mp3 and Ogg on Linux

From: Bill Chapman (nowhere_at_nospam.net)
Date: 10/09/04 

Date: Sat, 09 Oct 2004 20:07:55 GMT

I've been playing with audio. It's very time consuming. A lot of the
stuff I try doesn't work, or doesn't have good documentation, or turns
out not to have the features I am looking for.

I'm on SuSE linux 9.0, KDE3.

I've got hundreds of LP's and audiocassetes and CD's that I want to
covert to mp3's or probably Ogg Vorbis files. I spent last weekend
fooling around with various software to manipulate mp3's. A lot of the
stuff doesn't work very well, it was all very time consuming. I see
references out there to a HUGE amount of software to be evaluated, and
I'm hoping someone can point me to a web page that recommends which of
it actually works and what features it has. I figure some linux-based
audiophiles probably has home pages where they talk about how they have
their systems set up, and I would love to find such pages.

- I need to buy a portable mp3 / Ogg player, I'm hoping to do that this
weekend. I want to get one of the ones you can take in your car and it
will broadcast an FM signal that your car stereo can pick up. Any
recommendations would be appreciated.

I've been using Audacity to record LP's and tapes to mp3's from my
stereo and then edit them down into separate tracks and compress these
tracks into mp3 files. It's a very nice piece of work, there is
extensive online help, editing the waveforms goes very nicely. I
haven't tried making any Ogg files yet, but it says it can. There are a
few features I would like that I haven't found

- I would like to be able to start recording an album before I go to
work, and leave it recording, and have the recording shut itself off
when it reaches silence. Right now, just leaving it recording all day
at about 10MBytes / minute will totally use up all the memory I've got.
  I haven't been able to find such a feature in the online
documentation, but it might exist.

- I would like to be able to take an album that has been recorded into a
ram image, and separate it into tracks based on the silences between
songs, and encode those tracks into mp3 / Ogg files. There might be a
plugin that does this (there are hundreds of plugins, with no online
documentation for them), but I haven't found it.

- I would be nice if this whole process could go straight from the audio
from my stereo directly to disk, but that may be too much to ask.

I've only been experimenting with Ogg files so far, but will probably go
to doing Ogg Vorbis files. Any recommendations on the best Ogg encoder
and players would be appreciated.

--------------------------------------------------------------

For the benefit of others, here is what I have found so far, after a
weekend of puttering around on my SuSE linux 9.0 KDE3 trying to
manipulate mp3s:

- mixing:
   Kmix: is fine. It will do.
- mp3 encoding:
   lame: doesn't come with SuSE for patent/legal reasons. You need to
         get source from sourceforge and build and install it. It has
         features documented to set the song title, artist, album, etc
         of the song being encoded, but they don't seem to work.
   bladeenc: doesn't come with SuSE for patent/legal reasons. I was
         able to download and build it from somewhere, but it is several
         times slower than lame.
- CD ripping:
   grip: to rip to mp3s, you need to set up mp3 encoding (above) before
         this will work. Once that is done, this works fine.
             One thing that is annoying about grip is it rips to .wav
         files, then translates the .wav files to mp3s. It would be
         better to have a ripper that would go straight from the CD to
         the mp3s without an intermediate .wav file, seems that would
         be faster.
             grip has a lot of buttons for online help, none of which
         work. I found a web page, but not a manual, on the web.
             grip makes a very nice CD player, displaying the names of
         all the songs.
- Audio Recording / Editing
   audacity: nice piece of work. Lots of online help that works, but no
         documentation for the hundreds of plugins. Easy to edit the
         audio image in RAM once you have recorded it, and save pieces
         of it into files on disk. Use lame to encode mp3s, so the
         title, artist, etc, info doesn't come out in the mp3s.
   krecord: no advantages over audacity.
- Audio playback
   Juk - usually works, but crashes sometimes.
   xmms - works

   There is a BIG problem with both Juk and xmms in that while I am
   playing back, sometimes the music gets a little distorted. If I back
   up and play the passage over again, it comes out OK, so I know that
   it's not that the mp3 file is bad, something is going wrong during
   playback. This does not seem to depend on how loaded my cpu or disk
   are.

   ALSAplayer - pretty good. I've only played it a little bit, but it
   doesn't seem to be distorting like the other two.
- CD playback
   - kscd - works OK, plays back very quietly. Doesn't display song
            titles.
   - xmcd - doesn't work. Just says there is 'no disk' whether one is
            loaded or not.
   - grip - see above. Normally meant for ripping CD's, but can play
            them too. Recommended.

----------------------------------------------------------------
Bill Chapman
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