were Samsung, which is featured so prominently on the billboard, I’d demand for a refund for the embarrassment!

Windows has encountered an error and need to close! I won’t pay thousands for that to appear next to my brand.

Bob Picciano, GM of IBM Lotus, unveiling LotusLive

Cloud computing and social media are big themes this year.

Every major software vendor – from Microsoft to Google – is talking it up and jumping on the bandwagon. IBM Lotus just unveiled LotusLive Monday 19th Jan at this year’s Lotusphere 2009 in Orlando, Florida.

Basically, it’s a cloud-based social network platform hosted by IBM and sold as SaaS (software as a service). It extends to the extranet Lotus capabilities (which were mostly intranet focused) and is a reaction to the trends that applications are going online and social.

My first impression from an end user perspective is that it is a sort of a Facebook for business use. From a business perspective, it is an enterprise set of extranet tools that ties in with backend Lotus systems.

You can now buy DRM-free songs for your Sony Ericsson phone at a kiosk situated at its stores islandwide.

With the phone maker’s PlayNow Kiosk service launched across the island yesterday, SE users can hook up their phones and avail to some 23,000 songs (e.g. Sasha Fierce, aka Beyonce), as well as 30 movie titles (e.g. Hancock) and 25 games (e.g. Guitar Rock Tour) at launch.

Sounds like a workable service, given how popular people print their phone photos these days at kiosks, despite the proliferation of home printers. But what are the problems?

Definitive ProCinema 600

My new home theatre setup just got delivered today!

It’s a Denon 1509 AVR (audio-visual receiver, sorry, not adult-video receiver for you, Billy) plus a set of Definitive Technology ProCinema 600 5.1 speakers that I ordered from KEC at Adelphi.

I’m just dying to set up these chio speakers and fire up a DVD in an instant!

I’ll stick my neck out and make a prediction: in the future we won’t need to own digital copies of mp3s, let alone CDs.

Not when we can pull music off the virtual cloud that is the Internet.

Music is one big area that is exploding in the new social Web 2.0. You can discover, search, and share playlists on many music websites out there, and never have to own a single copy of any song.

It feels like Napster days all over again. But far more than filesharing platforms or basic internet streamed radio, these Web 2.0 sites – and there are many of them out there – allow you interesting ways to find and play music.

I hardly listen to my own mp3s nowadays except when I’m on the move. When I’m home doing work, I’m typically listening to one of these sites below:

Razer Mamba

I managed to get my hands on the prototype of the new 2.4 GHz wireless mouse that has set a new record at 5600 dpi speeds, beating the new Logitech G9x’s 5000 dpi by a whisker.

The Razer Mamba is developed right here in Singapore at the labs of the US gaming peripherals maker. It has amazing responsiveness for a gaming mouse with only 1 ms latency (gaming mice suffers from lag because the mouse has to transmit data from the mouse to the receiver connected to the PC)

You see the gap at the top of the wheel? That’s where you can plug in the USB charger cable and use it like a wired mouse. So you don’t have to scream your head off while waiting hours for your wireless mice to charge on its dock. Plus, it charges the mouse battery while you are using it in wired mode.

My conclusion: It felt just like a bloody good wired mouse to me!

Updated: Forgot to mention the retail price is US$129 and it will be available Q1 this year in Singapore (likely to be sooner than later)

Read my complete review in next week’s Digital Life.

Was gonna blog about Creative’s new Zii chip that was launched at the CES gizmo show yesterday, but realised its site is actually down. Another PR snafu?

Zii site down

The company has smartly hyped up the Zii as something to do with “stem-cell computing”, driving up hits at techie sites by making them guess what Zii actually was.

Unfortunately, a problematic site is surely not the best way to launch such an important chip that is aimed at turning around Creative’s flagging fortunes of late.

What exactly is Zii? We have no real idea. But Creative calls it stem-cell computing. So at first we thought – WOW maybe Creative is moving to the life sciences industry and scored some deal with some big pharmas. But it’s not.