By William LaMartin, Editor, Tampa PC Users Group
lamartin@tampabay.rr.com

Recording a RealAudio Stream I was sent a link to a RealAudio file the other day, and after playing it I decided I would like to have a "copy" of it. Well, when you play one of these streaming audio files, there is no copy of it left on your computer as there is for graphic images you view on the Internet. So what to do?

My first attempt was to start up the extend length sound recording I had written in Visual Basic, a download of which is available at http://lamartin.com. This differs from the Windows Sound Recorder in that the Windows Sound Recorder will only record for 60 seconds; my version will record for as long as you want. Unfortunately playing the RealAudio file on the Internet while running the sound recorder produced nothing. Next I tried a program I have called Acid Music from Sonic Music Foundry which not only allows you to record sound input to wave files, it also allows you to edit the files. Well, it also produced nothing.

Time to get inventive. I next connected the computer sound card’s line-out plug to a cable running to the line-in plug of a tape recorder. I then started the tape machine recording and again played the RealAudio file on the internet. That produced a 7.5 minute audio tape that sounded as good as the broadcast.

To get the file back to my computer, I connected the cable from the line-out plug of the tape recorder to the line-in plug of the computer’s sound card. Then I ran the Acid Music program and captured the tape output to a wave file on the computer. Since there had been approximately 20 seconds of dead air in the tape where the Internet transmission had to re-buffer (no data was lost, though), I used Acid Music to delete this dead air. The result was a 76 MB wave file that sounded just like the broadcast. Success!

But remembering our most recent meeting’s presentation by Bruce Fries on MP3 files and how they were approximately one tenth the size of the equivalent wave file, I went on the Internet and got a freeware program called Simple MP3 from the ZDNet download center. I used it to convert this large wave file to a 2.6 MB MP3 file using a bit sampling rate or 96, which is listed as near CD quality. I then did the conversion again using a sampling rate of 64 (FM radio quality) and found this just as good as the broadcast quality with a file of only 1.7 MB.

The simple MP3 program is really two programs—a MP3 player and an encoder which will make MP3 files out of wave files and vice-versa.

If anyone has a better or alternate way of capturing RealAudio audio broadcasts, I would be interested in hearing about it.

Invalid procedure call or argument is a message you don't want to see--especially if it occurs when you run some code that is the main component in a presentation you are to give in a couple of hours. But that is the way it is with computers.

The day before, I had prepared a presentation for our Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) SIG on my desktop computer. The next day I polished the code a little and then transferred the folder containing all the presentation material to my laptop. It is always a good idea to try such things out on the laptop to see if everything is OK. Well, this time it wasn't, and it was only two hours until meeting time. The VBA code would hang at a certain point and freeze Microsoft Access. Later I modified the code slightly and managed to avoid the freezing and instead got the above error, which was really no better in getting the presentation done. So at the presentation we worked around the problem by talking about it, trying to change the code to correct the problem, and running other code to fill out the meeting. The next day I reinstalled Office 97 on the laptop, and Access appears to be functioning properly there now. But for how long? How do these applications get corrupted?

VBA SIG What we do in this SIG is study code that allows us to automate processes in any of the Microsoft Office applications. What I wanted to display in the SIG was as follows. At any web site the server software keeps a record of everything that happens and stores it in a log file. There is specialized software that will download and analyze that log file, then present you with tables and graphs to help you see where the visitors to your site come from and what they are interested in--or not interested in. I own one such program called Virtual WebTrends, which cost around $80 as an Internet download. Its big brother WebTrends probably costs at least $400. It serves its purpose with nice tables and pretty graphs, but unfortunately it only displays the top 10 in each category--the top 10 visited pages at the site for instance. But I want to know what is going on with the other pages. So I really need to download the log file and analyze it myself.

The log file for the TPCUG site for September is around 4.5 MB. I have created a database to bring it into as a table containing the requisite fields and also the queries I need for the analysis--how many different user sessions each day, the number of visits to each page for the month, etc. There is only one problem. The log file contains what I would call page header lines all throughout the document. They need to be removed before I can import it into an Access table as a space delimited text file. To remove these unwanted lines throughout the document, I bring the document into Microsoft Word and run some VBA code I wrote that deletes these unwanted lines. I then have a space delimited file that can be imported into the database.

I note that it is quite humbling to see after the analysis of the log file that the Editor’s Comments are usually quite far down the list of pages ordered by the number of visits.

If you are really interested in Microsoft Office, you should consider learning Visual Basic for Applications. u