Voder-Vocoder

I propose that Jimi Hendrix's “1983…” be adopted as a transhumanist anthem.

What music have I bought recently? First off, I’ve bought some older albums to fill in gaps in my collection:

• Burn Out At The Hydrogen Bar / Chemlab
• Life In The So-Called Space Age / God Lives Underwater
• Extraordinary Machine / Fiona Apple
• Journeyman / Eric Clapton
• Imagine / John Lennon

And then there was the great Memphis Music Project from this spring:

• 38 Golden Classics / Carl Perkins
• Greatest Hits / Al Green
• Elvis 30 #1 Hits / Elvis Presley
• The Very Best Of Booker T. & The MG’s / Booker T. & The MG’s
• Live At The Apollo / B.B. King

I wanted to access my desktop's music library from my living room and play it through the amplifier and speakers there. So I grabbed my netbook, and after fumbling around with NFS for too long, I just tried:

yum install sshfs

(It's a OLPC XO-1, so it's Redhat-based.) And then wrote a little script:

#!/bin/sh
## ~/bin/mount-music
mkdir -p "${HOME}/music"
sshfs hal@sloop:/d/music "${HOME}/music"

I installed mpg123-alsa (by the simple expedient of copying the executable) and wrote a little script to run it.

#!/bin/sh
test -f "${HOME}/music/index.txt" || \
    sshfs hal@sloop:/d/music "${HOME}/music"
cd "${HOME}/music"
exec mpg123-alsa --control --long-tag \
    --shuffle --list index.txt

And index.txt is a file created with the find command on the server:

#!/bin/sh
# run this script to refresh the index file.
cd $HOME/music
find . -type f -a -name '*.mp3' > index.txt

Back on the CD-ripping project. For popular music, the album titles and artists names are easy and the online databases almost always give me the right answer. But for classical music, there are always discrepancies. So I always change the artist field to be Composer, Performers.

After ripping a few CDs with Sound Juicer, I then run mp3gain (sudo apt-get install --yes mp3gain) on the album.

#!/bin/sh
## ~/bin/mp3gain-a-directory
## Written 2009 Hal Canary, #DTPD#
renice 10 $$ > /dev/null
for dir in "$@" ; do
  if [ ! -d "${dir}" ] ; then
    echo "'${dir}' is not a directory" >&2
  else
    if ( /bin/ls "${dir}/"*.mp3 > /dev/null 2>&1 ) ; then
      /usr/bin/mp3gain -k -a "${dir}/"*.mp3
    else
      echo "'${dir}' has no .mp3 files in it." >&2
    fi
  fi
done

That little script takes a list of directories as arguments, treats all of the mp3 files in a directory as an album and applies the same gain (-a) to each mp3 file in the directory. The -k tells it “of course I don’t want to clip the sound; don’t ask me every time.” Since this operation is processor- and I/O-intensive, the renice is always appreciated.

Or, if I want to all of the directories at once, I can run this command:

find "${HOME}/Music/CDs" -type d -exec mp3gain-a-directory "{}" \;

mp3gain is nice in that it notices that it’s already modified a mp3 and won’t waste time on it again.

Since id3lib is incompatable with version 2.4 id3 tags produced by Sound Juicer, you need to use gstreamer and id3mux to grab the tag info to–for example–renormalize your filenames. Tags can themselves be edited in Rhythmbox.

#!/bin/sh
#~/bin/id3v24-info.sh
#DTPD
for file in "$@" ; do
  TMP=`/bin/tempfile`
  echo "$file"
  gst-launch-0.10 filesrc location=/proc/self/fd/0 \
    ! id3demux ! fakesink -t \
    < "${file}" > "$TMP" 2> /dev/null
  for tag in 'title' 'artist' 'album' 'genre' \
      'track count' 'track number' 'disc number' \
      'artist sortname' ; do
    grep "${tag}:" "$TMP" | \
      awk -F "${tag}: " "{ print \"  ${tag} = \" \$2 }"
  done
  rm "$TMP"
done

So my workflow is:

1. Rip a stack of CDs in Sound Juicer.
2. Notice that the tags aren’t right or don’t fit with the other tags in the collection
3. Edit tags in rhythmbox
4. Run a script to renormalize the filename.

I’m fooling around with a guitar and wanted to take notes on a blank page of guitar chord charts, so I post-scripted this one: pdf file.

%!
%% Written 2009 Hal Canary
%% Dedicated to the Public Domain
/Times-Roman findfont
14 scalefont setfont
/inch {72 mul} def
/tabu {
  newpath
  moveto
  90 0 rlineto   0 115 rlineto
  -90 0 rlineto  0 -115 rlineto
  0 23 rmoveto   90 0 rlineto
  0 23 rmoveto   -90 0 rlineto
  0 23 rmoveto   90 0 rlineto
  0 23 rmoveto   -90 0 rlineto
  18 23 rmoveto  0 -115 rlineto
  18 0 rmoveto   0 115 rlineto
  18 0 rmoveto   0 -115 rlineto
  18 0 rmoveto   0 115 rlineto
  -76 3 rmoveto  (E) show
  9 0 rmoveto    (A) show
  8 0 rmoveto    (D) show
  8 0 rmoveto    (G) show
  8 0 rmoveto    (B) show
  8 0 rmoveto    (E) show
  closepath
  stroke
} def
/trow {
  inch dup dup dup
  2.5 inch exch tabu
  0.5 inch exch tabu
  4.5 inch exch tabu
  6.5 inch exch tabu
} def
1 trow
3.5 trow
6 trow
8.5 trow
showpage

I am not the first to notice this; I’m just putting the evidence out there you you to consider.

John Williams – Empire – End credits – 345 seconds in.

Claude Debussy – Nocturnes – Sirènes – 62 seconds in.

Someone with free time on their hands should make me a mix tape. I havn’t gotten one of those in a while.

Of course a cd full of mp3s would be even better.

Well, I just put together the _NIN Mother’s Day Mix CD_. I hope Mom likes it.

When you listen to the soundtrack to Star Wars, do you hear all the music that John Williams stole from, or the other way around?

I made my Mom a Radiohead mix CD over Christmas. She loves it. She likens it to modern art. Dad, of course, can’t stand it.

listen
and
listen