Accept no substitutes

Day: February 9, 2005

Some Rights of Personality Reserved

Larry Lessig writes that he will be portrayed by actor Christopher Lloyd tonight on West Wing.
The West Wing site describes the show like this:

THE WAKE UP CALL
9pm 2005-02-09 ALL NEW!

IRAN SHOOTS DOWN PASSENGER JET AND IGNITES CRIES FOR RETALIATION; ROGER REES, CHRISTOPHER LLOYD GUEST-STAR —

On Valentine’s Day, an Iranian fighter jet accidentally shoots down a British passenger plane — killing 100 people — but C.J. (Allison Janney) is reluctant to awaken the President (Martin Sheen) even as the hawkish British prime minister considers bombing Iran’s nuclear reactors in retaliation. After learning that the passenger jet was mistaken for a U.S. spy plane, Bartlet calls in British ambassador Lord John Marbury (guest star Roger Rees, “Cheers”), as they debate whether a strike is the perfect excuse to wipe out the atomic sites or if it will set back reform movements in the rogue nation. Elsewhere: Abby (Stockard Channing) and C.J. war over the President’s schedule for rest; Toby (Richard Schiff) and a legal professor (guest star Christopher Lloyd, “Taxi”) try to pound out a new democratic constitution with representatives of Belarus — and everyone keeps dodging the traditional White House appointment with Miss Universe. TV-PG

Reviving the lapsed RA files

A friend writes that he is tired of old recordings he made and digitized sounding like crap. The problem is that they were digitized using early versions of RealAudio when doing any sound at all that you could receive over dial-up was a welcome accomplishment. Now we expect more. Much more. At least MP3.
But so many of us, including collections on ibiblio, went straight to .ra files that much of that information will be lost soon as technology improves and our demands for quality increase.
Saving sounds and pictures in proprietary formats like .ra wasn’t brilliant but it seemed the only way at the time.
In the Internet Poetry Archive, we have rare readings by Czeslaw Milosz and Margaret Walker for example. You will hear them in .ra, but I have tapes hidden here in a safe place. But not safe enough. They need to be in an atmospherically controlled archive. A few more years and the tapes will be sticky.

While I’m at it: Does anyone know a a way to migrate from .ra to any other format? I know the quality will be terrible, but to have the sound at all would be great.
One idea is to take the audio out from a computer playing the .ra and route it into the audio in of another computer capturing the audio.

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