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

Wow. Middle of the night x-post.

After Making a mini maglight into a working laser, what do you do for an encore?

Make a Star Trek Phaser prop into a Blu-ray-powered laser, of course.

Thanks guys!