I always burn music to CD and then rip them to remove the DRM. It's decently practical with RW CD-ROMs. It makes listening and moving music to my player or CD for my car much easier.

Actually since I don't buy a lot of music, I'm kinda moving back to the buying used CDs instead of downloading. It's just easier and I have a hard copy stowed away in case I lose the files for some reason.

In IE6 when you go to look at history (say, for last week) is there a way of determining the date and time you visited a site? Because all I can see is a list of sites I visited last week.

What I do, and what preserves tag information is to burn them to CD, and then reimport them. You lose ratings and some of the fancier tag stuff, but your CDDB info stays intact.

You also lose more audio quality, since the file has now been encoded twice. You can sometimes get weird audio artifacts, too (clicks and such).

You also lose more audio quality, since the file has now been encoded twice. You can sometimes get weird audio artifacts, too (clicks and such).

I was bringing it up as a replacement for tunebite--reflexively I think you'd end up with at least as good quality, and since I'm a metadata fiend, tagging is really important to how I use my files.

I was bringing it up as a replacement for tunebite--reflexively I think you'd end up with at least as good quality

Ahh, yes, that makes sense.

Music isn't so much an issue for me, except in instances when I just have to cut out the first thirty seconds of a Telepopmusik song cuz it's annoying me to tears, or if I happen to be vidding, and the song I want to use won't load into my editor, burned to a CD or not doing things I really shouldn't be doing with my music.

But I still haven't found a workaround for iTunes video.

Bleargh. Not good week on many fronts. Tech too. I can't run Repair Disk on my Macintosh HD. The underlying task reported failure on exit.

Will fsck do anything for me that Disk Utility can't? How can I tell if this is hardware-related (ie don't buy Leopard and start from scratch)?

Any recommendations on cheap/free software to rip DVDs so I can watch my movies on my pretty new Nano? I'm on a MacBook Pro.

Handbrake.

Will fsck do anything for me that Disk Utility can't?

Wouldn't hurt to try. At least it will give more verbose error messages.

How can I tell if this is hardware-related (ie don't buy Leopard and start from scratch)?

Look in /var/log/messages, (or use the Console.app utility), and see if there have been disk errors that have been logged.

Any recommendations on cheap/free software to rip DVDs so I can watch my movies on my pretty new Nano? I'm on a MacBook Pro.

HandBrake