The Linux Advocate

 

by Scott Dowdle
dowdle@icstech.net
ICQ UIN: 15509440

 

Linux Advocate
Column #59
August 27, 1999

LOGIN:

As you can tell from the Spotlight below, I've been busy this week ripping Audio CDs. Let it be known that I own all of the CDs in question and I don't plan on sharing the MP3 files I create with anyone that doesn't also own the CDs in question. Not a whole lot going on this week... I've gotten used to the fact that every week is a busy Linux news week so only a really, really busy news week looks busy these days. Did you follow that? :)

NEWS:

Item #1: Sun buying Microsoft Office competitor - The "competitor" in question is Star Division, a German company that produces StarOffice. StarOffice is an office suite for Linux, Solaris, Windows and OS/2. There is also a Java version that will run on any Java enabled device. While I played around with StarOffice 5.0 some time ago, I found it to be very buggy, basically as bad as a Microsoft application. :) StarOffice 5.1 has been out for some time now but I just haven't gotten ahold of it to give it a try yet. So far as looks go, SO is just as flashy and feature filled as any of the Microsoft products... so I see this purchase by Sun as a big event. Supposedly, Sun isn't going to make a formal announcement until August 31st. You can find the story from C-Net at the following URL: http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,40754,00.html?tag=st.cn.1fd2.newstkr.ne

Item #2: KDE and GNOME developer interviews - Here are a couple of interviews with the dueling GUI/desktop environment makers. In all honesty, as the two projects mature, and they are both quite mature these days, they are working more together for interoperability... which is great. Check out the interviews to find out what's planned for future releases. A few links are included to screenshots which look fantastic. Read:

The Daniel M. Duley (core KDE developer) interview
http://linux.com/interviews/19990818/16/

GNOME man's land
http://www.linuxworld.com/linuxworld/linuxworldtoday/lwt-indepth8.html

Item #3: VMware Review - A virtual machine in Linux to run your Windows programs - I found yet another review of VMware. Check it out if interested: http://www.linuxforum.com/99/08/vmware.html

Item #4: Linux gamesters - Hiawatha Bray of the Boston Globe gets his column back to talking about Linux stuff with a story about all of the games available and coming out for Linux. Sure, it's just a drop in the pan compared to the Windows world but it is getting better all of the time. As one would expect, the majority of the article is about Loki Software. Like games and Linux, read on: http://www.boston.com/technology/latest/18/linux.shtml

Item #5: Borland Linux Developer Survey Results - Borland, or Inprise, or whatever they are going by these days... released the results of a survey they did. Turns out that according to their info, the Linux community really wants a Delphi to be ported to Linux and Borland is going to oblige. Pretty interesting survey so check it out:  http://www.borland.com/linux/survey/

Item #6: Take a Free crash course at Linux University on September 9, 1999 - It appears that SGI and Red Hat have teamed up to create something called "Linux University". Hmmm, interesting concept. Check out an announcement for their upcoming events at the following URL: http://www.sgi.com/events/linuxu/

Item #7: Interview of the XMMS Staff - What program do you use to play MP3s? I use a program named XMMS. XMMS stands for the X MultiMedia System. XMMS is the product formerly known as x11amp... which is basically a clone, look-n-feel wise, of winamp. You can learn more about xmms at www.xmms.org but be sure to check out the interview with the developers at the following URL: http://linuxpower.org/display_item.phtml?id=136

Item #8: John C. Dvorak interviews Nathan Myers of Linux Laptops - Interviews, interviews, interviews... here is yet another one. Mr. Dvorak, not to be confused with the funky keyboard layout that all of my friends are trying to get me to learn (even printed me out a template but I'm not biting yet), conducted an interview with some dude from Linux Laptops. Mr. Myers says, "we get laptops off-the-shelf and install Linux on them, and then configure all the weird hardware that you install on them". That sounds like a worthwhile goal. Since I had a laptop running Linux for over two years, until it died, I'm well familiar with the peculiarities of laptops. Anyone else out there interested in putting Linux on a laptop (RadioDude and Joe M., are you listening?) would do well to check this interview out. Please note, that there are several interviews on the web page and you should scroll down a bit to find the one with Mr. Myers. Click on the following URL to jump right there: http://www.realcomputing.com/archive/archives/RC_trans_ed_080499.htm

Item #9: When will comprehensive clustering for Linux arrive? - LinuxWorld put together a VERY INFORMATIVE piece about Operating Systems and clustering. They explain the differences between parallel computing, clustering as well as other related topics... and where Linux stands in the crowd... and where it needs to go. Great article so go read it if you are interested in clustering at all: http://www.linuxworld.com/linuxworld/lw-1999-08/lw-08-cluster.html

Item #10: Why I hate the Open Source Community - Remember last time how I mentioned in the logout section that I wanted to write an article that sums up my feelings about the commercialization of Linux and the differences between the Free Software Foundation and the whole Open Source ideology? I found an web article that comes pretty darn close to expressing my views. While the title of the article is rather blunt, and I wouldn't say that I "hate" the Open Source Community... the article does a good explaining the situation. The following URL is a must read as far as I'm concerned: http://www.woot.net/

