Thursday, December 18, 2014

StrongVPN Review

Edit: I've changed my opinion on Strong VPN.  After 3+ years of being a loyal paying customer and advocate of StrongVPN, somehow, I discovered that they double changed me.  When I saw the double charge, I disputed it with my bank, because Bank of America online statements come with a dispute link for every transaction which is convenient for their customers.  When I did that, StrongVPN cancelled my account, and only when I requested a refund, they gave me a refund for the other charge.  StrongVPN never once admitted to their mistake of double charging me.  And told me it was my fault for disputing it with my bank when I should have asked them about the double charge.  What a terrible way to treat their loyal customers.  I would no longer recommend them as they seemed to be represented by customer service personnel who cannot admit to their own mistakes, even when dealing with something as severe as double charging your credit card.  And then blame you because they cannot trust you to not dispute other transactions.  Their logic being, if you disputed one charge, people usually dispute the other (correct) one even though I've been a happy customer for 3+ years.  What do they expect after they cancel your account that after you've pre-paid for a year?   Maybe it was just a rogue customer service person, but people like this hurt the company's revenue due to their egos.

As Korea clamps down on essential Internet services so that you use their services instead from daum and naver, a good and reliable VPN service is becoming more of a necessity.  Just recently, I've discovered I can no longer stream videos from Google Play.  Luckily, with a VPN service like StrongVPN, I can still watch South Park episodes on the Comedy Central app and get better access to free shows from Crackle in Korea.

Having is a VPN is the only way you can still enjoy watching videos from Netflix which always works consistently.  I've tried other VPN sites only to experience that speeds are only good the initial month, then they secretly switch you over to their other server that is always too congested for Netflix streaming.  With StrongVPN, the speeds are always good.  When their servers get a little busy, they just create another one.  I believe a lot of the other VPN services out there are essentially bait and switch scams.

One more great service that StrongVPN provides is that they have locations worldwide, so when the Olympics come around every 2 years, you can switch to the UK servers and watch Olympics live for free.  You can't do that in the US without having to verify that you are a cable subscriber.  However in the UK, you just need a UK IP address.

Overall, StrongVPN has become an necessity in Korea.  Without it, I would constantly feel the weight of the restrictions living in Korea.

Thursday, March 20, 2014

Recovering files from Adobe Audition after a crash

I love Adobe products. I really can't live without it. Photoshop is a rock solid application that I can't remember ever dealing with a crash for the thousands of hours that I've used it. However, Premiere Pro and Audition crash all the time. I've lost countless hours of work so far. Crashes in Audition seem more severe as autosave seems to be not present. And only rarely I'm told that there is a file to recover from. However, I ran into an article on how to get back the files.

On my Windows 7 x64, the files were located in: C:\Users\***yourusername***\AppData\Local\Temp\Adobe\Audition\6.0

You will probably recognize a massive file with a random guid for a name that has been modified recently.  You can do an import on a raw file, then define the sample rate which, channels (1 for mono, 2 for stereo, 6 for 5.1), and resolution. I always record in 192000 sample rate, stereo, and 32-bit (float) wav so it was easy to figure this out.  The file you end up with is the recording, and chained to any other recordings and edits you may have made. Just clip what you need and there you go.

Source