tech help

[Sarah]

Aw.

[Martin]

Glad to have helped, Sarah.

[Sarah]

Sarah now is the time to invest in two speakers and a receiver. If you are watching movies and TV on this you need stereo quality audio. Do you have a stereo? See if there is and input. If so pick up an Audio LR to Headphone chord and your problems will be over.

Am I right in thinking I need two such cords, one to hear what's on my computer through my speakers and another to record tapes and records onto my hard drive?

[Josh]

An external hard drive flaked out on me (some files ended up in a folder called "lost+found"). Disk Utility's "Verify Disk" and "Repair Disk" instructed me to back up the files from that disk and reformat, which is what I did. Now it looks like it's working fine.

Is it safe to continue using this hard drive or should I replace it?

[Bryan]

All hard drives will fail after an unpredictable amount of time. You should replace it while it's still working (and, in general, use Time Machine to keep a backup of your whole hard drive on an ongoing basis).

yesno is usually the evangelist for this cause, and I agree with him. Time Machine is a really useful feature of OS X.

[Josh]

Thanks, Bryan. I use Time Machine as well as iBackup on the reg so I was covered as far as data loss is concerned (though I did run another full backup when this happened). I guess I was hoping that it just went on a temporary flight of foncy and would be back to normal. This hard drive has served me well over the years and I harbor no ill will towards it or its manufacturers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VastXQ_hPb0

[yesno]

Glad I'm known for my extreme backing up views.  I wouldn't trust a drive like that on, Josh--I've had drives from everyone shit out on me.  Maybe you could use it as "storage for stuff I don't care too much about" or something.

I now recommend a three-pronged backup strategy, since you can't use Time Machine to back up network attached storage drives (only *to* said drives).

1) Time Machine or equivalent for local files

2) Dropbox for your "documents" if you are a writer of any kind.  If you work from a laptop this ensures your shit is backed up from anywhere you have a network connection.  (My Dropbox syncs from my work laptop to my home computer and the Dropbox folder is also backed up through Time Machine)

3) For NAS, I use rsync from a command line.  This is a bit techy, and I'm sure there's a way to automate this, but I don't because I also physically unattach my drives from my Airport Extreme (where they're made available, read-only, to things such as the tiny PC running XBMC that attaches to my living room TV) and attach them to a regular computer.  This is because running backup over a network is dicey, maybe not if you have a gigabit ethernet connection or something.  Anyway, rsync is the best; a quick "sudo rsync -a --delete  /Volumes/music/ /Volumes/backup" from the terminal is the most efficient way to mirror a media collection computerly possible.  The point is, make sure that you run backups even of drives that Time Machine might not capture.

[Sarah]

Sarah now is the time to invest in two speakers and a receiver. If you are watching movies and TV on this you need stereo quality audio. Do you have a stereo? See if there is and input. If so pick up an Audio LR to Headphone chord and your problems will be over.

Am I right in thinking I need two such cords, one to hear what's on my computer through my speakers and another to record tapes and records onto my hard drive?

Nu?

[yesno]

The answer is "it depends."  Sometimes you can use the same plug on your computer for both input and output.  But you just need to figure out what's the input, what's the output, of each device in your setup and arrange things accordingly.

[Bryan]

Probably you do need a pair of cords to do both in & out of your computer. They'll look something like this:


So you'll go from your PC headphones out (typically the green one) to your stereo's input and the other cord will go from your stereo's tape out (or whatever) to your PC's input (the blue one).

[Sarah]

Thank you, lads.  Now all I need to do is buy another cord.  Oh, and figure out whether the receiver and/or speaker(s) work.

[Sarah]

Can now play what's on the computer through the receiver/speakers.  The right speaker buzzes.  Someday I'll get a new set.

Can't wait for the second cable so I can start recording records.  Just think--if I go really nuts and copy all 500 or so, I can get these eight crates out of my (small) living room.

[Gilly]

Now all you need to do is download Foobar2000 and Asio4All to get those rips sounding even better.

[Sarah]

Oh god . . .

[Sarah]

What do I have to buy to put tapes/vinyl on my computair?  Is Acoustica's Spin It Again okay? 

Please be aware I'm not interested in working hard or learning a lot of stuff.