Back in the day I had got a Frontier Labs Audio player… it was the Nexia predecessor to the nexblack. It really was a pretty good music player. It supported compactflash for storage (no interntal storage.) It used double A batteries and had real buttons. MP3 was the primary audio format – they had promised ogg via a firmware update, but the hardware really just wasn’t up to the task. I used it for several years which is not bad for a $40 or so audio player. Unfortunately it has become flakey in it’s performance sometimes failing to boot up when I switched it on and so when I was given $40 for my birthday I thought it might be time to shop for a replacement.
Tag: mp3
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Morse Mp3 Ringtones
I’ve spent a bit of time over the last week putting some scripting together to build a new website. The site is morseringtones.com and as you might imagine there are morse code mp3 ringtones available there for download. I’ve put together a list of over 9100 names and there are 4 ringtones available for each name. These are played at 4 different speeds in morse code. For the quicker speeds the names are repeated multiple times to make sure you have a better chance to hear them if you’re using them on a cell phone. I’ve put things up to where you can submit ideas for further names if you like. I may be adding prosigns at some point in the near future and at some point may make it possible for people to go ahead and generate custom morse ringtones from a web interface. So if you want a morse code ringtone for your phone step over and take a look.
I’ve also bundled up the whole collection of them for download via lulu.com, more details can be found on the Purchase morse mp3 ringtones colleciton page.
In the future here I may detail some of the scripts that I’ve used to build this site. It’s all built on a linux server ( the generation of 9100 ringtones at 4 different speeds took about 6 hours.) I’m sure the scripts could have been designed differently but was quite proud of putting together the process for making the whole site so that future maintenance is minimal.
Anyway …-.-
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Converting rm to mp3
Recently I’ve run across a realmedia stream that I really want to convert to mp3 (mainly because my portable player can’t read rm files. I’ll talk about capturing rm streams in another post, but this one is going to talk about converting from rm to mp3.
For starters, it’s possible to use mencoder for this as follows:
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The CD is dead….
I’m tempted to say “long live the cd…”, but… EMI’s CEO has declared that the CD is dead. He does point out that you’re not likely to give your Aunt an iTunes download, so “dead” just means “in decline” in this parlance. However, I can’t help but laugh to myself of the notion that I release a cd through lulu of hymns and within the week the CD is declared dead. No, seriously… I haven’t bought a cd in quite a while myself. Mainly because I don’t want to put up with all the DRM restrictions these days. I want to be able to have a simple cd that I can extract to another player IF I WANT. But I want the original CD as a “high quality archived original” in comparison to the mp3 that might be lost when a flash drive or hard drive dies and isn’t quite as high quality.
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Cutting Short, splitting or truncating mp3 files…
from the command line in linux… or generating them from Wavs…. So, I’ve got this CD that I’ve made and is up for sale at lulu.com traditional hymns done as “chimes”. I’ve spent quite a bit of time recording to hard drive, editing and getting the wav files as good as possible and I’ve uploaded them, but I also want to make the individual songs available as mp3 downloads too. AND I want to give a preview, either a low quality mp3 of the whole, or a high quality 30 second clip…. Hmmm… how to do it.
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Zoom H4 recorder becoming reality?
I’ve got to say, I’ve almost wondered if the Zoom H4 was true vaporware the last few days. it’s supposed to be received by various vendors (around October 1st-3rd) and I still haven’t seen ONE first hand review. I’ve seen one music site that has 7 people that have rated it on a scale of 1-10, but no written review – for all I know they could have said “Man that looks cool I bet it will be a 9…” There are several posts from a podcasting expo Friday that mention it though this says it’s the “ONLY field recorder worth getting”. The other is basically a “fluff” article with no real substance other than that the device was demo’ed.
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Peltor RaceTunes AM/FM Stereo radio and hearing protector
For some time I’ve wanted a good pair of noise reducing headphones for “mowing season”. Ideally they’d have am/fm stereo so I could listen to the radio (or something broadcast from my little FM transmitter…) REALLY ideally, they’d have a way I could patch something directly into them. I’ve found such a thing from Amazon.com in the Peltor HRX52A-01347-BD-GV Racetunes AM/FM Radio Headset and Hearing Protector with Audio Jack and Scanner Patch Cord.
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Recording online streams (real / wma) to mp3 format (or ogg) with mplayer
So, I’ve been looking back over my list of “scripts” that are pulling in audio from various news sources online for the onlineradiotv.com site. It’s also got me doing a bit more spanish language listening than I had been. In the car, I usually use an mp3 player (the nexia) with a small FM transmitter to listen. One of the problems is that I only have a very short list of sources that I can actually download an mp3 from. The rest are streams only. Some are mms (Windows media) streams, others are (rtsp) real server streams… yet others are “playlist” style asf, or ram files that point to other files (rm or asx/wma)…
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Converting spaces in filenames to underscores
Linux supports long file names, in some (many?) ways better than windows. However, when I moved over to linux I had tons of files with spaces in the name. This isn’t really a problem usually, but it can be a bit annoying having to enclose the filename in quotes for everything… anyway. Most of these were mp3’s that I had ripped from my collection of cd’s to store on the server. The script I used to automatically play through the music archive had problems dealing with the spaces (and I didn’t want to figure out how to make it work…) so I found another solution….
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Automatically downloading a file mp3 with a bash script
Linux systems give you many possibilities and one of them is good scheduling (cron), another is good scripting capabilities. I’ve done things with linux fairly easily that with Windows would have been next to impossible and required me to download several other things to make it happen. Anyway, I recently saw mention of a linux, bash scripted podcatching client. Basically you tell what podcasts you subscribe to and it downloads them on a schedule. It reminded me of a couple scripts I’ve got running that do similar things, but not from a true rss/podcast feed.