3 Apr 2002 sab39   » (Master)

Advodiary

Maybe having advodiary to use will help me update more frequently... I've wanted to make more timely entries for a while...

"Killer App"

tk: I had read your last diary entry out of context, in that it mentioned wanting a "killer app" but didn't mention Delitalk explicitly. So the suggestion was just a "killer app" in general, not a killer app for Delitalk explicitly. Sorry.

Just for posterity's sake, I'll post the idea here also...

I have a number of cassette tapes that I don't have CD equivalents to, and most of these I simply cannot get CD equivalents to for any amount of money - either because the tapes pre-dated CDs being widely available, the band has split up and CDs are no longer available, or the tape was made by a "friend of a friend of a friend"'s band who I am no longer able to get in touch with (and who probably don't have the resources to make a CD anyway).

But I'd still like to be able to rip and encode these cassettes into digital form (Ogg, of course). It's relatively easy to use sox or equivalent to record the whole of one side of a cassette into a single wav file (using a walkman and a headphone-out-to-line-in cable). But the difficult part is then going through the cassette and identifying where one track starts and the next ends, and encoding those parts into ogg individually (and, of course, ID3 tagging them and auto-creating a playlist in the same way that abcde does for CDs).

My theory is that it should be possible to hook into xmms or something and let the user use xmms's position control to jump to the end of each track, hit a button indicating "track 1 ends and track 2 starts here" and, after repeating that process for all the tracks and typing in the track (and artist for multi-artist tapes) name, generate an ogg file for each track and a playlist.

Bonus points for making it easy to process two sides of a cassette into a single playlist, applying some kind of filter to the sound to eliminate tape hiss, and for coming up with an inventive UI for noting the exact point in the sound where one track ends and another begins. You could also support cases where tracks overlap slightly (eg the band starts playing the next song before the last chord of the previous one has died down) or where there's some dead space between tracks that you want to skip entirely.

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