Aaron Computers has been in the IT service business since 1993 and has established a loyal following in Anderson County. After 15 years of excellence, they have decided to expand into the Greenville, Mauldin, and Simpsonville market. We welcome the move and look forward to working together.

Considering the relatively low cost involved (web sites are available for as little as $400 plus $20 a month for hosting), any business that is serious about competing in the Greenville or Upstate area (or the modern economy in general) absolutely has to have a web site.

My problem arose when I realized that one, and only one, song from a particular LP was invisible when I looked at the album I had copied over. I was using the phone’s built-in VCast music library and player to get to the album. I decided to access the phone as a USB mass storage device instead, so that I could see if the actual song file had been copied. In fact, it was there, pretty as you please. I tried copying it again anyway, but still had no luck viewing the file from the music library.

Then, on a hunch, I decided to carefully compare the file to other song files from the same album, to see if there was any reason this one wouldn’t show up in the library. It was then that I noticed that one word in the song’s title had an apostrophe. Since I had allowed Spin it Again to assign file names, it had not occurred to me that the software would use the exact title (including the apostrophe) as the name of the file. I changed the name of the file, replacing the apostrophe with an underscore, and voila! VCast could now see the song. When using third party software to rip songs or modify file names in any way, be sure to eliminate any stray apostrophes, commas, etc. or your MP3 player’s music player may not be able to read the file.

An another occasion, two different songs from one album did not show up in the Vcast player. Both copied fine, and there were no special characters, etc. I was stimied, until I realized that the two songs had the longest two titles on the album - one with 52 characters and the other with 45 characters. Since the file name consisted of the song title in each case, I decided to reduce the file names to about 25 each. Once again, both songs magically appeared. Apparently, Verizon’s software can’t read file names over a set length, so be sure to keep all filenames to a reasonable number of characters.

I regularly use my laptop at our local library. Actually, I occasionally teach seminars at the local library, and between classes I like to catch up on email correspondence. Receiving email was, as usual, no problem. Sending email, however, was a major pain. In yet another ongoing crusade to control spam, the library’s firewall prevented email of any kind to be sent via port 25.

For a while, I used webmail to send mail, but this was extremely inconvenient since I have, due to the nature of my business, about ten different email accounts that I send/receive email through. Checking each one of them individually through webmail was time consuming and laborious. Furthermore, most days I would open up Outlook Express (my mail client of choice) without thinking and download my mail. To reply, I then had to log into webmail and copy and paste the original message into the reply.

So I tried other options, including creating an SSH tunnel via Putty (I couldn’t get it to work, even with expert advice). Seems my mail server isn’t configured properly to allow this kind of traffic.

Anyway, after months of workarounds and dealing with the nuisance, I suddenly remembered seeing “IMAP” when adding an email account in Outlook Express. Then it dawned on me…I have a Google mail (gmail) account (which can be configured as IMAP), so why can’t I set up my gmail server to send mail and thereby possibly bypass the firewall restrictions?

As it turned out, I could. First, I had to enable IMAP in Gmail. The steps are as follows:

1. Sign in to Gmail.
2. Click Settings at the top of any Gmail page.
3. Click Forwarding and POP/IMAP.
4. Select Enable IMAP
5. Click Save Changes

Next, I need to configure Outlook Express. I could have followed Google’s instructions on how to do this; however, I didn’t want to receive mail via IMAP, but just send  it. In order to do this, for each account I needed to send email from, I changed the outgoing server to imap.gmail.com. To do this:

1. Click Tools, Accounts
2. Select the account to change and choose Properties
3. Click the Servers tab.
4. Enter imap.gmail.com for the outgoing mail server.
5. At the bottom, check the box that says “My Server Requires Authentication”.
6. Click the “Settings” button.
7. Choose the “Log On Using” radio button.
8. Enter my gmail account name and password and click OK.
9. Click the Advanced tab.
10. Change the outgoing mail server to 465.
11. Check the “This server requires a secure connection” box.

With that, I was able to send email using Outlook Express, from behind the firewall.

After trying several free packages, I was unable to settle on anything that met all three criteria mentioned above. My next step to focus on low-end commercial products. I tried a few on a trial basis, and finally settled on AudioLava 1.0 from Acon Digital. I used it on a trial basis for about a month before buying it for $24.90. While I wasn’t 100% sold on it, it was the best I had found given my budget of $40 or less.

AudioLava was ok for about six months. The pros were the ease of use (not a lot of “geeky” music production terminology to learn) and the low price tag.  The quality of the finished music files was acceptable, though there was a learning curve involved in getting it to that point.

However, there were several negatives. First, the software had a frustrating habit of crashing in the middle of working on a project. Since each record took about an hour to record, clean, and output from start to finish, and since there was no way to save a project, this was infuriating, particularly if I was near the end of a project. I wrote to support, but their only suggestion was to upgrade to the latest build, which I did, to no avail.

Second, as I already stated, there was no way to save a project. Once I started a record, I was tied to it until I was completely finished cleaning and exporting the output. This meant I had to schedule my time carefully. I couldn’t even just leave my laptop with the software open because the crashes were so frequent. There was no alternative to just finishing the project or starting over later.

Finally, the track detection feature was relatively useless, at least as far as I learned to use it. While it is possible I could have learned to tweak the settings for better results, I generally just took the time to manually divide the audio file into tracks. This was a large part of the time involved, and no easy task. All in all, though, it was still the closest thing to what I needed, so I continued to use it for about six months.

Finally, after one maddening crash too many, I decided to look around a little more. And that’s when I found Spin It Again by Acoustica. To put it mildly, I was blown away. SIA was clearly written for the end user (like me) who wants to quickly and easily convert a home vinyl collection to CD or mp3 files. I was up and running in minutes, and was amazed at the output quality and the overall ease of use.

