Mp3 | Technology Blog

Add mp3 support in Fedora 10

December 25th, 2008

1 comment

One of more frustrating aspects of some modern Linux distributions is that they do not ship with mp3 support rolled in. This is, by design, done because of licensing issues. And granted using the ogg format is a much better solution in the end (as well as a much better sounding format) but for those of us who have massive amounts of mp3 files already located on multiple hard drives converting to ogg format would be a very time consuming option. To that end it is nice to be able to have mp3 support native on your machine.

Fortunately that is not difficult. And even more fotunate, here are the instructions.

The first thing you need to is close out all applications that might want to make use of an mp3 file. This could include Ryhthmbox, Amarok, Banshee, or xmms. Now open a terminal window because you are going to be issuing some commands in a moment. Once the terminal window is open you will first need to su to root. With root privileges it is time to get down to business.

The first set of commands to run will install the necessary repositories for yum to use. First issue:

rpm -ivh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm

Once that command completes issue:

Advanced MP3 Tag Remover

December 23rd, 2008

No comments

We covered ID3 Tag Remover yesterday which can be used to remove ID3v1 and ID3v2 tags from mp3 files. The advanced mp3 tag remover TidyMP3 goes a step further by removing all data except valid mp3 audiodata-frames. This means that it will clear ID3v1, ID3v2, images, lyrics and everything else from audio files. The tiny 23 Kilobyte command line tool removed those information not only at the beginning or end of a audio file but also the middle which is typically the case if a mp3 audio file contains multiple songs.

You need to open a command line or write a batch file to use TidyMP3. Entering tidymp3 without parameters will display a help file with instructions on how to use the software. The basic command looks like this: tidymp3 [path] [options]. To clean all mp3 in c:\mp3 you would simply issue the command tidymp3 c:\mp3. Important switches are /b for creating a backup and /s for including subfolders.

Here is the complete list of command line parameters:

Play Random MP3 Albums In Winamp

November 26th, 2008

No comments

RandoMP3 is a lightweight software program for Winamp that offers two interesting features. The first feature called Audition will randomly select a MP3 album from the music collection and start playing it in Winamp. The program provides the means to move or delete the folder as well which makes it an ideal application for testing new mp3 albums before making them part of the music collection.

The user has to pick a root folder of the mp3 collection at start of the application. That root folder remains as long as it is not changed in the options to another folder. RandoMP3 can be closed after Winamp starts playing the mp3 album.

The root folder has to be rescanned when new mp3 albums have been copied into it. The second application is Charger which can fill a removable device with a specific amount of Megabytes of music. Alternatively it can fill the device until it reports to be full. This program is only directly available in the program folder that RandoMP3 gets installed into.

Media Converter

August 18th, 2008

No comments

Online media converters have several advantages over their software counterparts: They do not bog down the system and do not require software to be installed on the local computer. They are usually also easily accessible and convert media rapidly due to servers in the background that are used for the process.

One of the best, or at least one with lots of options to choose from, is Media Converter. The music and video converter supports a wide range of file types like flv, avi, mp3 or pdf that can be uploaded and converted online. That’s only part of their service though. Instead of uploading files to Media Converter to convert them online it is possible to point the service to a supported website and convert the media files found on that site directly.

This has the advantage that the source file does not have to be downloaded or uploaded. Only the final product has to be downloaded to the local computer. The media can be converted in the process. Pointing Media Converter to a Youtube video makes it possible to convert the video to mp3, ogg or one of the supported video formats before downloading the converted product.

Download Music from eSnips

August 18th, 2008

No comments

The file hosting website eSnips provides access to various communities that have been created for users with the same interests. You find communities about art and fun but also music. The music community is divided into communities for different music genres like rock, metal or rap.

Each music community offers a large amount of music tracks that can be played online in an embedded player. Some music tracks can be downloaded directly because the user who uploaded the track allowed that option. Other songs on the other hand can only be played in the embedded player.

There are however a few options to download those songs from eSnips as well. The first software that I try out for any kind of streaming service is Orbit Downloader and it’s grab link grabber.

Winamp Auto Tagger

August 3rd, 2008

No comments

Winamp has been one of the applications in the past that belonged to a set of software programs that I installed automatically after setting up a new operating system. This has changed in the last two years because I did switch from Winamp to XMPlay which is only using half of the resources that Winamp Lite is using when playing music. (4 MB vs. 10 MB vs. 17MB of memory and 4 MB vs 6 MB vs 10MB of virtual memory)

Stefan (German blog) however discovered a very nice feature of Winamp that I also did not know about. It’s not the uber-feature that would drive me back to Winamp but it’s very handy. I’m talking about the Winamp Auto Tagger which can automatically tag selected music tracks by looking them up in Gracenote music database.

Some notes about the process: Winamp Lite users seem to only be able to tag one music track at a time which could mean lots of work if you want to tag many tracks. Just right-click a track and select View File Info from the menu. That opens a new window that is displaying the tags of the selected mp3 track and the Auto-Tag button at the lower right corner.