Laziness or the Family Man

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Recently, I was at a friend’s house, visiting.  As I was looking around his house, I noticed that my friend, who is married and has children, kept his house spare of any expensive or precarious objects.  As we were getting ready to watch a movie, he went over to a cabinet, that was closed and locked, selected a DVD from a collection that was close to the top of the shelf and carefully opened the package.

I wasn’t use to this level of carefulness, but I guess when you have a house filled with children who have fingers that are covered in peanut butter and enjoy throwing dvds onto the ground under other toys, you need to be careful with your video discs.

It reminded me of something I started to do last winter as a way to allow myself to be lazier than I normally am.  It irritates me that, in order to watch one of my dvds, I need to get up, take the disc over to my player and put it in.  Then, if I am watching a television series with multiple discs, this routine repeats itself several times.  I wanted something simple.

Enter: Slysoft’s AnyDVD HD.

For 79 euros ($110), AnyDVD HD allows you to copy your movie discs to your computer as an image file.  Basically, it is a singular file that has all of the information of the DVD.  When selected, this file, in conjunction with Slysoft’s Virtual CloneDrive, tricks your computer into thinking that the disc is in the drive and plays the movie for you. 

In other words, I have made it so that, with other applications, I can watch any movie I own, on my computer just by clicking on the file from my bed; no disc, dvd covers, or getting up required.

How does this apply to my friend?  Using this program, you could make backup copies of your movies so that, if Toy Story 3 ever gets scratched or destroyed before a long car ride, you can burn a quick copy with a blank dvd and you don’t have to fork over another 20 dollars to avoid the screaming banshee in the back seat.  For a parent, I can’t imagine a more wonderful, technological security blanket. 

Now there are stipulations.  I only use this to make copies of films that I already own.  And I do NOT make copies of films I own, then turn around and SELL.  That is illegal.  Well, to be strictly technical, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act DOES imply that this is illegal, but if I own the movie, I feel that I should be able to do what I want with it as long as I am only using one copy at a time.

For the next couple posts, I am going to be talking about some of the cool tricks and tips that you should know if you want to start backing up your media and DVDs, so keep posted.

And remember to email me any questions you may have and follow my technology twitter feed.

You Can't Scratch a Digital File

My dad always asks me if I know of any way to take a CD he has and rip the music files to his hard drive. “Ripping” is taking the music from the CD and changing it into an MP3 file on your computer so you can put it on an MP3 player or make your own playlist CD. I keep reminding him that I’ve shown him how to do it several times.

If you don’t want to download and use iTunes, (which, if you’re not going to use it for your music collection, just takes up valuable memory on your computer) you can use a program called CDex. Once you’ve DOWNLOADED and installed the program, open the program, click on the “options” button and click on “settings.” Once the options window is open, click on “Remote freedb” under CD Database and type your email address where it says “Your E-mail address.” While you’re here, click on “Directories & files.” Next to “Recorded Tracks,” click on the three dots and select your desktop or your Local Music folder. Click OK. (Don’t worry, they will not email you spam)

Once you place the music CD that you want to rip into your CD drive, you’ll notice that CDex calls the music tracks “Audio Track 01…02…03…etc.” To change those songs to the real names, click on the magnifying glass, as shown below:


Once you have found and selected which album you have, you can then click the icon that says “Extract CD tracks to Compressed Audio Files” as shown below:


I’ve found that, after the initial installation, this is the easiest way to convert all of your CDs to MP3 files. Even if your CD has a couple scratches, the program works with them to try to make your music skip-proof.

After your music is all “digitized,” you’ll need to back it up. We’ll talk about computer “back-ups” next.