The Sound of Music

Ok, I've finally run of out of excuses *not* to convert my music collection to the free, open, ogg vorbis format.
I've kept them as mp3s for three main reasons:

1. I use my phone (Motorola L7) as a portable music player, but it only does mp3s.
2. I love my music, so my entire collection is meticulously tagged. If I convert it all, I'll have to redo the tags, right?
3. According to Amarok, I have just over 5000 tracks (2 weeks worth of listening). Converting that much music is bound to be a pain.

However, I've just got a 30GB iPod Video from a friend who just bought an iPod Touch (more on that here), and I'm planning on putting Rockbox on it (again, more in a future post). So that eliminates reason 1.

mp32ogg
Reasons 2 and 3 were taken care of when I read about mp32ogg, a perl script that converts mp3s to oggs (the clue is in the name).
It doesn't appear to have been under development since 2002, but it still does the job, so...

One of my favourite features of this script is that it can rename tracks based on their ID3 tags. It can only use the title, artist, or album name tags, but that's pretty sufficent (unless you name tracks based on track length or genre?)
The best use I've found of this, is some old tracks I had, that were victims of iTunes. For those that have never had the pleasure of the iTunes/iPod combination, when you use iTunes to put tracks onto an iPod, it renames the track to 4 random letters. (e.g. avca.mp3, hjbv.mp3, vhvc.mp3, etc)
However, running that track through mp32ogg with the --rename=%t option set (rename as title), outputs tracks with their original names. I was impressed :)

The conversion
I told it to get to work on my ~/multimedia/audio folder, re-encoding everything at a quality level of 5, renaming the new oggs with the title stored in their tags, and deleting the old mp3s when they were converted (that one made me nervous!)
It automatically acts recursively, so that's nice and easy, and it gets bonus points for being command line, so I can come and write this blog post while I'm waiting :)

Converting from one lossy format to another, the quality was never going to be perfect anyways, but saving about 0.8MB on each file is a pretty good trade-off :) (NB: 0.8MB might not sound like much, until you times it by 5000-ish tracks I have in my music collection) Considering my /home on the music centre/server thing I have (more on that in another post) was 98% full yesterday, the extra 4GB of space is nice :)

It did throw out a few errors, something about not recognising the type of mp3... which makes no sense to me. Worse still, an error stops it from working (it won't just skip the bad track and carry on), and even worse, it doesn't tell you which track caused the error.
Some quick googling didn't give any solutions, and since the program isn't being developed, I doubt we can expect a fix.
I managed to work around the error (sort of) by telling it to convert ~/multimedia/audio/A*, then B* and so on. It still missed a lot of tracks, but the majority got converted in the end.

Conclusion
And a quick listen to a couple of tracks showed no obvious decline in quality, although I'm sure I'll notice some over the coming weeks, at which point I'll start looking at ripping my CDs into ogg format.

mp32ogg is a nice simple app, it only takes a minute or so on the help page before you can set it to work on your whole collection in the background.
It's a shame that it's no longer being developed (if I'm wrong, let me know, but I can't find anything since 2002), and I would definately recommend it, despite the issue it has with some files.

Now I just need to find something for my wma and wav files :)

Well, that went well...

After two days of using Gnome (for the first time in months), I'm back in KDE already.
I blame the fact that my attention span is too short, and that I like Kontact too much :) Whereas Gnome didn't like Kontact much at all.
The other thing that bothered me was that I couldn't find a way to make programs open on specific desktops, or at specific sizes (etc). It might not sound like much, but for a geek who likes some sense of order, its a big thing. :D
Might get round to posting some screenshots of my desktop(s), just as reference to my OCD.

So, looking forward to KDE4 now :)

Taking a break from KDE

In a random act of madness, I'm installing ubuntu-desktop, and going back to the Gnome desktop that I left many months ago.
I don't know why (probably my short attention span), but KDE doesn't seem as bright and shiny as it did when I first tried it.

So, I've decided to give Gnome until January 11th (the proposed KDE4 release date) to impress me.
From now until then - no KDE apps. No Amarok, no Kontact, no Kopete, no Katapult, no Yakuake. I have no idea what I'm going to use in place of them (although Banshee seems to have improved since I last used it, and I never exactly hated Pidgin).

But the whole experience should at least give me some good blog food - application comparisons.

Anyways, its finished downloading now, let's see how this turns out...

Breaking News: Data Loss scandal takes seasonal twist

A leaked memo from Santa Claus' HQ at the North Pole tells of massive data loss this Yuletide, Capricorication can reveal.
Details of over a billion children across the globe, on two pieces of parchment, affectionately known as Santa's 'naughty' and 'nice' lists, went missing from Santa's sled, sometime between 2am, and 4 am (GMT), this morning.

The lists contain the names and addresses of every child on Earth (as of 25th December 2007), and industry experts say that the lists could be worth in excess of £1.5bn ($2.98bn) on the black market.

However, police officials say that there is no reason to believe that the data may used for malicious purposes, and warn the public to be "cautious, but enjoy the holiday season."

Some identity fraud experts are already calling the news 'disgraceful', and one source, who wishes to remain anonymous, told Capricorication, "Santa's abuse of data has been documented throughout history. He routinely collects data of children, without warning or notification, and there is no clear way to opt out of the service."

An early press release from Santa Claus' HQ this morning, said that Santa will continue on his round trip delivering presents as normal, and will release an official statement regarding the data loss on Boxing Day, after consulting his Chief Elf.

Let the games begin!

For some time now, my thoughts and opinions have made their way into various forums, IRC channels, other blogs etc. It's hard to keep track sometimes!

So I figured it was about time I had some kind of central place to put them, save me the legwork :)

So, this little corner of the internet will soon be full of whatever my head is full of - usually geeky stuff, stupid opinions or jokes about whatever is in the news, and as much personal stuff as I feel comfortable posting on the internet :)

Feel free to leave me comments, constructive criticism, insults, spam etc in the comments - you know I love it :)