SPOTLIGHT: Krabber, a frontend for the various audio CD ripping utilities

Have I ever mentioned that I'm a HUGE fan of the Artist formerly know as Prince a.k.a. O(+>? Well, I am. Seeing as how a big fad going on lately is MP3 I couldn't help but do a search on freshmeat.net for the various MP3 related programs for Linux. I was delighted to discover that there are a ton of programs to pick from. So far the best frontend for the various tools I've accumulated is a program named Krabber. Krabber is a GUI application designed for the KDE environment that acts as a frontend for:

1) cdparanoia - a free audio CD reader that creates .wav files
2) sox - a free multi-purpose sound conversion utility
3) mpg123 - a free text/console based mp3 player/decoder)
4) 8hz-mp3 - a free mp3 encoder
5) bladeenc - a free mp3 encoder
6) l3enc - a commercial mp3 encoder
7) mp3enc - a commercial mp3 encoder

When Krabber is run for the first time, it checks your system for what combination of software you have installed. I use cdparanoia and bladeenc. Krabber is an extremely easy to use program with a relatively well designed GUI interface. It also talks to the various online CD Databases (cddb) to grab the Audio CD information since as artist, title, and song titles. Krabber has several configurable options, such as how many tracks to encode at a time (1 - 6), etc. I've run three copies of Krabber at the same time, encoding upto 13 MP3s at the same time and it performed flawlessly.

Speed: I've started converting my entire O(+> CD collection (well over 35 CDs) about a week ago and am about 2/3rds done with it. I haven't been running the computer 24 hours a day though. This leads into the question about speed. How long does the complete process converting an audio CD into MP3s take? Depends on the speed of your machine and the length of the CD. If I had to guess, I'd say that it takes about 2 to 4 hours per CD... even if I am using my computer for other stuff, such as IRCing, ICQing, web browsing, etc. To be sure, when I had 13 encodings going at the same time, I could noticed a big impact on the speed of my machine when I was using it for other things... mainly because I have the priority for encoding set to the highest value... but my machine was still usable. Do THAT in the Windows World.

Quality: Now what about quality? As the screenshots wills how, I've been encoding 44,100 Hz, 128,000 bps in stereo and my ears can't detect a difference between the original CD and the MP3. I did try lower encoding settings but did notice a big difference in quality. Luckily, all of these parameters adjustable. There are even higher quality settings than the ones I'm using, but I don't think I would notice a difference other than the disk space used.

Size: Speaking of disk space, I noticed that my CD to MP3 conversion process takes anywhere from 31MB for the shortest CD, to 70MB for the longest CD for the finished product. The conversion process first reads in the raw audio data and converts it into a .wav file which it dumps to disk as a temporary file. Then the .wav file is converted into MP3. As one would expect, the temporary files are huge. Just how huge? Well, one CD I have is a single track of approx. 46 minutes. The temporary .wav file created for that CD was around 750MB in size. Be warned that you will need a LOT of disk space to create and store MP3 files. It is that way no matter what conversion software you use. The single track CD turned out being approx. 42MB in size. It would probably been half that if I had chosen mono rather than stereo but I wanted high quality sound.

Using the software: As you can see from the screenshot of the main screen, the four buttons on the bottom right-hand side lay out the process very logically.



All you have to do is:

1) Choose Music - Put an audio CD in the CD-ROM drive and select which tracks on the CD you want to work with. I just select all.

2) Choose Dir - What directory do you want the working files and end product files stored in?

3) Name Files - What do you want to name the files you create? I have Krabber setup to use the CDDB so it automatically creates a directory named after the CD Title and names each track the name of the song. It's extremely easy if one goes that route.

4) Run - Starts the whole process rolling. Krabber automatically spawns the various backend programs to read the CD, dump it to .wav, and then encode the .wav file to .mp3... and it provides a graphical progression window so you know where it is in the process and what is going on.

After you have been through it one time, you're a pro. In fact, Krabber remembers what directory you want to use and what filenames you want to use if you are using the CDDB (and why wouldn't you?)... so it's really a matter of just clicking on 1, selecting the tracks with the mouse and clicking on 4. It takes about 10 to go from inserting the CD to getting the work started.

The CDDB feature really makes Krabber a joy to use because it not only automatically names files and directories, it also embeds the information into the MP3 tags used by the decoders at playback time. Krabber is also highly configurable such that you have a nice GUI frontend to various parameters of the backend programs. The CDDB features also have some options.

Summary: While one could use the various text based backend programs from the command-line, where Krabber shines is in the fact that it greatly simplifies the entire process and automates it in a very user friendly way. Krabber adds the CDDB features. All of the programs involved in this process deserve the credit but without Krabber, the entire process would be much less enjoyable. Functionally, I can't think of any significant ways that Krabber could be improved... but there are always those eye candy features, playback features, and what-not that could keep the author (krabber@gmx.de) busy for years. :)

Where to get it?

To get a complete list of mp3 related programs for Linux, go to http://freshmeat.net and search for "mp3".

Krabber homepage: http://krabber.automatix.de/

bladeenc homepage: http://home8.swipnet.se/~w-82625/

cdda paranoia homepage: http://www.xiph.org/paranoia/


LOGOUT:

I hope you enjoyed this installment. Please tell a friend about this column and get me more readers, ok?!? :) As always, thanks for reading!

Scott Dowdle

 

 

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