Friday, December 7, 2007

Gentoo has no newsletters for several weeks

Since the last release of Gentoo Weekly Newsletter (GWN), which is dated October 15, 2007, Gentoo hasn't released any newsletters for nearly two months. It is a strange thing. What happened to Gentoo?

Gentoo Linux is a distribution I like very much. It gives me an opportunity to fully control my system. Wish everything is OK for Gentoo!

Thursday, December 6, 2007

A shell script to convert APE/FLAC to mp3

There is a shell script that can convert a big APE/FLAC file to mp3 files easily. The author of the script is not clear, the script just says: Brian's Archive CUE/FLAC Splitter v0.1, No sanity checking in place. Be careful.

Download the script 'ape2mp3'. The original script has been slightly modified to be used with newer versions of the related software.

Use of the script is very simple (of course you need both the CUE file and the APE/FLAC file):
# ape2mp3 album.cue album.ape
It requires several packages installed on your system. For Fedora, some packages can be found at freshrpms.net. You may first install freshrpms-release, then use 'yum' to install them.

1. mac - Monkey's Audio Codec (MAC) utility and library
# yum install mac
2. lame - LAME Ain't an MP3 Encoder... but it's the best of all
# yum install lame
3. shorten - Low complexity and fast waveform coder
# rpm -ivh shorten-3.6.0-1.2.i386.rpm
(src: shorten-3.6.0-1.2.src.rpm)
4. shntool - Multi-purpose WAVE data processing and reporting utility
# rpm -ivh shntool-3.0.6-1.i386.rpm
(src: shntool-3.0.6-1.src.rpm)
5. cuetools - Utilities to works with cue and TOC files
# rpm -ivh cuetools-1.3.1-2.i386.rpm
(src: cuetools-1.3.1-2.src.rpm)