Muahahaha! Geek Girl rides again! I had a file that I wanted to be an MP3, but it was in that stupid (and entirely unnecessary, since there is no advantage to it) Monkey’s Audio APE format. Linux has no problem exporting a sane (and standard) format like FLAC to MP3, but does not support APE without some work. I went looking for a way to at least convert it to FLAC, and discovered that it involved not inconsiderable use of the CLI, including installing some things from source. CLI doesn’t bother me, but installing from source has never been in my top ten favourite pastimes. At that point in time, I could have just given the file to P and had him hunt down some little Windows freeware app to re-encode it to something useful, but I thought, “No, goddammit, the harder they’re going to make it, the more determined I am to do it.” First, I enabled APE plugin support for both Beep and XMMS (just because I could and it’s cool to watch software compile), then I hunted down a script to convert to FLAC. Some of my paths were different, so I had to edit the script, and I had to give it executable permission, but it wasn’t too long before I had my FLAC file. A quick run through Audacity and I had my hard-won MP3. The file itself wasn’t so important; the important bit was that Geek Girl does not fear the CLI and can compile with the best of ’em…especially if the task at in question is something that Windows users get handed to them on a silver platter.
March 17th, 2007 at 7:36 pm
Far be it from me to throw water on your geek girl flame, but what aould have happened if you’d burned the file to a CD and re-ripped it?
March 18th, 2007 at 8:38 am
Nothing, because in order to burn it to CD as anything but an APE file (i.e. the data exactly as it was, not playable on a home/car CD player), I’d have to have burning software that recognised it and was able to decompress it to WAV, but GnomeBaker does not. There are Windows apps that can decompress APE (Nero Burning ROM can’t) as long as the codec is installed (you need that to play the damned things), but in order for any Linux app to be able to do anything useful with it, it has to recognise the file type (my system did–Banshee and VLC wanted very much to play it for me) and have the codec (which it didn’t). When I installed the plugins for Beep and XMMS, I first had to install MAC (Monkey’s Audio Codec), then compile the plugins against the headers from the dev packages for both players. The plugins tell the media player, “Use this codec”, but if the codec isn’t installed first, the plugins won’t even compile because they choke at, “Use what codec? I can’t seem to find it.” GnomeBaker can automagically make audio CDs from WAV, FLAC, OGG and MP3 (after MP3 support is enabled), but APE files don’t even show up on the list of files when you’re creating an audio CD because it doesn’t know what they are. The system knew it was a sound file–it showed a sound file icon and offered Banshee as an option–but until I installed the codec, it couldn’t do anything with it.
That’s my problem with Monkey’s Audio–it’s free (as in beer), but offered only for Windows, it’s not open source (free as in speech), so Joe Linux Nerd can’t readily port it, and it’s unnecessary because FLAC is already lossless, and already much more popular. Enabling FLAC support was simple; I didn’t have to hunt down or compile anything because it’s popular, an assortment of tools are readily available for Windows, Mac and Linux, and everything I needed was right there in Synaptic. Pointy-clicky. If the file had been FLAC, making it into an MP3 would have been as simple as opening it in Audacity, clicking “File > Export to MP3”, and burning to an audio CD would’ve meant nothing more complicated than telling GnomeBaker to make an audio CD, then dragging and dropping the file, and clicking “Burn”.
March 18th, 2007 at 11:01 am
Windows-only formats: like being racist but with computers. I’m seeing “Windows only” drinking fountains.
March 19th, 2007 at 11:53 am
Well, kind of, except that one cannot choose one’s race, but one can choose one’s OS. Both of us could just give up, buy Windows and “go with the flow”, but there are too many already doing that, so those of us more intrepid souls need to be different because if we aren’t, MS will have more than a “functional monopoly”; they’ll have a real one. I have nothing against those who choose to use MS, but I have a big problem when people don’t know that they have a choice, or “choice” is made so difficult for them that it isn’t really a choice at all. As long as there are other, actually viable options for desktop OSes, then MS can’t afford to sit on its arse and keep churning out the same old worthless shite. Look what happened with Firefox, for instance. IE had been a steaming pile of dog crap since its inception, but as FF gained popularity and people began to realise that they did NOT have to accept the crappy default, MS came up with IE7. It’s still IE, so it’s still dog crap, but it’s a smaller pile, and not still steaming. As Mac and Linux gain desktop marketshare (they’re doing it by leaps and bounds already), MS will have to do the same with Windows. Vista is pretty good, but that’s by MS standards, not by real-world standards, and they did say that this would be the last of their monolithic operating system line. I don’t know whether that means they’re going with a “install the base, pay for anything else you need” model, and I don’t care. The real problems with Windows are running as Admin by default, the fact that everything important is dumped into “C:\Windows” (or one of its subdirectories), and that godforsaken system registry. It’s that way because Windows was never designed to be used by more than one person on one standalone desktop with no network connectivity. Network capabilities were sort of stuck on afterwards with plastic ties and duct tape. Based upon UNIX, both Linux and Mac OSes were built for multiple-user environments and networking from the ground up. That makes them not more secure because (as many Win users would have us believe) “because nobody uses them”, but by their very design. Modular > monolithic…that’s just logic. All the UAC and “Cancel/Allow” dialogues in the world isn’t going to change the fact that a system designed for only one standalone user is at a distinct disadvantage in a networked and/or multiple-user world. IMHO, the only solution is for MS to abandon the old model entirely, say to hell with backwards compatibility, and move forward.