BeTips.net

Warning: This tip involves using DiskProbe, which can trash your drive or
delete information if used improperly. Never launch DiskProbe and start changing information unless you know what you’re doing. Right-clicking and opening a file with DiskProbe is much safer than opening a whole disk drive (you’ll only wreck that file if you screw up). Keep DiskProbe away from children 😛
It seems that some MPEG encoders tack junk onto the end of files that Be’s MediaPlayer doesn’t like. If you encounter an MPEG movie and you get the message that MediaPlayer can’t play it, there’s still a chance you can play it.
Open the MPEG file with DiskProbe (right-click, Open With…) Go to the end of the file and replace the last half page of data with 00 00 00. Save it and try playing it again. Repeat if necessary. I have had pretty good sucess with quite a few stuborn MPEG files that wouldn’t play. This may work with other movie files but I’ve only tried it on MPEG files.
You can also use DiskProbe to impress your friends by editing your favorite BeOS games high score file. How did I get over 5 million points in Xgalaga? Don’t ask me how to do it — I won’t tell you. 😉

If you have a motherboard running an older BIOS and a Western Digital hard drive, you probably have the WD EZBios utility running to enable use of large hard drives. The presence of EZBios will make it impossible to boot BeOS.
The solution is to upgrade your motherboard BIOS and disable EZBios, since you won’t need it anymore.
See also: Make sure drives are seen by BIOS

SoundPlay 4.0 is capable of delivering music in the current playlist to listeners anywhere on the Internet, or elsewhere on a local TCP/IP network. This makes it easy to keep a playlist running at home and tune into it from work, or to run your own Internet „radio station.“
There are two streaming methods supported in SoundPlay 4.0: pseudo- streaming / download and real-time streaming (of course you can still run standard .m3u pseudo streams if you like.)

Pseudo-Streaming / Remote Control

With a pseudo-streaming server, files are dished up at their actual bitrates and sizes, which is usually not very bandwidth-friendly. Files will not be downsampled, so a 3MB MP3 will mean a 3MB transfer. Pseudo streaming does, however, give the client random access capabilities, so they can skip around in your playlist at will.
SoundPlay 4.0 includes its own mini HTTP server, capable of dishing up web pages showing the current playlist, and optionally populated with Play, Download, and Stream links. The server runs on port 8080 of your current IP address, and does not require you to run a separate web server (but note that because it runs on a separate port, it will not conflict with a standard web server running on the same machine). To use it, you must know your current IP address, which you can get from the DUN config panel or by typing netstat into a Terminal. Things will be a lot easier if you have a static, rather than dynamic IP.
To enable this feature, go to Preferences | Plugins | General Purpose and select HTTP Interface. Click Configure, and select appropriate output options.
Show File Info: This will send the bitrate and playing time of each track to the client browser along with filenames.
Enable play links: This link is used only for controlling the remote machine. Clicking a Play link will not cause it to play on the client machine, but will make SoundPlay on the other machine jump to that song.
Enable download links: Obviously, clicking a Download link will let the client download a copy of the MP3 file to their own machine. Unfortunately, downloaded files always come through with the name dlod.mp3, rather than the actual file name (in Internet Explorer anyway; this may be a fixable bug… stay tuned). Note that you’ll need to own the copyright of each track if you intend to implement this and want to stay legal. It is illegal to offer copyrighted music to others for download.
Enable stream links: Clicking a Stream link will send the selected track to the client’s preferred MP3 player in real-time, without letting them save the MP3 as a file on their hard drive.
Once configured, make sure the HTTP Interface is enabled, then test the configuration from another machine by appending :8080 to the IP address. For example, if the SoundPlay machine’s IP address on a local network is 192.168.0.7, the client machine would enter http://192.168.0.7:8080. Real IP addresses and domain names also work, of course. Unfortunately, the port address in this version of HTTP Interface is not configurable.

