From shlomif[at]vipe.technion.ac.il Mon May 14 08:03:15 2001 Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 20:00:57 +0300 (IDT) From: Shlomi Fish To: lin-club[at]vipe.technion.ac.il Subject: Some corrections regarding the MultiMedia Lecture Hi! First I'd like to aplogize for embarassing Alon by having to say all those things during the meeting and not going over the slides before the lecture. But I still like them to be permanently available. So here goes: Slide 5 - s/Kerenel/Kernel/ Slide 9 - an mp3 can be converted into a WAV using the "-w" switch of mpg123. It does not appear in the man page but it is mentioned in "--help" listing. It is usally advisable over calling sox with all the arguments, because mpg123 will determine the appropriate paramters for the file. Furthermore, mp3s can be encoded using the Lame encoder, whose homepage is http://www.sulaco.org/mp3/. LAME is GPLed, but in some countries it is still encoumbered by the patents issued regarding the mpeg sound compression. I don't think they apply in Israel, but they exist. Freshmeat can show several other tools for encoding mp3s, but most of them are front-ends for LAME or BladeEnc or both. Slide 11 - 1. another MOD player that is worth mentioning is gmodplay, which is based on the ModPlug engine. There is also ModPlug for Linux, but it is proprietary and thus "Moqtze mehamat hami'us". I don't think gmodplay supports EsounD, though, or at least did not the last time I checked. In any case, ModPlug Player for Windows is an excellent MOD player for "the OS that should not be named", and ModPlug Tracker is a superb MOD editor. I wish its author would create a Linux version of the Tracker too. 2. "A popular consle-based mod tracker is MikMod". There is a great deal of inconsistency in MOD-file terminology but it is generally agreed that a Tracker is an editor for MOD files, while a MOD player is referred to as a "player". Thus s/tracker/player/. Slide 13 - I believe ALSA Player is also worth mentioning: http://www.alsaplayer.org/ It has some interesting features such as variable speed (say times 1.5 the normal, and even negative speed). There are other GUI front-ends for the various sound libraries. FreeAmp comes to mind, but there are many others on Freshmeat. Slide 14 - I believe it is also worth mentioning "arts" which KDE directs as the replacement for EsounD, and "GStreamer" which is the GNOME interface. A hint for the Linux Standard Base Guys: make them have a unified interface for doing such things, or else we won't be able to hear GNOME sounds when using KDE and vice versa. General remark: ALSA - The Advanced Linux Sound Architecture http://www.alsa-project.org/ ALSA aims to be a replacement for the OSS/Free subsystem, which is the current Linux sound subsystem. ALSA supports a large number of cards, and is pretty stable, but it is not part of the mainstream kernel yet. It is backward compatible with OSS/Free, but has some clear advantages like support for more than one card. Since I use Mandrake 7.2, ALSA was installed for me by default as the driver for my soundcard. However, I noticed distruptions when using xmms with EsounD or without it. When I switched to OSS/Free they were solved. :-( Maybe it's because of ALSA's extensive dependence on modules that it was not operational for me. Or maybe the OSS/Free emulation is lacking. But since I don't have more than one soundcard, and since I use EsounD, I don't really have a good incenitive to prefer ALSA. Best regards, Shlomi Fish ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Shlomi Fish shlomif[at]vipe.technion.ac.il Home Page: http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/ Home E-mail: shlomif[at]techie.com A more experienced programmer does not make less bugs. He just realizes what went wrong more quickly.