Posts Tagged ‘awk’

ffms2m3u.sh - create playlist for all files on a Firefly Media Server

Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008

ffms2m3u - create playlist for all files on a Firefly Media Server.

If you run Firefly Media Server, you can run this script to create an M3U of all the tracks on your server. You can play this in most audio players; VLC likes it, as does iTunes (though big playlists take an age to load). Rhythmbox and the default Ubuntu Movie Player won’t touch my playlist of over 17,000 tracks.

To configure the script you need to edit three lines:


# where the Firefly database lives
DATABASE="/usr/var/cache/mt-daapd/songs3.db"
# server domain name or IP address
SERVER="server.example.com"
# Port to talk to server - don't leave blank
PORT="3689"

If you’re running Ubuntu, you’ll probably only need to change the SERVER line. It spits the M3U playlist, ordered by album, to stdout. Note that in the default Ubuntu install, regular users can’t read the database file.

If you’re running this from a cron job, it’s probably a good idea to fill in the real paths for sqlite3 and awk.

Lady Goosepelt Rides Again!

Sunday, August 19th, 2007

Lady Goosepelt, from What a Life!

In case anyone wants them, the 600 dpi page images of What a Life! are stored in this PDF: what_a_life.pdf (16MB). If you merely wish to browse, all the images from the book are here.

I got a bit carried away with doing this. Instead of just smacking together all the 360 dpi TIFFs I scanned seven years ago, I had to scan a new set at a higher resolution, then crop them, then fix the page numbers, add chapter marks, and make the table of contents a set of live links.

I’ve got out of the way of thinking in PostScript, so I spent some time looking for tools that would do things graphically. Bah! These things’d cost a fortune, so armed only with netpbm, libtiff, ghostscript, the pdfmark reference, Aquamacs, awk to add content based on the DSC, and gimp to work out the link zones on the contents page, I made it all go. Even I’m impressed.

One thing that didn’t impress me, though:

aquamacs file size warning

I used to edit multi-gigabyte files with emacs on Suns. They never used to complain like this. They just loaded (admittedly fairly slowly) and let me do my thing. Real emacs don’t give warning messages.