BeTips.net

Note: This tip may not work with all sound cards. It definitely works with the SoundBlaster Live!.
To save any sound stream to disk, whether it originates from Video, CD, Midi, or another source, try this:

• Open the media preferences panel.
• Select the In channels. (if you use SB Live!, it’s the Emu10K In).
• Select source: Speaker out.

To get crystal clear sound.

• Click the Out channels.
• Make sure you mute the Mic.

Start SoundRecorder

• Start SoundRecorder (Be | Application | SoundRecorder).
• Press the record button.

Start the source.

• If you want to rip from CD, play the CD.
• If you want to rip from movies, play the movies.
• If you want to rip a MIDI file, play a MIDI file.
• If you want to rip your favorite TV show, play the TV (You need a TV
  capture card).

Finishing…

• Cut leading/trailing silences by dragging the grippy dot sliders.
• Saves the sound as WAV or MP3 (right-drag or Ctrl-drag the waveform into
  the Tracker.

Want to create an CD?

• Open CDBurner
• Drag the new files into the burn window
• Burn!

Scenario: You have carefully hand-picked your computer’s components to be compatible with BeOS. You also run a Windows 98/95 installation on the same machine with no problems. Yet, certain devices (USB, SBLive, etc) do not function in BeOS, though they seem to work fine in Windows. Why? Here’s an idea: check to see if your computer is forcing two or more devices to use the same IRQ (Interrupt Request).
For example, Windows95/98 doesn’t have any qualms about allowing the USB controller(s) to share an IRQ with other devices. Things will seem to work (depending on your devices). BeOS, however, runs your hardware „properly.“ It may not appreciate IRQ sharing (though IRQ sharing does work in many instances).
If you find you DO have two or more devices sharing an interrupt (you can learn this by open the Devices preferences panel and tapping Alt+U), you may have to remove these devices physically (PCI cards, for example) and rearrange them to incite the mainboard to assign new resources. You may also benefit from disabling older I/O devices you are not using (like IDE on a SCSI system or serial and parallel ports where you will be using USB instead); this will free up more IRQs for other devices.
Thanks for this tip must also go to: Mathias Agopian at Be for helping me check USB in BeOS and Creative Labs‘ great technical support for the PCI IRQ info.

[Editor’s note: DO NOT use techniques outlined in this tip if your hard drives are not seen by your computer’s BIOS. Bad things may happen. In addition, if you have a modern BIOS and modern drives, DMA should be enabled by default. This tip may help you to eek a little extra performance out of the drives though. Use these techniques at your own risk!]
You can probably improve data rates with DMA transfers enabled on hard drives. To enable DMA, you must edit the ata configuration script. To start off, copy /boot/home/config/settings/kernel/drivers/sample/ata to /boot/home/config/settings/kernel/drivers/ata (i.e. move it out of the „samples“ directory). Edit this file to suit your system, as follows:

deviceat 1 0 {
    forcedma
}
matchdevices {
    match {
        model "WDC AC23200L"
    }
    use {
        forcedma
    }
}

Where it says ‚deviceat 1 0‘, make sure this is correct for your system as: deviceat bus[primary/secondary] id[master/slave]. In my scenario, the hard drive is on the secondary ide controller (thus I chose 1), and it is the master drive (so I chose 0). If your not sure what your hard drive is placed at, you can check the /dev fs. i.e.: /dev/disk/ide/ata/0/slave/0/raw , you would put, deviceat 0 1, because it is on 0 (primary), at slave (1). If you understand all that, your in the green. An easy way to get raw device paths is to use the „df“ command.
Now, in the ‚match‘ block, set the hard drive model string. You can find this out with the ideinfo or idestatus commands included in the /optional/experimental/diagonstics directory on the R4.x CD (ask a veteran user for these if you don’t have them handy). Alternatively, watch your bootup screen for the drives detected, or open up your computer and see what the model number is on the hard drive itself. Mine is ‚WDC AC23200L‘ which is a Western Digital Caviar 3.2 Gigabyte drive (or 3200 Megabytes).
‚forcedma‘ will enable DMA transfers along the drive(s) you specified, ’nodma‘ will disable DMA transfers.
Here are some of the benchmarks I achieved with BeRometer:

As you can see, with DMA enabled on the drive, file transfers are a lot faster. Since the hard drive was faster, my system more responsive with DMA, and sluggish without DMA. This drive is only DMA/33 with Personal Edition. I have not tested it on my ata/66 drive yet, but eventually will in which this tip will be updated with additional benchmarks.