Real-Time Streaming

Through a separate interface, SoundPlay 4.0 offers the ability to do real- time streaming, via a „Live Encoder“ plugin. In this configuration, the user (client) cannot skip around in your playlist — they simply hear whatever you’re playing at any given moment, like a radio station. Whereas the HTTP Interface is limited to controlling / accessing one track at a time, the Live Encoder streams whatever is currently runnng through SoundPlay to the outside world. More importantly, it lets you „downsample“ the stream to Internet-friendly rates, making it possible to serve modem users. Of course, you’ll have to compromise somewhere on the spectrum between available client bandwidth and audio quality.
The Live Encoder works by piping the stream through an MP3 encoder elsewhere on your system, which handles the downsampling (if any). The Live Encoder then routes the stream back out on a port address of your choosing. Therefore, you’ll find the Live Encoder in the Filters section of the Plugins panel.
In order to use the Live Encoder, you’ll need to install the LAME encoder on your system (preferably in ~/config/bin) No, you can’t use GOGO for this, as GOGO always outputs to a file, not to stdout, which is required for this setup. In the Live Encoder config panel, you’ll see that you can send various command line flags to LAME. The default configuration is:

/boot/home/config/bin/lame -b 64 -x -r - -

This tells lame to re-encode the stream at 64kbps, to use raw PCM as input, and to force byte swapping. The - - are actually two separate flags, which tell LAME to accept input from stdin and send output to stdout.
The default configuration should work well, but if your clients are on a fast network, you’ll probably want to change the bitrate to 128kbps or higher to ensure better quality.
It’s important that you set the streaming buffer setting in the receiving MP3 player to match or exceed the bitrate at which the stream is being sent. If you serve at 128kbps but WinAmp (for example) has a streaming buffer setting of 64kbps, the client will get choppy audio.
Conversely, if you’re serving to modem users, you’ll want to downsample your stream to make it more network friendly. However, it is not sufficient to just click the „Halve samplerate“ or „Make mono“ checkboxes. If you check these, you must modify the encoder flags. Specify a halved samplerate with -s 22.05, and make mono with -m m (-m is for mode; type „lame“ into a terminal to see all of its possible flags). Therefore, to send a 64kbps mono stream at 22.05KHz, use:

/boot/home/config/bin/lame -b 64 -m m -s 22.05 -x -r - - 

Experiment with mono/stereo, various bitrates, and full/half samplerate until you find a combination that works well for the speed at which your users are connecting.
To offer access to your live MP3 stream, hand out your IP address with the port address specified in the Live Encoder panel (the default is 8000). For example, http://192.168.0.7:8000. The user should enter or paste this directly into their MP3 player, not into their browser.
Note that while the Live Encoder plug-in is very similar in concept to ShoutCAST / icecast / live365, the current version does not include a mechanism to send meta-data to those sites, so you cannot have your stream automatically listed in their databases. However, live365 makes it possible to register streams manually, so you can theoretically get your stream listed. Unfortunately, a bug somewhere in the system is currently preventing this system from working as it should.

I’m not certain this tip will work on all laptops, but it does on my Dell Inspiron 3500.
Under Win98 or NT, if you want to change from the modular CD-ROM drive to Zip or floppy etc, you have no choice but to shut down, swap drives (or battery) and reboot. [Editor’s note: My Inspiron 3500 came with a SwapBay util in the control panel, but it’s slow and unreliable]. Even then, hot-swapping these modular drives under Win98 or WinNT will often crash the system entirely, or freeze the shutdown process.
Under BeOS, however, you can simply swap the device, run DriveSetup, and pull down Rescan | IDE. The new drive appears in the Mount menu, ready to mount. Very convenient when I need the uptime provided by two batteries but need to quickly get a file off of Zip disk.
If you prefer to use the command line rather than DriveSetup, these commands will achieve the same effect:

 rescan mountvolume -all 

mountvolume --help will tell you that the flag -r will rescan automatically, but I found it unreliable. You can make these into a little script by putting the ‚magic cookie‘ (#!/bin/sh) at the top, and running chmod +x on the file. Once you’ve got a working script, link to it from the Be menu — whenever you swap a drive, you can just run the script to mount the new volume on the desktop.

