Just Computers

I was just farting around with Audacity and the Repair function. I noticed this in the manual: "Audacity has a Repair effect which can be used to repair a short length of up to 128 samples long...". [emphasis mine]

I wonder if the problem you had was not a program failure, but you were working with some audio that the program couldn't handle 128 samples at a time. There must be some reason they said "up to" 128.

More farting around with Audacity.

I saved a clip at 192,000 samples per second. When I loaded that file, the repair function would only allow less than forty samples to be selected, then the warning box popped up. If you have the problem again, check the sample rate.

_Howard wrote:

I was just farting around with Audacity and the Repair function.

So can I assume you're working on a routine to find-and-repair all noise events automagically???

Nope. I was just trying to replicate the problem you had.
For the first time, my computer does not have any development tools installed.

To do all the repair "automagically" would require a new program, not just a routine for Audacity.

As to your problem, check the sampling frequency and sample size on the files that gave you the problem. 44KHz has a sample size of sixteen bits, while higher sampling frequencies typically use twenty-four or thirty-two bit samples. I think that is what caused your problem (and Audacity could provide better error messages, especially this wasn't exactly an error).

I don't think the sampling frequency was a factor.  For one, I've always used 44.1KHz 16-bit as my standard, and secondly, the error came and went on the same file.

But it's not a major deal anyway, as I stated, since I rarely correct as many as 128 bits anyway.

It DOES make sense though that a higher sampling frequency would result in shorter time being capable of being worked on -- although "128 bits" is "128 bits" regardless of the timeframe.

You keep saying "128 bits" but I'm sure you mean "128 samples." Which is altogether different.

128 samples can vary in size.

Yeah you're right of course, I meant "samples."

Is a "sample" equal to a byte (8 bits)?

In the audio files widely used, 44.1KHz has a sample size of sixteen bits, while higher sampling frequencies typically use twenty-four or thirty-two bit samples.

128 samples at 44.1KHz allows you to select about three milliseconds of signal for repair.

So one sample = 2 bytes?

At the grocery store the samples are rarely more than one bite.

NoCoPilot wrote:

At the grocery store the samples are rarely more than one bite.

And they aren't worth two bits.

One sample may be two bytes, which would be stated as sixteen bits. But one sample may be larger than two bytes. There are esoteric reasons why the sizes are given in bits, rather than bytes.

NoCoPilot wrote:

But it's not a major deal anyway...

I know, but when I see a software issue, I have to try to figure it out.
I can't just ignore it. It is not in my nature.

The file I'm working on has 64,557,767 samples.

At 128 samples per repair, that'd be 504,357 repairs.

At 5 seconds per repair, that's a little over 29 days. That sounds about right.

_Howard wrote:

One sample may be two bytes, which would be stated as sixteen bits. But one sample may be larger than two bytes. There are esoteric reasons why the sizes are given in bits, rather than bytes.

Enlighten my load.

Not every "byte" is eight bits. I could give you a history lesson, but that would be boring.

More boring than editing 64,557,767 samples?

It would likely be a tie.

Unless you would be fascinated by the origins of the terms bit, word, and byte. Oh, and let's not forget nibble.

And it would also require a knowledge of computer hardware.

Fun times.

NPM update changes critical Linux filesystem permissions, breaks everything

The wife and grandson are cleaning out the garage (thank you, thank you. thank you). They ran across a large box with a monitor in it. (I had already had five old monitors thrown out from the store room). I had no idea where the monitor came from, until I looked up the model number on the net and it made me remember what the monitor was.

It was, at the time, called an Ultra High Resolution monitor: 1600x1200. It was also called a paper white monitor because the display was white, rather than the standard green. It could be optionally mounted so that it was taller than it was wide. It required a special video card, because in 1988 the PC video was, well, lacking. The video card used more current than the computer's bus could supply, so it had an external power supply just for the video card.

To make everything even better, the monitor and controller did not come with drivers; I had to write my own. Can you imagine anyone doing that today?

I used it about thirty years ago for a job I was doing for a local company. They supplied the card and monitor. When the job was done, I remember Larry picked up the video card and said he would pick up the  monitor another time. Apparently he didn't.

Yeah, malware continues to be the bane of the internet, moreso for naive Windows users but still its out there for everybody. Kinda surprising in 2018 actually that nobody's figured out a fix for this.

Yesterday's news brought stories of Cambridge Analytica buying 50 million Facebook user profiles from a British professor who had gotten them for research. This professor spoke Russian and taught in Russia, and some ties to the Russian government were assumed. Cambridge Analytica is an offshoot of SCL, a British data mining company. CA was created in 2013 to use data on US voters to do targeted political advertising. Steve Bannan was (is?) a principal in the company.

Facebook users had their data transferred to the UK for research, sold by a Russian, and brought back into the US by right-wing ideologues to help Donald Trump win the election.

Facebook -- and most social media sites -- are insecure reservoirs of all your personal data. Anyone who participates should be aware.

_Howard wrote:

It was, at the time, called an Ultra High Resolution monitor: 1600x1200. It was also called a paper white monitor because the display was white, rather than the standard green. It could be optionally mounted so that it was taller than it was wide.

When I worked for Ballard Computer in 1990 we sold the Radius Paper White Rotatable Monitor.  It was a nice piece of kit.

Sometimes I hate software companies.

I have the need to burn a DVD on my computer, something I haven't done before on this computer.  Looked around for some shareware or cheap software to do menuing and editing, found what looks like a nice suite called iSkysoft for free. "Make Free iMovie DVD Menu with iSkysoft DVD Creator!"

Downloaded it, installed it, opened it up.

It asks for a $49.99 payment before launching.  Freaking bait-and-switch.

lol

Why ‘remote detonator’ is a bad name for your Wi-Fi network

Heh, “It hurts when IP” — I like that.

Phishing is alive and well. At least they caught this guy.

The Man on the Train: Caught with his phishing loot