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?
Posts Tagged ‘mp3’
it is good
Saturday, July 19th, 2008I just installed Firefly Media Server and it is good.
the dire effects of Whiskey Before Breakfast
Monday, July 14th, 2008This is allegedly what happens when the battery runs out on your Zoom H2 while recording: whiskey before breakfast. This is Nichol playing his Collings during a lesson.
Absolutely: The Hills of Buccleuch
Wednesday, May 28th, 2008This is my favourite song from Absolutely: The Hills of Buccleuch.
annoying ringtone
Sunday, May 18th, 2008Now I’ve discovered how easy it is to create MP3 ringtones for my BlackBerry (make a 64KBit mono MP3 of short length, e-mail it to the phone, open attachment, save it, and select “Use as ringtone”), I just had to use this little snippet of the DeZurik Sisters: dezurik.mp3.
Sandro Perri gives you Double Suicide
Tuesday, April 8th, 2008Sandro Perri sings Double Suicide [mp3].
(recorded live at Tranzac, 3 April 2008. Colin Fisher plays bouzouki and Brandon Valdivia is on snare and cymbals).
guess my music competition
Thursday, March 6th, 2008So I could listen to semi-disposable CDRs in the car (and with that phrase, my green cred has vanished) I wrote a program that converts directories of mp3s to WAV files and TOC files for cdrdao. It works rather well.
In order to get sensible file names, the program truncates album names down to eight letters. I will send $5 canadian by paypal to the first person to guess correctly the album and artist of the following four names:
dancetun darlingc hepooscl maggotbr
Answers in the comments only, please. They’re all official releases, before you accuse me of getting you to guess my mix CDs.
down home radio show » The End of the World Banjo Band
Thursday, January 3rd, 2008down home radio show » Various Field Recordings
Anthology Film Archives - New York City 12/8/07:
This show was after a screening of the film “Bound to Lose” which is a GREAT documentary about The Holy Modal Rounders. “The End of the World Banjo Band” is a current project by Peter Stampfel of The Holy Modal Rounders. It’s an all banjo band featuring Peter Stampfel, John Cohen (of the New Lost City Ramblers), Jeannie Scofield, Walker Shepard and Down Home Radio’s own Eli Smith. Faced with the end of the world, seemingly the only option is actually to create an all-banjo-band. The band has 5-string banjos, banjo-mandolin, and 6-string banjo-guitar.
whoa, I won something!
Wednesday, November 14th, 2007My strategy of dropping off my business card at every trade show booth that promises quality swag paid off. I just received an MP3 player from Genivar - thanks, folks!
It’s a weird little unit. Looks almost identical to a nano, but is your plain-vanilla USB mass storage device - something that Apple could learn from, but they’re in the business of selling players tied to iTunes. It also has a standard USB connector for days transfer and charging - Apple and iRiver please note.
It seems it’s an S1 type player, so can play videos in its own weird format. It also has a voice recorder, which again records in its own special format (likely some hacked version of GSM).
It will be fun playing with it.
Update: Looks like it’s an ATJ-2135 Actions Semiconductor player of some kind. It can record in ADPCM wav (which sox can convert), or its own weird ACT format (which can be converted using this Windows-only program).
as tents
Tuesday, October 16th, 2007Whoa, the Camp Combo rocked Mitzi’s Sister - in fact, they are still rocking it, as I had to head back home.
Nichol brought his enormous Leslie speaker which added to the ‘jazzeh’ sound of the evening. It was worth lugging it down.
Update: Fred Spek was kind enough to let me post the recording online:
Fred Spek’s Camp Combo - Mitzi’s Sister, Toronto - 2007-10-16 (early set).
it’s a beautiful sunny day …
Thursday, April 19th, 2007… And I have no Polyphonic Spree on my player, alas.
Casper and The Cookies - Lee’s Palace, Toronto - 20 February 2007
Sunday, February 25th, 2007Casper and The Cookies - Lee’s Palace, Toronto - 20 February 2007
It was Jason’s birthday …
- Sid from Central Park
- Kiss a Friend
- Barking in the Garden of Ill Repute
- Neo Dada Hey Day
- Sea Fingers
- Kroetenwanderung
- The Optimist’s Credo
- My Heart is in my Head
- Learn How to Disappear
- Hey Mr. Superstar
- Sweet Pea
If you must stream these, here are the playlists: m3u | xspf.
Update: this show is now available on the Internet Archive: Details: Casper and the Cookies Live at Lee’s Palace on 2007-02-20.
spiff with a silent X
Sunday, February 18th, 2007I’ve been playing with XSPF, mostly so I can use the XSPF Web Music Player. There’s a Perl API for working with XSPF (XML::XSPF) which works well, but is extremely short on documentation.
Creating a playlist with XML::XSPF is pretty logical: create a new track object for each new track, then feed an array of these tracks into the playlist object. It took me a couple of hours of fiddling about (and much use of Data::Dumper::Simple, the plain man’s guide to tortuous data structures) to find that out.
The end result is this:
id32xspf - create XSPF playlist to stdout from a list of MP3s with ID3v2 tags.
It’s intended for use on a local directory of MP3s, which will subsequently be uploaded to a website. It uses MP3::Info to do the tag work.
It has some limitations:
- every file must have ID3v2 tags.
- it doesn’t handle file:// locations at all well, as their syntax is system-dependent. You’ll probably have to use the –urlbase option. For example, for Unix systems for local files in the current directory, I find -u file://`pwd`/ works well.
- it doesn’t include track numbers, as I didn’t know that XSPF supported them.
- it doesn’t create track artwork links, as this isn’t included in ID3 data.
One slightly amusing caveat about the XSPF Web Music Player is that it doesn’t understand the rate of some of lame’s more amusing VBR presets. If you feed it files from the voice preset (56kbit, mono, resampled to 32000Hz), the results sound like Pinky & Perky …
iPod Shuffle: meh
Saturday, November 5th, 2005There’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.
King Cutler
Sunday, September 11th, 2005I’m hosting the MP3s of King Cutler, the 1990 radio series featuring Ivor Cutler, Phyllis King, and many others.
Update, May 2008: actually no, I’m not. Jeremy Cutler asked me to remove them.
sad-boy old-skool 8-bit ring tone
Tuesday, April 19th, 2005My phone now rings the Uridium theme, thanks to smashTheTONES.
I really should’ve gone for the quacking bit at the end of Pink Floyd’s Bike. Or something by Neutral Milk Hotel. Or Of Montreal. Man, my GPRS charges are gonna be huge this month.
m4p2mp3 - helper to turn an iTunes protected m4p to an mp3
Saturday, December 18th, 2004m4p2mp3 — 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.
livemp3 - convert those big old audio torrents to something listenable
Tuesday, November 30th, 2004You’ll need Perl, and Config::IniFiles.
Program: livemp3.
A sample ini file so you can see how to set this up: welch_rawlings_shepherds_bush.ini.
At the moment, this just generates output that you’ll need to feed to sh, but it handles renaming, converting and tagging MP3s to my satisfaction.
Update: it doesn’t handle FLAC tags, even though they’d be a good source of metadata. I may look into implementing that some day.
linux allofmp3 downloader
Wednesday, June 16th, 2004I use — and quite like — AllofMP3.com. While it’s good that they don’t require special software to download the songs, clicking and saving each link on a page is a pain.
If you save the download page basket.html, you’ll be able to run the following one-liner to get all the files from it:
tr ' ' '
Update: Well, as you can see, the above code is all munged, but it’s moot since allofmp3 is basically dead and gone. If the service still works, one of the wget tricks in the comments will work as expected.