The tools I am talking about are mpg123 and mpg321. Although mpg321 claims to be a drop-in replacement for mpg123, I still prefer to use both tools (the former for converting .mp3 to .wav and the latter for converting .mp3 to .ogg). And in this article you will see how simple it is (using the command line) to convert these file types.

Installation

Since we will be using the command line for the conversion, we’ll install the tools from the command line. The distribution I am using for example is based on the recent, stable Debian. You will not need to add any repositories to your /etc/apt/sources.list file, because all of the tools are found on the standard repositories. To install these tools, follow these steps:

1. Open up a terminal window.
2. If needed, su to root (if you use sudo in place of root, just add sudo to the beginning of the installation commands below).
3. Issue the command apt-get install mpg123 mpg321 vorbis-tools

That’s it. Now let’s take a look at how the tools are used.

Convert .mp3 to .wav

The first conversion is to .wav. Why use .wav? First and foremost, the .wav file is not compressed and is lossless, so the sound is better. The only downfall is that the files are much bigger. So, if you have a particular file and you want to retain as much quality as you can, .wav is the format to use. Of course, in this instance we are converting a lossy file type (.mp3) so there is already diminished sound quality. But why diminish it further? To make this conversion, the command looks like this:

mpg123 -w output_file.wav input_file.mp3

Where output_file is the name of the .wav file that will be converted from the mp3 file named input_file. So let’s say you want to convert the file Rush_Tom_Sawyer.mp3 to .wav. That command would look like:

mpg123 -w Rush_Tom_Sawyer.wav Rush_Tom_Sawyer.mp3

Convert .mp3 to .ogg

The .ogg format is the open source equivalent to .mp3 and is supported by many players. The .ogg format is a good format to use when creating “mix cd’s” (I’m old, I still want to say “mix tapes”), because you can fit more files per CD than if you were using the .wav format. But to convert the .mp3 to .ogg the command looks like:

mpg321 Input_File.mp3 -w raw && oggenc raw -o Output_file.ogg

Let’s examine the same file we converted to .wav above. The command to convert to .ogg from .mp3 would look like:

mpg321 Rush_Tom_Sawyer.mp3 -w raw && oggenc raw -o Rush_Tom_Sawyer.ogg

Easy right?

Final thoughts

Now you can get crafty and create batch scripts that will allow you to do batch conversions. Naturally many will think “Why would I go through that, when I can just download a handy GUI tool like Soundconverter to do the job? Why? Because it’s always smart to have the command line option around. One day you might need it.

Easy Tag is an open source application available for Linux and Windows that allows you edit tags for the following file types:

• MP3
• MP2
• MP4/AAC
• FLAC
• Ogg Vorbis
• MusePack
• Monkey’s Audio
• WavPack

And what’s best about Easy Tag is that you most likely won’t have to manually edit all of those files.

Simple installation

You will find Easy Tag in your distribution repository, so you can fire up Synaptic, search for “easytag” (no quotes), select the package for installation, and click Apply to install.  Or, if you prefer command line, you could install with a command like yum install easytag. Once installed, you will find Easy Tag in your Audio (or Sound and Video) menu.

How Easy Tag works for you

Figure 1

There are two painless ways Easy Tag can be used: Automatic tag recognition and CDDB search. Althought it might be tempting to use the automatic tag recognition, the best, and most reliable method is using the CDDB choice. So when you fire up Easy Tag (and after it searches through your music library) you will see that it lists all of your music in the middle pane (see Figure 1).  What you see, in Figure 1, is a section of files with incorrect tags. You know a file has an incorrect tag if it is listed in red. Now let’s fix those tracks.

The best way to do this is to select an entire

Figure 2

album of tracks. Although it looks like all of the tracks for the Rush album Signals are correct, there is something amiss. So I will highlight all of those tracks and right click the selections. From the right click menu select CDDB search. When the new window opens (see Figure 2) select the correct listing and then click Apply. It will seem as if nothing has happened, but something has. Click the Close button. Now you have to save the changes. Go the the File menu and select Save. A small window will appear for each change you are about to make (See figure 2). Click Yes for each change (unless you check the “Repeat action…” checkbox).

When the save is complete you can go back to the track listings and see that those files are no longer listed in red. Their tags are now correct.

Figure 3

If your CDDB search comes up with no results, then you might have to reconfigure the server Easy Tag uses. To do this to go Settings > Preferences and then click the CD Database tag (see Figure 3).  You can change the server settings for automatic and manual searches. When I changed mine to freedb.freedb.org, all of my troubles went away.

Final thoughts

Use Easy Tag to clean up your music collection tags. Not only does this make a tedious task simpler, it keeps your music collection clean so that music players can easily read and display the tags for your music files.

In this tutorial I will first introduce you to Aqualung and then I will show you how this unique tool can help to organize your music.