NetPositive bookmarks are edited directly in the Tracker, by pulling down Show Bookmarks or by opening /boot/home/config/settings/NetPositive/Bookmarks. What’s not immediately obvious to new users is that the titles that appear in the Bookmarks menu are not the filenames of the bookmark files themselves, but rather the Title attributes of of those files.
To edit these, pull down Attributes | Bookmark and select „Title“ (why this isn’t displayed by default is anyone’s guess). If you like, you can now drag the Title column over to the left to make things more intuitive. Any changes made to these attributes will be reflected in the Bookmarks menu immediately.
Note that to change the name of the folders, you have to change their filenames, not their Title attributes.

A utility called Spread ‚em Checkbooks will read your BeMyCheckbook .act files and output .txt files containg formatted text, which can then be pasted nicely into a spreadsheet such as Gobe Productive or Microsoft Excel. Very convenient if you need to do post-processing of your financial data that can’t be done within BeMyCheckbook.

Note: This tip requires that you be running BeOS 5.01 or higher.
When you first load BeOS on a machine with an i810 video chipset, you’ll find that you can only do 1024*768 at 8-bit color, while Windows can do 24-bit on the same machine.
The reason is that this chipset uses system memory rather than video memory, and only 1MB is used by default. To change this, copy
/boot/home/config/settings/kernel/drivers/sample/i810
to
/boot/home/config/settings/kernel/drivers/i810.
This file has only one line :

gfxmemsize 4M

4Mb should be fine for most resolutions, but you can edit the file and change the 4 to an 8 or 12 or 16 if you need higher. No editing is necessary however, it’s just an option. Simply moving the file out of the sample directory will cause it to be activated with the default of 4MBs.

If you navigate to the Samples folder in Gobe Productive 2.01 (probably located at /boot/apps/Gobe Productive 2.0/Samples), you’ll find a checkbook program, day planner, business cards, resume creator, and more.

When you burn audio CDs with Be’s CDBurner, you’ll get a two-second silent gap between tracks, as is the industry standard. CDBurner is in fact doing DAO („disk at once“ — the technique typically used to avoid this) but uses a two-second gap as a default. If you want to avoid this, use the Pre-gap slider to control the gap length. However, do not set the slider to 0 seconds or you’ll still get the two-second gap due to a bug. Instead, set the gap length to 0.02 and you’ll get a gap short enough not to be noticeable.
Alternatively, you can use Marcus Overhagen’s excellent CD Manager, which also has the advantage of supporting more burners. In CD Manager, just select all tracks, right-click on them, and choose „Set Pause / 0 seconds“ and click on the red button.
Tech note: On an audio CD, a track must be a multiple of 2352 Bytes (thats 1/75 second). CDBurner may append some silence at the end of the track if the WAV file is not exact a multiple of 2352 Bytes (plus 42 bytes WAV header).

If you use the FileTypes panel to add or modify attributes from a filetype, the new or modified attributes will not be immediately visible in the Tracker’s Attributes menu. To see your changes accurately, drag the affected column headers out of the Tracker, then re-enable them from the Attributes menu. You may also need to close and re-open that Tracker window.

Until July 2000, there were two ways to set file permissions: From the Terminal, or with Chris Herborth’s SetPerms add-on. With later versions of OpenTracker, however, you can set permissions from the Tracker directly.

The permissions configuration panel lives in the Get Info panel. To access it, select a file and tap Alt+I (or right-click | Get Info). You’ll see a „Permissions“ widget at the bottom of the panel, which will also let you establish user and group names for that file (though user/group options aren’t currently working).
If you don’t see this widget, grab the latest version of OpenTracker. This feature, like most OpenTracker developments, will probably be included in future releases of BeOS.