Nozell, rhymes with Oh Hell

A while back some radio station website or somewhere had a video in WMV of KT Tunstall performing Black Horse and the Cherry Tree and I wanted the music for a plane ride today.

Usually I’d use vsound, I’ve been able do save the audio track of a video in realplayer, but for some reason it wasn’t working for gxine.

Anthony Barker’s blog had the concise steps needed to use mplayer to grab the sound.


mplayer -dumpfile outfile.dat -dumpstream some-video.wmv

rm outfile.dat


The mt-daapd wiki has a nice write up on how to access a remote DAAP (aka iTunes protocol) share by tunneling over SSH.

But the instructions are quite right for an Ubuntu/Edgy desktop. The short, short steps are:

$ ssh homeserver -N -f -L 192.168.118.33:6689:localhost:3689

Instead of using the default 3689 port, pick a high number. First of all it means you won’t have to start the ssh tunnel as root and it won’t confuse banshee which wants to use that port itself. Also you need to specify your local ip address (eg: 192.168.118.33)

$ avahi-publish-address -v -H UbuntuLaptop.local -s "my personal homeserver tunes" _daap._tcp. 6689 &

Avahi is not Apple based code, so there is no mDNSProxyResponderPosix command. The above line is the equivalent to “mDNSProxyResponderPosix 127.0.0.1 squeal “shareName” _daap._tcp. 3689 &”

$ banshee

To debug this, keep an eye on /var/log/mt-daapd.log on the system running mt-daapd.

It appears that Rhythmbox gets a little confused about trying to connect to localhost:6689. Now only banshee dies when closing.

I recently recorded an event using my little Creative MuVo TX FM mp3 player. It created a 22M WAV file of reasonable quality, but lame and audacity had problems converting it to an MP3 file.

The work around is to open the original wav file with audacity and then File->Export as WAV. The resulting wav file is about four times as large, but is in a usable format. From there use your favorite tools to create an OGG or MP3 file.

It appears the problem has to do with the way the MuVo encodes the wav:



VOC001-original.wav: RIFF (little-endian) data, WAVE audio, IMA ADPCM, mono 8000 Hz
VOC001-clean.wav: RIFF (little-endian) data, WAVE audio, Microsoft PCM, 16 bit, mono 8000 Hz