[PLUG] Sound quality driving me to the dark side

chris (fool) mccraw gently at gmail.com
Sat Aug 9 00:21:41 UTC 2014


I've used virtualbox successfully with win7.  installation was simple.  I
have done this awhile ago on ubuntu, currently on OSX - both worked without
complication.


On Fri, Aug 8, 2014 at 5:03 PM, Dick Steffens <dick at dicksteffens.com> wrote:

> Readers with unfortunately good memories will recall that I use an old
> program called Transcribe along with a separate old program called
> Footpedal to play back audio recordings for the purpose of transcribing
> them. Some of you may also recall that I've been fooling around, from
> time to time, with updating those programs to run well on Ubuntu 12.
> When I switched to Ubuntu 14 they wouldn't work at all. A few months ago
> I realized that those programs work well on Ubuntu 10, so I created a
> VirtualBox Ubuntu 10 machine just for the purpose of running them. This
> solution has worked well, for the most part.
>
> Yesterday I ran into a problem that tells me that explains why I haven't
> been able to dedicate the time to those programming projects. Some of
> the audio files I get are plagued by distortion. I commented about a
> particularly noisy file to the fellow I get the work from. He listened
> to it on his end and said that it was clean. This made me wonder if the
> problem was on my end. I listened to the file with Audacity and
> discovered that the noise was considerably reduced -- not completely
> gone, but much better than when played on Transcribe.
>
> I had been planning on re-writing Transcribe so that it would run on
> Ubuntu 14, but since I would be using the same library calls as the old
> version I wouldn't be getting rid of the noise. Transcribe -- and Totem
> Movie Player (which seems to go by a different name as Ubuntu releases
> progress) -- both use gstreamer for playing audio. So, when I listen to
> a file with either tool it sounds the same. Being in a hurry to meet a
> deadline I borrowed my wife's Win7 laptop, installed a demo copy of
> GearPlayer 4, and got the work out.
>
> As I mentioned above, the noise was reduced with Audacity, so they must
> use different libraries for reproducing sound than gstreamer. Audacity
> was good enough that, if I could figure out a way to control it with a
> foot pedal, I'd consider using it. However, that's not what Audacity is
> designed for, and it's not all that clear that there is a way to insert
> the foot pedal into its controls.
>
> Now for the part related to the dark side. From my experience using
> GearPlayer yesterday and again today, I've concluded that I need to
> spend the money for it. However I'd rather not have to run two machines.
> (I've done this before, and will probably continue to do it for the time
> being, but I'd rather just run the one machine.) My current desktop has
> the resources to support virtual machines, so I'm considering setting up
> a Win7 virtual machine just to run GearPlayer. Does anyone have
> experience setting up VirtualBox with Win7? Are there any gotchas I need
> to worry about before going out and getting a legal copy of Win7?
>
> Thanks for understanding my unfortunate need to proceed to the dark side.
>
> --
> Regards,
>
> Dick Steffens
>
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