Following so soon upon the heels of my last entry, here is something interesting by way of comparison between XP Pro and Mandriva 2006.0: how easily (or otherwise) can one record and disseminate audio files from home to students by e-mail?

This proved to be unexpectedly difficult under XP, and an explanation follows . . .

Picture the scene: your Boss is forever having his cassette tapes mangled by cheap, nasty recorders purchased at ridiculously low prices from a local shop, complicating the already harrowing process of preparing a batch of students for this year's local speech Derbies. At one point, one afternoon, as we were preparing the first group of students for the initial contest (held the following Saturday, if you must know), the inevitable happened and we were all startled to discover the tape all chewed up and the actual drive unit suddenly non-functional. Half in jest, recalling the small cold object in my pocket, I said: "Why don't we use mp3s instead?"

At the back of all this was the idea that, since so many of the kids would bring their mp3 players to the hagwon (as evidenced by them forever listening to music during lessons!), I could save my Boss the continual cost of shelling out on more mangled tapes (and players) by forcing them along the solid-state route. In the end it wasn't quite as simple and straightforward as I expected but at the moment, it seems to be working quite well. And it goes like this:

Having made the initial suggestion (and knowing that a version of Audacity was standard in the current Silver Club Pack), I installed Audacity in both my XP and Mandriva directories, with the intention of starting in XP and migrating (as ever!) to Linux. The reason for this was that since my mp3 player was a convenient way to carry such files, this necessarily forced the use of Audacity under XP, because (surprise! surprise!) the on-board mini-OS of the mp3 player was not compatible with Mandriva - it was (Korean-) designed only for use with Windoze (take a look at http://www.mobiblu.com/).

This afternoon, before departing for work, I was busy typing the speech drafts and then turned to the task of recording the same as mp3 files. Windoze has its own "Sound Recorder" but this can create .wma files of only up to 60 seconds in length and what a surprise (again), this is wayyyy too short for recording a full text of any of the kids' speeches (sounds like a bit of an "un-sound recorder" to me), so a third-party solution had to be used. Having reformatted from Windoze Audio to LAME, I was then ready to transfer the files to my personal mp3 player. That was when the trouble started . . .

Micro$oft seems to have a long and dishonourable history of supporting third-party software whose functionality is later compromised due to unexpected changes of OS configuration. There are many tales of well-known third-party office apps, for example, which are suddenly unable to function due to a security update. After the most recent set of updates (which is what I suspect), which were installed after both Audacity and the manufacturer's loading software, I suddenly discovered that the USB interface could not recognise the removable storage device (the mp3 player which was actually designed for Windoze)!

In the end I was able to persuade the thing to be recognised and the files were duly transferred - but by that time, the drive designation had gone from :E to :J!!! That has never happened before and it is stupid.

Now, when I finally crawled into work (having had to grab a taxi again to avoid being late) there were apparently yet another three of these yet to be recorded and it seems that the mothers of the little mites were keen to get them practising as soon as possible. One of our kids had won a prize in the first contest and knowing this, Korean mothers being what they are, which is hopelessly egalitarian in a rather negative sense, they now imagine that their offspring can perform similarly, and thus cannot wait for them to get started. I was amazed to discover that they had suddenly realised that a file of about 3Mb (equivalent to about 2.25 - 2.50 minutes performance length at 44100 bits/second) could actually be sent as e-mail attachments, thus cutting out physical media completely!

So now I am sitting here at about 3:00am on a Saturday morning after sending them on their way and this time, it was not necessary to go into (ptui!) Windoze - it could all be mediated in Mandriva. And I am reflecting upon the facts as follows:

1: Installation was awkward in both OSes not because of the quality of the Audacity package - which performs flawlessly in both cases - but because of the proprietary nature of the LAME encoding dll. Under XP, Audacity has difficulty initially locating the dll file, whereas under Mandriva it works first time.

2: After complaints that the first recordings were rather quiet, I bought a new pair of headphones with boom microphone identical to the ones used at my academy and the gain turned out to be much higher. One gets the constant impression that as an OS, Mandriva is much more "sympathetic" to the i586/Athlon system than Windoze, right from the time of booting. Everything - like microphones - sees to work better.

3: XP had great difficulty in detecting and then allowing me to use my own removable media device even with a Windoze-dependent mini-OS and I suspect some pointless DRM involvement - pointless because the files in question were not copyrighted but were just voice recordings which have no meaning after the completion of the contest and will simply be discarded. There might have been no problem under Linux but as I had already discovered, although Mandriva could read and copy files held in my mp3 player, it could not deposit them there. This seems to be a classic case of proprietary software platform-dependence actually preventing the intended function of a purchased device.

What is slowly emerging is a bizarre situation with regard to OSes here in Korea. M$ has been threatening to pull out of Korea completely because the Koreans (in local and national governmental offices) do not like M$ (which they think can be hacked into too easily) and besides, they also don't like the licensing costs. The result of which would presumably be that M$ actually capitulates to a competing OS and moves out of a fairly major market. This in spite of the fact that non-M$ OSes seem to be few and far between around here. Everyone is obsessed with Windoze and web sites here are unsympathetic towards any browser other than IE (and I prefer Opera for Linux, myself - works wonderfully under Mandriva!).

At the same time, there appear to be no Linux mirror sites located here in Korea. Often when searching at RPMSeek or pbone.net, no names of Korean mirrors are visible - the nearest are in Japan or Taiwan. So if M$ really stepped out of Korea, all of the potential alternatives would have to be downloaded over the internet from distant sites like Japan, Taiwan, Australia and so on. This would create a very difficult situation for anyone here who needs a computer OS but lacks enough knowledge to install it as easily as Windoze - most Koreans purchase new PCs with Windoze already installed . . . is that why Korean PCs are full of 'bots?

Anyway, after negotiating my way around the various little potholes involved in creating and disseminating my own audio files, Mandriva seems to acquit itself better than XP in terms of ease of use. Under Mandriva, Audacity has turned out to work extremely well. And I never in my wildest dreams suspected, before arriving in Korea, that part of my job would be as a recording artist!

Now, if someone could just recommend a good Linux-compatible mp3 player, I'd be well away . . .

Added Note: LAME can be added to a Mandriva system using the libmp3lame.so files available from the PLF - configure URPMI under MCC to accept PLF as an update source via EasyURPMI. You will then see it as lame-3.7 . . . rpm.