Thursday, January 31, 2013

Google Chrome Processes

If you're not careful Google Chrome can configure itself to run multiple background processes when it isn't running in the foreground. This may be desirable if you want faster loading of Chrome and/or background services like Offline Gmail, but it may just be unnecessary system overhead.

To see if this is happening, close Chrome, and then start Windows Task Manager (e.g., by right-clicking on the Taskbar) and check for "chrome.exe" in the Processes tab.

To keep this from happening:
  1. Start Chrome.
  2. Click icon Customize and Control Google Chrome at top right corner, and then click Settings from the drop-down menu.
  3. Scroll to the bottom of the Settings window, and then click Show advanced settings...
  4. Scroll again to the bottom of the Settings window, and then uncheck Continue running background apps when Google Chrome is closed.
Now when you close Chrome all Chrome processes should terminate.

How To Delete Windows 8 Upgrade Download

If you purchase an online Windows 8 upgrade, download it, and then create an ISO file for later upgrade or installation, afterward you'll still have 2.7 GB of wasted space on your system drive. This same problem was reported in the Consumer Preview (see How to uninstall Windows 8 Consumer Preview setup?!) but wasn't fixed. Fortunately, a similar manual process can be used to reclaim the wasted space after the ISO file has been created for the release -- delete these two directories (folders):
  1.     C:\ESD
  2.     %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Websetup

Friday, January 25, 2013

How To Play TuneIn Radio Pro Recordings

TuneIn Radio Pro (Android app) makes recordings in whatever format (MP3, AAC, WMA, etc) a source streams in, but does not create legal container files, making recordings (deliberately) hard to play outside of TuneIn.

To determine the format of a given source, start a manual recording and note the format shown on the TuneIn screen.

To play a recording, copy the file from the TuneIn folder on the device to a computer, and rename the file to give it an appropriate file extension; e.g., .mp3 for MP3 audio. The file should now be playable with VLC Media Player. (See example in Comments.)

To play with other players less forgiving of file format issues, it will need to be converted with a tool like foobar2000 or Audacity.

UPDATES

  1. This method does not appear to work with WMA streams. See if MP3 stream is available.
  2. In same cases TuneIn makes a recording in multiple file segments, with additional segments named -001, -002, etc.
  3. VLC Media Player on a computer can be used to transcode a network stream on the fly to any desired format.
  4. As of version 10 (October 2013), recordings appear to have been moved from open storage to protected app storage, which can't be accessed without rooting the phone.