Freeeday 29 January 1999

Pic of the day: Unhealthy Lifestyle.

Went online last night to search for a (preferably free) CD player program for my PC. There is one included, but it somehow garbles Daggerfall graphics, so Daggerfall displays rubbish in the lower half of the screen while the image is flattened into the top half. So much for suspension of disbelief. And point is, Daggerfall is where I want to be when I play "www.happy-people.net". (Because neither my "Jump" not my "Levitate" spell work reliably in the Real World.) Well, I found this great freeware program Yamp, which plays a lot of different sound formats, and CD's too. But alas, the graphics were just as distorted. May be an effect of the actual use of the sound card, rather than the program itself. Very peculiar. Of course, there is always the Minidisk player, but I must admit that I'm confused. Because I know I've played CD music with Daggerfall only a few months ago.

BTW, Yamp works, is free, and plays CDs and a good choice of sound formats from MID to MOD to MP3. I hesitate to call it intuitive, I had to actually glance in the included helpfile. Still, value for money approaches Infinity. (At least provided you have Win9x or NT.)

I proceeded to download the program "MusicMatch" which "rips" CD audio to MP3. My intention was to use an MP3 player instead of the CD and thus avoid the graphics distortion. Well, here's the news: The resulting file was ca 20% faster than the CD audio - on average, since the speed varied somewhat but was never under the original. Sometimes it would swallow a word or a few beats, making it even harder to sing along to. This is a shareware program, which probably is not the smartest strategy when it's bound for the trashcan within the first hour. Of course, there is the distinct possibility that it might work differently on other computers, but it did not comment on the hardware. To add insult to injury, there is no obvious way to exit the program (no x in the corner, no reaction to Alt-F4, no eXit on the File menu) and even when killed with Ctrl-Alt-Del it refused to go down quietly and tried to hang on for another 20 seconds. My well-meant advice is to avoid the thing. It was with a certain pleasure I uninstalled the program. And then, because I knew they MUST have botched that too, went to delete the corresponding folders and files. Sure, there was a junkpile left, which I put in the trashcan and emptied it. Just say NO.

So, how is Rosa the Daggerfall linguist dressed for the Freeday? Click Rosa's wardrobe page!