Stefaan Lippens' webface

In a previous post I listed some options for audio data manipulation (conversion of format, sample rate, bitrate, trimming, etc), with SoX, MPlayer and FFmpeg. The obvious question is now: which one is best?

In my day job, I regularly have to convert/transcode/re-encode audio data from one format to another. Because I typically have to do this in batch jobs, I'm mostly dealing with command line tools (on Linux) like Lame, SoX (Sound eXchange), MPlayer and FFmpeg. Having a cheat sheet of how to invoke them with the desired options has proven to be very useful, so here is mine. Note that I only cover the operations I mostly need, like format conversion, sample rate conversion, conversion to mono and trimming/cropping. If you need more/other functionality, look in the man pages or ask your favorite search engine.

[Update] also see a follow up blog post about an execution time comparison between SoX, FFmpeg and MPlayer.

At work, I'm trying out BeatRoot, an application written in Java, for its BPM estimation capabilities. The data set I'm working with is encoded in MP3 format and getting this Java tool to work with the MP3 data was not an easy ride.

Het heeft me wat tijd gekost, maar eindelijk vond ik een lijst van rechtstreekse links naar de VRT internetradio streams. Nu kan ik eindelijk (vanuit Linux) naar de VRT-radio luisteren zonder dat dat flashgedoe in als zijn "trendyness" zinloos cpu staat te verbruiken en eigenlijk niets doet behalve foutmeldingen spuwen.

I'm a happy Amarok user, using it for playing/browsing/querying my music collection, but this weekend I encountered a problem: Amarok didn't start anymore. When I launched Amarok (version 1.3.1, that is) from the command line I got the following error:

$> amarok
amaroK: [Loader] Starting amarokapp..
amaroK: [Loader] Don't run gdb, valgrind, etc. against this binary! Use amarokapp.
QLayout: Adding KToolBar/mainToolBar (child of QVBox/unnamed) to layout for PlaylistWindow/PlaylistWindow
kio (Scheduler): FATAL: BUG! _ScheduleJob(): No extraJobData for job!

I experimented with changing/deleting my Amarok settings in ~/.kde/share/apps/amarok and it became clear that there was some problem with collection.db. Deleting (after a backup of course) that file would solve the problem, but I did not want to lose the statistical information about my music collection in that file.

Today I bothered to intall the Last.fm player just to give it a try. The installation (on my Kubuntu 5.10 Linux laptop) was very easy. I just downloaded a tarball with the Linux binary from the Last.fm player download page and extracted it to a local folder in my home directory. Next I had to tell my webbrowser (firefox) to use this player for links with the lastfm:// protocol (like explained here). That was all to make it work.

Just a little blog entry to say:

R&B is boring and pathetic! It's for memoryless beings unable to notice all those R&B songs (and videoclips) are (almost exactly) the same.

now I feel much better, thank you