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Phew. I picked up my replacement copy of Star Wars from the Royal Mail depot on my way to work, and tried out ‘A New Hope’ on a colleague's Mac. This time it appears to do what it says on the tin. I had had a bad feeling about this: from everything I'd heard it looked as if sendit.com in particular had received a bad batch, so I was worried that I'd get three or four identically broken sets in quick succession; but apparently not, which is a relief if only in terms of hassle avoidance.
Last night was amazingly productive given that I'd mostly intended to spend it slumping on the sofa; about half way through the evening I got restless and went and faffed with media software, with the result that I can now listen to streaming from Radio 4 without going through the horror that is RealPlayer, and even record it easily to disk should I feel so inclined. Pity I didn't figure all this out before the new Hitch-Hiker series started on Tuesday, but there's still time to record the repeat of the first episode.
You know you've been me for too long when you instinctively capitalise the last two letters of ‘Pity’.
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mplayer, which handles proprietary formats by using a standard module interface to load binary codecs. It ships as a source archive plus a binary codecs archive; the latter turns out to include RealAudio codecs. So on the one hand I don't get to avoid non-free code completely, but on the other hand I get to use an application that has most of the advantages of open-source Unix code. In particular, it completely lacks the nasty overcomplicated RealPlayer GUI, preferring a completely command-line approach; and also it has a built-in option to save its audio output to a.wavfile rather than insisting on playing it to the sound card.no subject
*grin*
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