Making a copy of an audio CD on my iBook.

Today, for the first time, I had to duplicate an audio CD on my iBook.
My server’s CD writer has been shot for quite some time now and I haven’t yet had the need to do this kind of thing so I had no idea how to go about it.
Well, obviously I knew I could use cdda2wav and cdrecord just like on the Linux server, but I knew there had to be a way to do it which was more Mac-oriented (i.e. a mouse-engineering approach).
It turns out there is such a way but, contrary to what I’ve come to expect from this platform, it is not all that obvious, it doesn’t even involve the Disk Utility, but instead iTunes and some preferences tweaking.
I guess they don’t like people duplicating disks, but I don’t like using my original discs on the car stereo either…

So I googled for it and I came up with one page that explained how to do it in several ways, including the good old-fashioned mouse-engineering way.

Since the page is rather long and contains loads of other stuff I’ll summarize it here for future reference:

• Insert the original disk on the drive and either wait for iTunes to open automatically or fire it up yourself;
• Open the preferences page of iTunes and on the Importing pane choose “Import Using: AIFF Encoder”;
• Still in the preferences go to the Burning pane and choose “Disk Format: Audio CD”, “Gap Between Songs: none” and de-select “Use Sound Check”;
• Import the CD in the usual way;
• Insert the blank CD on the drive;
• Burn the CD on the usual way;
• Delete the songs from iTunes and if you really want them on your Mac import them again with your preferred encoder which probably compresses them and doesn’t waste so much space.

This procedure is a bit more detailed than the one on the page I mentioned earlier and it does work for me.
You get an identical copy of the CD that’s even recognizable on CDDB.

Surprise, surprise, Internet Exploder borks it…

Well, I’ve been trying the site out and so far:

• tried it on Safari and it works great. But then it should, since I developed for it;
• tried it in FireFox for Macintosh and it looks great with one minor hitch I will have to look into: the navigation on the right (context-dependent navigation) sometimes gets one or more extra lines between the “boxes” and sometimes even loses the line at the bottom. It may be a badly designed CSS but I really don’t think so and since it is only FireFox that does this I’m blaming the browser for now. But I do keep an open mind! :-)
• tried it in Opera for Linux and it works great except for the relative positioning of the pictures and the text in the main picture list. That’s it, I’m leaving CSS to where it matters and sticking to tables here, I’m mainly interested in having the site working, I don’t want to spend ages just tweaking CSS in order to get what is, essentially, a tabular content right. I really wish I didn’t have to do this but I’m fed up with it;
• then I tried it on Internet Exploder 6. Oh my GOD! I don’t even know where to begin! As usual it must be the rest of the world’s fault, but the fact is that every other browser did it (mostly) right but Exploder didn’t seem to be able to center the pages, to deal with invisible PNGs, to position the navigation buttons consistently, why even the background image of the header only appears on some sections of the site and the code used to render it is exactly the same!

So basically what I’m saying is: everything is as expected, nothing too alarming but I will have to take drastic steps to deal with Exploder. Man this just plainly and utterly sucks! I don’t want to spend any more time on looks and design than I absolutely have to, I want to start writing stuff on my wiki, but this looks like it is going to last for a while… :-(