Many features in ABiSoft’s IRC client Baxter are not readily apparent. Here’s a list of some neat ones I’m sure you’ll find useful.

Tab Tips

• Although when you first start Baxter all channels and private chats come up as tabs, you can easily „tear them off“ into separate windows one at a time by dragging tabs out of the window. You can also oblierate tabs altogether by simply dragging the server view away from the tab view, taking all the other tabs with it. Every time you log on to a different server you’ll have to do this, but once tabs are separate windows, they stay separate. To put them back into tabs, use the „Add to Tab View“ menu item in the Baxter menu, or hit Alt-T.
• Reordering tabs is a snap. Hold down Shift, then click and drag the tabs to the left or right.
• The colors of the tabs — and even whether or not they’re translucent — is configurable in preferences. Look under GUI | Tabs.
• Tabs turn a different color when they’re not active, but if someone in the channel they represent says something that contains your nick, or one of the highlight words you set up in preferences is written, the tab will light up. Select General | Highlight and add some words.

Useful Commands

• Next time you’re on IRC try /uptime or /cuptime. The commands echo your computer’s uptime to the current channel or private chat, in black and white and color, respectively.
• /run, /rrun, and /system all can be used to run applications. /system runs the application in the background and should be used to launch a GUI application. /run and /rrun run the application and wait for it to complete before sending it’s output to the current channel. /run simply prints the output, but no one else sees it. /rrun (the extra r is for remote) sends the output to the channel. Try typing /rrun fortune sometime.
• Baxter ships with a simple tic-tac-toe add-on. Type /ttt nick to request a game with them.
• Type /notify to get a notify list.

Aliases make IRC a whole lot simpler. More information about aliases is available online.
Baxter is skinnable! Download Baxters skins individually or as a batch. Feel free to create your own.

cdda-fs (which lets you mount audio CDs and access tracks directly as WAV files), stores each track’s number as an attribute of its corresponding WAV file. For some reason though, Be does not make this attribute visible by default.
To make track numbers visible in the Tracker, launch the FileTypes preferences panel and navigate to audio/x-wav (not audio/wav or similar — double-click multiple WAV entries in FileTypes to see their internal names if you’re not sure), and click Add to add a new custom attribute:
Attribute name = Track
Internal name = Audio:Track
Attribute type = Integer 32 bit
Visible, not editable, display width 20 (or whatever.)
Close FileTypes, then close and re-open the WAV folder on the CD. You should now be able to show the Track column by enabling it in the Attributes menu.

Adam N (nanovivid@bigfoot.com) notes that this tip also works with the x-cdda filetype, as used by CDPlayer.

If you’re trying to export a personalStudio project for the first time, you may find there are no video codecs available in the export menu. This is because the filetype defaults to „RIFF Audio File Format (WAV)“. This is an audio-only format, so obviously there are no video codecs that can be used with this filetype.
The solution is to change the filetype to QuickTime or AVI. The video codec picklist will refresh with all of the available codecs for that file format. You’ll only need to do this once, as the preferences file will properly store the list of output codecs for your next use.

If you have a very fast machine (such as a P600 or higher) and you’re hearing clicks in the audio stream under R5, you’ve encountered a known bug. Fortunately, there’s also a known fix.
Add the following line to your ~/config/boot/UserSetupEnvironment:

export OVERRIDE_AUDIO_BUFFER_FRAME_COUNT=256

and reboot (yes, reboot — it’s not enough to restart the media_server). The clicking should go away.
If you have a SB 128 PCI or similar card, you also may experience clicking after 12 hours of uptime, even if you don’t have a fast machine. Restarting the media server should fix this.

If your supported USB printer won’t print, make sure your machine’s BIOS is set to assign an IRQ for USB, and that the printer is attached to the first USB port on your machine (if you have more than one port).

If you’re installing BeOS Personal Edition manually (e.g. using the Linux package, or creating a PE partition manually on a Windows machine), remember that case matters. If you’re installing on a FAT volume, be sure to place the image file at:

/BEOS/IMAGE.BE

When working with ext2fs, be sure to use:

/beos/image.be

With NTFS, the case is unimportant.