Posts Tagged ‘itunes’

m4a2mp3

Thursday, July 31st, 2008

m4a2mp3 - convert AAC to MP3. Uses Perl, LAME and faad. Semi-gracefully converts weird iTunes genres to ID3v2, or to “Other” if it’s something else. Uses lame’s new VBR settings, so you end up with an MP3 not massively bigger than the source M4A.

PS: broke the 8000 tunes on the Firefly server …

oh yeah, that’s what I’m talkin’ about

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008


This is my work PC running Firefly Client, serving my music from home. Who needs to install and manage local music libraries now?

it is good

Saturday, July 19th, 2008

I just installed Firefly Media Server and it is good.

iPod Shuffle: meh

Saturday, November 5th, 2005

There’ve been a couple of times that my 256MB USB key wasn’t quite big enough, so I was in the market for a 1GB unit. Since the iPod Shuffle was only slightly more expensive than a plain memory key, I thought it would be a good purchase.

Um, wrong. While it’s undoubtedly a decent (if slightly portly) USB key, it has huge deficiencies as a music player:

  • you can’t skip to the next album in the play list.
  • shuffle mode seems more like ‘play a few songs out of order from the same album until you manually skip to something different’.
  • why is my music hidden away in weirdly-named files?
  • iTunes doesn’t always sync all of the tunes in the playlist, leaving you with missing albums.

For me, I think the most the Shuffle will be is a way of listening to the couple of albums I’ve bought on the weekend. It is small, light, and sounds pretty reasonable, but it won’t replace my iRiver H120 for musical goodness.

liquor CD?

Friday, August 26th, 2005

Robyn Hitchcock’s Mossy Liquor — a limited edition release of out-takes and weirdnesses recorded around the time of Moss Elixir, formerly only available on vinyl (ptui!) — is now available from iTunes Canada. Does this mean that it’s finally coming out on CD?

m4p2mp3 - helper to turn an iTunes protected m4p to an mp3

Saturday, December 18th, 2004

m4p2mp3 — helper to turn an iTunes protected M4P to an MP3, so I can play music I have bought on my MP3 player. Probably runs best on a Unix-like OS.

You will need Perl, some M4Ps, mono, FairKeys, DeDRMS, faad, and lame. You’ll need to edit the script to say where the DeDRMS.exe file is. You’ll need to have run FairKeys to pick up your account details from Apple’s server.

Does the conversion via WAV, so you’ll definitely lose something. As written, MP3 file sizes are about 15% larger than the M4P. Doesn’t handle invalid MP3 genres gracefully at all; there is the beginnings of a mechanism to do this in the code, though.

This script doesn’t know anything about decryption, and thus contains no code to circumvent DRM.