Computer operating systems

[Zelandeth]

Debian with the Mate UI sounds like it Jim. Solid base but lacking the unnecessary visual frills that the later Gnome etc window managers seem to be obsessed with.

That's basically what I've got in Mint, just without the branding or the multimedia codecs installed "out of the box" it appears. Probably what will be going on my systems here next.

The ability to continue with the user interface I was familiar with (Mate is essential a fork of Gnome 2.6 as used by Ubuntu up to the switch to Unity) was the main reason I moved to that platform in the first place.

[CitroJim]

That's just what I want Zel but for the moment I'm very happy with Cinnamon Mint on top of Debian... It ticks every box for me...

I just hope it never significantly changes...

[demag]

I think if you're on the long range support or whatever they call it, till about 2020 or thereabouts there will be only minor tweaks.

[white exec]

I have had the mysterious disappearance of the Sound Recording facility on two Dell desktops - one running Vista, the other Win7. A scan done on both, with Windows reporting no missing software. Looks like a common problem, with no obvious Windows solution.

Unable to use Magix Audio Cleaning package, as it seems to need a working Sound Recording facility.

Can anyone recommend a SR program (WAV/44100 quality) that will allow not just external (line-in sources) but also the ability to record audio playing through the PC's soundcard from a web source? The Windows SR utility would have done this.

[myglaren]

I used to use Audacity and that would record anything playing, internal or external.
I will say though that I haven't been able to make any sense of it recently.

[demag]

I use VLC.

[Zelandeth]

The ability to do that seems to be hamstrung by a lot of modern soundcards. The old Creative one in my desktop has a specific channel labelled "what you hear" that you can record from just like any other.

None of the newer cards I've had have had this feature. A talk with someone who works in the trade revealed that apparently this was largely down to pressure from the big media groups to make it harder to record from live sources like YouTube and other streaming media. No idea how true it is - and this was about ten years ago - but it sounds like the sort of daft thing that could happen.

The drivers for my old Creative card under Windows have that channel visible but greyed out and unusable beyond a very early XP build...so it does look to be something that was actively disabled there.

No real help in your case though...afraid I've no experience with the software you're working with there.

[white exec]

I can understand the move to intentionally disable 'on the fly' audio recording from the soundcard.
My problem is that the PCs report 'An audio recording devide cannot be found', even though Accessories > Sound Recorder, and a System search show it's there.
Will follow up the suggestions above . . . and thanks.

[Zelandeth]

So I wanted to transcode the blueray we picked up yesterday...only PC with a blueray drive just now is the Windows 10 one.

MakeMKV needs updating before it will let me proceed...fine. Well it was right up to the point that this thing decided that the internet other than microsoft.com and Google.co.uk no longer exists.

It can resolve the website addresses just fine, and both long and tracert to any address comes back successful...just no web browser seems to be able to actually load a page. Exactly the same on WiFi or a wired connection.

I'm just going to go and buy a drive for my desktop as trying to make this thing play ball is making my blood pressure skyrocket as per usual. Have already wasted an hour and a half on it this morning.

[CitroJim]

I'm just going to go and buy a drive for my desktop as trying to make this thing play ball is making my blood pressure skyrocket as per usual. Have already wasted an hour and a half on it this morning.

Yet another illustration why I steer a course away from as much IT as possible these days...

Hope it is easily resolved very soon Zel...

I must confess I have no clue at all as to what you speak of... I'm that far out of touch now

[Zelandeth]

Basically I create a digital copy of all the movies we've got on DVD (and more recently Blu-ray), which then gets copied onto our NAS so it can be watched by any of the family, anywhere in the house on any device connected to the network. Given there are upwards of 500 DVDs etc involved, that saves a lot of hunting for discs.

However my desktop PC which does most of the grunt work for this doesn't have a Blu-ray drive - hence using the Windows machine downstairs. Which is invariably a pain.

...so I'm taking the lazy way out and just buying a drive for my own machine so I no longer have to use the PC downstairs at all rather than trying to sort it (again).

[demag]

You mean a blueray drive Zel?

[CitroJim]

Thanks for the explanation Zel

Sounds like an excellent idea and saves a lot of faffing around!

[Hell Razor5543]

My cousin has several external DVD drives connected to his media PC. Once he has a large block of disks he will then do a batch run, saving the DVDs to one of his HUGE NAS boxes (each NAS box has 4 x 3TB drives, running as RAID 5).

[Zelandeth]

Ours don't tend to accumulate that quickly, so once I've caught up there won't be a huge amount to do. Our NAS is only 1TB at present - though I'll probably need to double that before too much longer. No RAID or anything as everything also exists on my PC (and its own backups) so data loss isn't a real worry!

Blu-ray drive was picked up earlier and will get installed once the current DVD has finished the copy operation.

This is actually the second time I've done most of the library as I discovered several optimisation settings in Handbrake when I was about 80% done...oops.