The International Classification for Standards (ICS) categories are used to serve as a structure for catalogues of international, regional and national standards and other normative documents, and as a basis for standing-order systems for international, regional and national standards. It may also be used for classifying standards and normative documents in databases, libraries, etc.

The classifications can be downloaded here for free as a PDF document (intro page here). This document lists the main categories first, and then a full alphabetic index. I won’t try to explain the format here, as it is all on the ISO website.

The PDF is a handy reference, but cannot be used in electronic systems. I have extracted the classifications from this document and provide it here in tab-separated format for loading into a spreadsheet or database.

The first line of the file contains the column headings. The remainder of the file holds one classification per line, in ASCII, with tab-separated fields as follows:

1. Field – the top level, two-digits (00 to 99) mandatory
2. Group – the second level, three digits (000 to 999) optional
3. Subgroup – the third and last official level, two digits (00 to 99) optional
4. Title – the title description of the classification
5. Notes1 to Notes7 – notes, all optional

The optional fields can be empty, with trailing optional fields (i.e. the notes) not present at all.

The text file: ISC-Categories-ics6-en

Here is the same data normalised into separate titles and notes:

ISC-Categories-ics6-en-titles

ISC-Categories-ics6-en-notes

If you find any mistakes in the data, please let me know. Before you ask, I don’t have a list of all the standards, since there is no freely-available index to down load in any format.

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Edit: I have recently come across this XML version of the NACE codes in the Europass project, that may also be of use:

http://europass.cedefop.europa.eu/TechnicalResources/XML/xsd/imported_schemas/NACE_COM.xsd

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I had reason to rip some Karaoke CDs to a hard disk recently, and knew there must be some free software to do this. It was hard to find, so I’m listing it here. Hope it is useful. These tools are Windows only, and only tested on Windows XP, so I have no idea how they perform on Vista or Windows 7.

The first thing I needed to do was to rip the Karaoke disks to the hard drive. Now, Karaoke disks are not standard audio disks so you cannot use your usual ripping software to extract the data. They do contain an audo track just like a normal “white book” CD, but hidden in a normally-unused channel of the CD are the graphics. The disks are known as “CD+G” or “Compact Disk plus Graphics”.

The only free software I could find to rip these CDs is Audiograbber. Originally released as shareware, this is now freeware.

Once installed, Audiograbber will rip the contents of a CD+G disk into a variety of different formats. I chose the “MP3+G” format, where each track is extracted as an MP3 file and a separate “CDG” graphics file. These files can be joined back together and burned back to disk later, but it is useful to have the MP3 available separately.

Before ripping to MP3, you will need to download lame into the Audiograbber home directory (just the DLL and the EXE is needed). This will let you save the audio at up to 320kbit/S, while Audiograbber only supports 56kbit/S natively. It detects lame automatically and uses it to encode the audio on request.

One thing that is not obvious with Audiograbber is that the command for ripping CD+G disks is under the “CD” menu. It is not available through any of the toolbar icons.

Another thing to bear in mind is that not all CD players are capable of reading the graphics channel. My laptop CD player could not, so I used an external (USB) Panasonic CD writer that worked like a champ.

So, I have my MP3 and matching CDG files. What can I do with them? Easy: play them.

To play the tracks you need a player. The free Karake Builder CD+G Player works well. It will read the CDG files directly, picking up the MP3 files and play them just like a pub Karaoke. In full-screen mode you just get the graphics and the audio.

The Karaoke Builder player will also read “bin” files. These have the audio (in WAV format, so fairly sizeable) and the graphics channels multiplexed into a single file. Most CD writers capable of writing CD+G disks (and again, not all hardware will be capable either) will require the bin files so they do not have to attempt to mulitplex two sources onto the media at the same time as burning the disk.

Another tool work mentioning is Active ASP Software’s MP3+G Toolz. This utility, once installed, is available in the context menu of Explorer, and will convert between various CD+G formats. You can freely convert between WAV+G, MP3+G, and BIN single/multiple track formats. They also have a CD+G player called Troubadour Karaoke Lite Home Edition. I haven’t tried that out though.

When I find what software I used to burn the CD+G disks (several years ago) I’ll report back here. From what I remember, it involved creating a whole-disk bin-format file, then using a special burner – or perhaps a Nero plugin – to burn the disk.

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