For starters, the import feature is fast - much faster than AudioLava. Second, the price is reasonable at $34.95, well within my budget. But the biggest advantage is the accuracy of the track detection. I can now import an audio file and have all of the tracks accurately detected in a matter of seconds, rather than the fifteen minutes or so it was taking me before. And the quality of the exported files is superb…the variety of cleaning and equalization tools are magnificent.

Inexpensive, fast and easy to learn and use, and high quality output. What more can you ask for?

Buy Spin It Again

Trial Version

Our SEO system combines the latest in modern search engine algorithm research with industry-specific time-test techniques and methods, as well as proprietary systems developed through our own research and analysis of search behavior.

We also offer a full suite of search engine optimization and internet marketing services to guarantee that your site will receive the maximum amount of traffic. Aartek Systems is one of the industry leaders in designing and optimizing web sites that are search engine friendly, that is, that actually attract visitors (and therefore potential customers) to your web site. While there are web developers who can offer fancier designs, few are as skilled at actually attracting traffic to your site. After all, you found this page, didn’t you? In the end, isn’t that what your web site is all about — driving traffic?

Our SEO system combines the latest in modern search engine algorithm research with industry-specific time-test techniques and methods, as well as proprietary systems developed through our own research and analysis of search behavior.

It starts innocently enough: you are contacted by a webmaster for a site that wants to trade links with you. You do your due diligence and check the site out, and everything seems to be in order. You agree to place a link on your site in exchange for a link back. One fairly common scam occurs when the requesting webmaster links back to your site, but only long enough to get your link. At some point in the future, the webmaster removes your link without notifying you, and suddenly your link exchange has become a one-way link in his favor. Such unethical tactics require you to either periodically perform a time-consuming audit of your link partners or utilize one of the many automated software packages or online services that specialize in keeping tabs on such things.

Recently, however, I was almost victimized by a more devious strategy. I received a link exchange request from the webmaster of a site that seemed of good quality and related to my site. I replied that I would be glad to post a link back to him as soon as my link was up on his end. Within a few hours I received a confirmation email notifying me that my link was ready. I clicked on the URL, and, sure enough, there was my link. It wasn’t until I hovered my mouse over the link that I discovered that the link actually linked back to his site, not mine. In every other way, the link looked just like the html code I had provided him. The only way to know it was different was to look at the source code itself.

In short, when manually verifying the presence of a link on another site, be sure to look at the source code, not just the displayed text. It’s too easy to fake a link to your site.

Internet Marketing - The term “internet marketing” encompasses all areas of marketing or promoting your business or service via the internet or World Wide Web, including search engine optimization (SEO), paid advertisement, email marketing, and any other online method.

Keyword Analysis - The process of collecting keywords/keyphrases related to your site and researching as many as possible to determine which are the most economically attractive in terms of demand and competition. Demand represents the number of searches on a particular keyword/keyphrase over a given period of time, while competition represents the number of websites competing for those keywords. For best results, a website should target keywords that are high demand (lots of searches) and low competition.

Keyword/Keyphrase - A word or phrase that describes a product or service that your business offers.

Link Campaign - A coordinated effort to increase the number of links from other sites to your site.

Link Popularity - the number of links from other sites to your site. Very popular sites have many links to them from other sites. Link Popularity is a major factor considered by search engines in their rankings.

META Tags - Code placed in the hidden heading section of a web page. Common META tags are the keywords tag and the description tag. META tags were once used by search engines to determine a site’s ranking, but were so abused that they are now largely ignored when ranking a site.

Organic Search Results - The normal, non-paid results (as opposed to Sponsored Listings - see below) returned by a search engine in response to a search request. These are the results considered most relevant by that particular search engine.

Pagerank - A proprietary value Google assigns to each website it indexes. The exact algorithm used to determine Pagerank is a proprietary secret, but sites with higher Pagerank are generally considered much more important than sites with lower Pagerank.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) - A form of advertising in which the advertiser pays a certain amount each time his advertisement is clicked by a visitor.

Reciprocal Link - A common link-building strategy in which two sites link to each other. Reciprocal links hold much less value to search engines than one-way links in determining your site’s ranking.

Search Engine - a program that is used to find websites related to a particular keyword or keyphrase and rank them in order of relevance. Examples are Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - The process of tweaking a web page to make it as search-engine friendly as possible for a particular keyword or keyphrase.

Search Marketing - Similar to Internet Marketing, but differs in scope. While Internet Marketing refers to any form of marketing which utilizes the internet (email, for example), search marketing refers specifically to marketing through search engine results including both organic and pay-per-click marketing.

Spamming - the process of using unethical techniques to attempt to manipulate search engine results in your site’s favor. Many forms of spamming (such as stuffing your site full of keywords and little else) have long ago been made obsolete by new search engine algorithms, and such techniques will get your site ignored at best and banned from the search results altogether at worst.

Sponsored Listings - The advertisements usually listed above or to the right of organic results in response to a search request. These listings are paid for and used by advertisers to get more exposure than they might if they relied on organic (non-paid) results alone.

Our service and repair rates are as follows:

Mauldin City Limits: $50 per hour. A one hour minimum charge applies for on-site service.
Greenville City, Greenville County: $70 for the first hour, $50 for each additional hour. A one-hour minimum charge applies for on-site service.
Standard rates apply between 9:00 am and 6:00 pm on weekdays.
For early morning and evening rates (7:00 am to 9:00 am, and from 6:00 pm to 11:00 pm), add $25 per hour.
For late night/weekend rates (between 11:00 pm and 7:00 am and on weekends), standard rates are doubled.
Spyware/virus cleanup: $125.00, includes pick up and delivery