MP3 on Wimpy's World

Amazon Loves Linux Music Lovers

martin@wimpress.com (Martin Wimpress) — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 22:30:48 +0000

I’ve no idea when Amazon.co.uk launched their MP3 store and I’ve no idea when they released their Linux client for downloading the MP3s you purchased. I don’t care, I just want to say I’m really impressed Amazon have considered us Linux users. Well done Amazon!

Not only that but the MP3s are DRM free, encoded using variable bit rates aiming at an average of 256 kilobits per second (kbps), album cover art is included with each song and the tracks are typically cheaper than iTunes. Well done again.

Doubtless some would want an Open Source client and unencumbered formats such as Ogg and FLAC, but I’m pretty happy with what Amazon have on offer so long as it works. Which it does.

However, the Linux MP3 downloader client is 32-bit only. Not so good, but it can be successfully installed in 64-bit Ubuntu. Here’s how I did in on Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 64-bit.

wget -c http://frozenfox.freehostia.com/cappy/getlibs-all.deb
dpkg -i getlibs-all.deb    
wget "http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/dmusic/help/amd-installer-redirect.html/ref=dm_amd_linux_ubuntu?ie=UTF8&forceos=LINUX&callingPage=%2Fgp%2Fdmusic%2Fhelp%2Famd.html&linux_Ubuntu.x=1" -O amazonmp3.deb
dpkg -i --force-architecture amazonmp3.deb
getlibs /usr/bin/amazonmp3

MP3Gainer - Apply ReplayGain to your entire music library

martin@wimpress.com (Martin Wimpress) — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 15:25:45 +0000

Work has been crazy. We’re moving house. Hence, not much time for geeky stuff recently. I’ve been putting this off for ages, I need to “normalise” the volume of my MP3 music music library. Not all CDs sound equally loud. Whilst different musical moods require that some tracks should sound louder than others, the loudness of a given CD has more to do with the year of issue or the whim of the producer than the intended emotional effect. This difference carries over when you rip the CD to MP3 and random play through my music collection requires constant manual volume adjustment. This has been bugging me for a while now, but when it started to bug my wife I knew it was time to find a solution. My main concerns with applying some sort of audio normalisation were….

My MP3s should not be irretrievably changed into something I end up hating.
The method used should be free of the application used for music playback, given that I play my music on iPod Nano, iPod Shuffle, PSP, PS3, Linux desktops, TomTom 720T FM streaming and in car MP3 player.

After some research mp3gain seems to be the tool for the job which provides an implementation of ReplayGain. However, as of today my entire CD collection is ripped, which is very large, so I needed a way to process my whole music collection in an automated fashion. I found some examples of how to script this, but there are caveats with the solutions I found. Therefore I have created my own script, MP3Gainer, to apply ReplayGain using mp3gain which overcomes these common limitations. MP3Gainer recursively applies ReplayGain to a MP3 music collection of any size and directory depth. ReplayGain can be applied in ’track’ or ‘album’ mode and if ReplayGain has previously been applied it can also be undone. It is important to understand that MP3Gainer ‘album’ mode really is per album, which is what you want. Trust me! This script works on Ubuntu, should work on any other Linux/Unix flavour and possibly Mac OS X providing you have the required tools installed.

MP3Gainer

Mediatomb 0.12 - Streaming audio and video around the house

martin@wimpress.com (Martin Wimpress) — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 16:23:39 +0000

Mediatomb is an open source (GPL) UPnP MediaServer with a nice web user interface, it allows you to stream your digital media through your home network and listen to/watch it on a variety of UPnP compatible devices, such as the PlayStation in my case.

Mediatomb 0.12 is not yet released as final yet but it is certainly stable enough for general use, so I spent the last week migrating from Mediatomb 0.11 to Mediatomb 0.12.

I’ve recently finished ripping my entire CD collection (344 CDs) to MP3 and I am currently ripping my DVD collection (85 done so far) to MP4 with AAC 5.1 audio. The ‘Music’ and ‘Video’ folders in our home directories are mounted via NFS. The Mediatomb server uses the same data sources so any playlists or new music/videos we might import are immediately reflected in Mediatomb.

Our entire CD library is now available at the click of a button, automatically organised by genre, artist and date. We have also created some playlists in .m3u or .pls format.

New to Mediatomb 0.12 is the ability to scrobble your music to Last.fm, this a killer feature for me and why I chose to migrate to 0.12 before it goes final.

I ripped the CDs using SoundJuicer, since I can configure it to use LAME presets. I then used the Music Brainz Picard Tagger to add additional tagging and embed cover art and then applied ReplayGain.

Finally my wife and I use Banshee to manage the music library on our computers, including the creation of playlists and syncing to our iPods.

I am using Handbrake to rip the DVDs to MP4. I’ve created a new PS3 compatible profile which is focused on quality, I’ll post details about that in the future. Mediatomb 0.12 has some experimental features to stream video content from .ISO images of DVDs. I’ve yet to play with that but it sounds very cool. I’ve also created a script which queries IMDB to categorise our film library by genre and create summary information about each film in the library. I’ll be posting more about that soon. I haven’t finalised how we will integrate Photo management with Mediatomb yet, but that is that final piece in the puzzle.

Cheap and Cheerful MP3 Player

martin@wimpress.com (Martin Wimpress) — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 13:00:10 +0000

My six year old MP3 player just isn’t up to the job anymore and I have been looking for an alternative, on and off, over that last few weeks. Ideally I would have liked a portable music player that supported Ogg Vorbis but as my home cinema isn’t Ogg Vorbis compatible I decided to standardize on MP3. No flames please!

I have lots of MMC and SD memory cards that I have collected over the years so decided get a player which could make use of them. I only need a player for use in the gym and while cycling so it doesn’t need to be too fancy, with that in mind I decided to get the Sumvision XT105 MP3 Player which is super cheap and surprisingly good considering the price :-)

Initial impressions are that the manual was obviously translated from Chinese to English using Google, the included headphones are not much cop. That said, once you plug-in a decent set of head phones the sound reproduction is very good and more than good enough for what I want it for and although playlists aren’t supported playback by folder is. That player is very light and very small, so ideal for use in the gym and battery life is around 10-12 hours from a single AAA battery. It is also Linux compatible, although I have been using a USB card reader to populate my memory cards with MP3s as the XT105 is only USB 1.1 and therefore a bit slow. I am off to the gym now with some banging tunes.

Pocket Entertainment

martin@wimpress.com (Martin Wimpress) — Mon, 22 Aug 2005 09:36:08 +0000

I recently discovered ScummVM and have started playing Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders for the first time in years! ScummVM allows you to run certain classic graphical point-and-click adventure games, provided you already have their data files, allowing you to play them on systems for which they were never designed!

So, I decided to organise my old adventure games for use with ScummVM so that I can enjoy them all again, but this has led to a couple of eBay bids to buy some games I am missing. I have used the ScummVM tools to compress as the game data files so I can fit the games on my iPAQ 4150. Life is good. I have been thinking of getting a new solid state Ogg Vorbis compatible portable music player but haven’t found one which completely suits my needs. So, my iPAQ 4150 is now standing in as my portable music player too. This is thanks too the excellent GSPlayer. I have configured my iPAQ 4150 to be a full time entertainment device.

I am off to get myself a decent set of head phones today, more on that later…