Il blog di Gas

A proper transcode must have a lossless audio format as a source, a good one is flac ,stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec, because it does the job well and has a good licence ( BSD and GPL ).

If you have some flacs and want them in mp3 format (you need lame and flac) you can use this one liner:
for FILE in *.flac; do flac -cd "${FILE}" | lame - "${FILE/.flac/.mp3}"; done

the above line decodes every file that ends in .flac to the standard output (screen) and pipes it to lame that will encode it. “${FILE/.flac/.mp3}” will be the output file, in bash that means: take the variables “$FILE” (that is the original filename), remove “.flac” and substitute “.mp3″.

Nowadays I transcode quite often to 320 kbit/s constant bit rate (CBR)

• achieving the best quality for an mp3 and still being highly portable, some players don’t like variable bitrate of high quality ( like the V0 preset)
• doing something unefficient since mp3 is not a good codec for that quality but if your stereo reads just mp3 you don’t have any choices

I simply need to use lame with the proper switches , the above one liner becomes:
for FILE in *.flac; do flac -cd "${FILE}" | lame --cbr --preset insane - "${FILE/.flac/.mp3}"; done

To rip my compact discs and encode my music in flac I use a program for windows called Exact Audio Copy (EAC), my Wine build doesn’t like it for some reasons and Virtualbox has historical problems in handling cdroms correctly, the solution was VMWare. The native solution is RubyRipper

Today after syncing I found out that Rhythmbox 0.9.8 (codename “Type Slowly” it hangs!!!) and Ekiga 2.0.5 are now in portage. I use rhythmbox a lot and hopefully I’ll enjoy one of the improvementes like the album cover shown in the trayicon tooltip and the ability to transcode songs before sending them to the ipod .

Overview of changes in Rhythmbox 0.9.8 "Type slowly"

=====================================================* move to SVN and move round lots of files. yay!

* use "friendly" date-time in track list (William Jon McCann)

* add visualisation plugin (JOnathan Matthew)

* support more lastfm:// URIs (Jonathan Matthew)

* split code out into a library common to plugins and the binary (Jonathan Matthew)

* display cover art in the tray icon tooltop and song-change notification (Ed Catmur)

* Magnatune improvements (Adam Zimmerman)

* core art improvements, support art for podcasts et al (Ed Catmur, Martin Szulecki)

* Python plugin improvements (James Livingston, Jonathan Matthew)

* add support for the Jamendo online catalogue (Guillaume Desmottes)

* support new Gnome "media key" mechanism (James Livingston, Jonathan Matthew)

* support track transfer for "generic" audio players, and improve iPod

  track transfer support, including transcoding (James Livingston)

* many build/run issues on Solaris (Irene Huang)

* Nokia N800 support (William Jon McCann)

* Many core improvements, for future work

* the usual pile of minor features and bug fixes

As far as I can tell from the changelog there have been a few fixes for ekiga but no big improvements.

Thinking about ekiga i realize that is very easy to get lost in very simple things, especially for gnome developers. Every tray icon of any Voip/Chatting software on this planet change when you have a missed called , so you can actually realize that someone was looking for you but not with ekiga. You must open it and once you have done it there are no symbols that warns you about the missed called at first glance but there’s a single text message …. it doesn’t seems so smart…

Non è appena uscito ma l’ho appena scoperto,si chiama songbird ( ricorda qualcosa?) ed è il nuovo lettore multimediale “tutto in uno” di mozilla.

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