Features

Aqualung offers a number of unique features:

• Audio CDs can be played back and ripped with on-the-fly conversion to WAV, FLAC, or OGG, or MP3.
• Subscribing to RSS and Atom audio podcasts is supported (with automatic download.)
• Almost all sample-based, uncompressed formats (e.g. WAV, AIFF, AU etc.) are supported.
• OSS, ALSA, JACK, PulseAudio, sndio driver support.
• Exporting to external formats from Playlist and Music Store.
• Gap-free playback.
• Convert sample rates.
• Tabbed playlists.
• Comment support.
• Control running instance from command line.
• RVA (relative volume adjustment) control.

As you can see, there are features that make Aqualung more in line with serious listeners than your average player. But even though Aqualung has a bevy of features, don’t expect it to have the interface of, say, a Songbird, or an iTunes. Instead of such a UI, Aqualung keeps everything on the simple side. It’s easy to use, and quick to navigate.

Installation

Aqualung can be found in just about any Linux package management system. You can fire up Synaptic, search for “aqualung” (no quotes), and have the application installed in no time.

Managing your music

Now comes the fun part. Aqualung can do the standard playlist just fine. But what Aqualung also does is Music Stores. A Music store is a database of music you have assigned a title. The philosophy behind the Music Store is that it allows you to have more than one music library from which you can listen to music or create playlists. Think of the Music Stores as Master Playlists. So let’s say you have more then one user that uses one machine. Each user can have a Music Store from which to populate play lists and so on. So how do you create a music store? Simple. Let’s walk through the process.

Music stores

Figure 1

Aqualung works with two windows: The main window and the Music Store window (See Figure 1). If you right click on a blank spot in the Music Store window a menu will appear. From that new menu select Create Empty Store. When you do this, a new window will open where you configure your new store (see Figure 2).

Figure2

The information you need to fill out for your new store is:

• Visible Name: The name you want to give your new store.
• Filename: This store will create an xml file and you have to set the location where this file will be stored.
• Comments: Any comments you wish to add to the store.

Once you have filled out this information, click OK and your store will appear in the Music Store window. Now you have to add music to your new store. To do this right click the store listing and you will notice a number of possibilities. You can:

• Add the store to a playlist.
• Build/Update store from file system.
• Add new artists to store.

and more.  Since there are no files in this music store it might be best to select Build/Update store from file system. When you select this entry a new window will open offering you two choices:

• Directory driven: Follows directory structure. Artists are added on an album basis.
• Independent: Recursive search from the root directory. Artists are added on file basis.

The best choice is Directory Driven. Using this will ensure a better organized store. This, of course, helps to have a fairly well organized file system. If your file system is organized in the iTunes fashion (where all files are randomly named and placed in directories like F00, F01, F02, etc) you might as well go with the second option.

Figure 3

The difference between the two is better understood by looking at the sample shown in Figure 3. In Figure 3 you can see the top portion is a Music Store that was created using the Directory driven choice, whereas the bottom portion was created using the Independent choice.

Now, how do you use this? Simple You can go through any of the music stores and add music to a play list by either double clicking the song or right clicking the song and selecting add to play list.

You can also have multiple play lists open at once. To do this follow these steps:

1. Go to the main window.
2. Right click on an empty spot.
3. Select New Tab.

You now two tabs open where you can have two playlists.

Final thoughts

This tutorial really only scratches the surface of what you can do with Aqualung. In later articles we will deal with some of the other features that help to make this application unique in a world of same ol’ same ol’.

Spotify is a service which allows users to stream many songs online free and legally. The service is ad-supported and currently available in Sweden, Norway, Finland, the UK, France and Spain. The adverts are only a minor annoyance; I find there is about 2 minutes of them per hour of music. A premium service is also available, where adverts can be removed for a cost.

The service requires a desktop client to play the music. Their client is currently only available on OS X and Windows. Using this software, users can search for music, compile playlists and listen to online radio. The music is streamed as an Ogg Vorbis at 160kbps, so it is very high quality! It also scrobbles the music to last.fm.

The advertising is tolerable. Generally, they last about 30-45 seconds and either advertise Spotify Premium or, currently, the Disasters Emergency Committee in the UK. Premium (ad-free) Spotify costs either 99p a day or £10 a month.

I am beginning to reconsider if I still have the need to download music. Most songs are available free on Spotify, with the exception of some of the newest releases on certain labels. My only problem with Spotify is that it isn’t portable, so I can’t use it on my iPod etc.

Spotify has a bigger collection of music than the ‘full tracks’ available on last.fm.

It is currently only invitation only, but I will give the first 4 people to ask an invite each. Just leave a comment asking for one.

The first step is to find an Internet radio station. The Shoutcast directory should provide something for every music taste on the planet. A simple click on Tune In should load the stream in AIMP2 if it is configured to play the playlist files of Internet radio. Since we have to configure one setting in the music player’s option anyway I show you how to make AIMP2 the default player for the playlist files first. Once that is done we are going to configure the options to save Internet radio in a proper format and select a directory on the hard drive.

Pressing [CTRL P] after starting AIMP2 will open the player’s options. Selecting the Associations entry under System will bring up the various compatible file types the player can play. If AIMP2 is your default player you can simple click on the Enable All button to associate all file types with AIMP2. The important file type for Internet radio is .pls which you find at the bottom.

AIMP2 should now start playing the Internet radio whenever you click on a link that leads to an Internet radio playlist. Now head over to the Streaming menu under Player.

You have to pick a folder where the music from the Internet radio station will be saved in. A directory of the data will automatically be added in the root directory. The second option is about the format of the recorded music. The default is wave which takes up lots of space on the hard drive. A better option would be to select mp3 as the format. Either 192 or 256 Kbit should be good choices. Other choices are ogg or flac.

Now that the settings have been made it is time to start the recording. The recording option is only available in the main client and not in the minimal client. You can start the recording by clicking on Radio Cap on the left side of the player. A blinking text indicates that the player is recoding the music.

Users who would like to record more than one station at a time might want to take a look at Streamripper instead.

Currently the formats mp3 and ogg are supported and the applet is finding and playing the music files automatically. All you need is the link to the torrent containing the music and a browser that has Java enabled. It works very well if the torrent has a lot of seeders but you can run into troubles with torrents that have only a few.

The first parts of the file are prioritized during the streaming to make sure that you can listen to the music as soon as possible. I personally think that this is an interesting concept that will surely find some users who will love it. It’s probably great if you want to preview a album or song before you download it.

via torrentfreak and bitlet

I never quite understood why someone would use Winamp to play videos because this functionality was introduced into Winamp when several other great software video players like VLC, Mplayer or BSPlayer were already in existence. I therefor decided to compare the lite version of Winamp 5.5 against my favorite music player XMPlay.

The Winamp executable has a file size of roughly 2.2 Megabytes while XMPlay one of 340 Kilobytes. The XMPlay folder has a size of 1.9 Megabytes after installation while Winamp’s folder one of 6.6 Megabytes. The first noticeable difference can be found if you open both players without a song and take a look at the Windows task manager.

XMPlay uses roughly 550 Kilobytes of memory in idle state while Winamp lite uses 1.37 Megabytes. I decided to load a seven Megabyte mp3 file into both players. XMPlay was using 2.52 Megabytes afterwards while Winamp 5.5 lite was using 3.88 Megabytes. The difference between both players rose from roughly 800 Kilobyte in idle state to 1.3 Megabytes in idle state with a 7 Megabyte file in the playlist.

I pressed the play button in both players and switched back to the task manager. Winamp 5.5 lite was now using 6.24 Megabytes of memory while XMPlay was using 3.84. The difference rose to 2.4 Megabytes.

Last but not least I decided to see how both players would do when playing Internet radio streams. XMplay was using 3.53 Megabytes while playing a 128 Kbit stream while Winamp used 7.66 Megabytes.

The conclusion is that XMPlay has a far better memory management than Winamp. The real important state is of course when playing music files in the music player and this is where XMPlay really excels. This means, if you really want a “lite” player you should switch to XMPlay instead of Winamp 5.5 lite.

Read More:

XMPlay Homepage
Winamp 5.5 beta download

Screamer Radio supports Shoutcast and Icecast Mp3 Streaming as well as WMA and AAC streaming. A big list of supported radio stations is available at the official screamer radio website. The preset tab holds a large list of radio stations which are directly accessible through screamer radio. Just choose a station and Screamer will automatically start the playback. Just hit REC if you want to start recording streams which will then be saved in the default location.

A great feature of Screamer Radio is that you can hit REC even in the middle of a song and it will still be saved completely if it was not the first song of that radio station. Screamer Radio uses a buffering technique to make this possible. Best of all it is free, does not use many system resources and can be run in system tray. The only feature that is missing is the ability to save more than one station at once.

If you do not have a software that supports plugins you could use the excellent freeware Burrn which supports many formats which are: wav, mp3, mpc, ogg, aac, mp4, ape, flac, ofr, wv, tta, m3u, pls and fpl playlists and cue sheets as well as embedded cuesheets for ape, wv and flac files. It reads the tags automatically and adds them to the burning process. Burrrn is really easy to use, it supports drag and drop and direct editing of song title and artist.

You will have to choose a burner the first time it starts. Once this is done the main window opens and you may add new songs to the CD by dragging songs or cue sheets to the main window.  If you want a certain order for your files you have to drag them one at a time. Last but not least it offers a way to adjust the replaygain for all songs before the songs are burned to the audio cd.

Artists are paid using donations, if you like a album you are free to donate using paypal. This is a great new concept, I´d really like to see stats how this way of distributing albums compares to portals like itunes and the like. Do the artists get a better payment for instance ?

You might know the tagged approach, right at the start page you have a list of common tags like rock, ska and metal. Clicking a tag leads to the category page that displays the albums sorted in that category. Every album offers a listen icon that you simply click and it opens in your favorite player. You find the bittorent link on the same page there, if you want to download the full album right away or after listening to the music for some time.

You can click on the album cover which leads to the albums page. You see all songs listed, can listen to every song there, write reviews, spread the album by placing links on your homepage. Some bands offer CD versions of their albums which you can purchase from their website.

What else ? Downloads are available in MP3 (~200 Kbps) and OGG format (~300 Kbps). Last but not least you find recommendations that sound similar to the album you are currently viewing / listening to.

My suggestion ? Support them, it´s a great concept and finally a portal that stands in contrast to all commercial portals.