Note to Self: Dude, You Don’t Need FLAC; gPodder WTF?
Sure, disk space is cheap. But backing up gigabytes of data is a royal drag. But I’m finding that if the MP3 is of high-enough quality (by this I’m thinking whatever lame --preset extreme
excretes out in hot-and-steamy MP3 bits) I don’t mind. Additionally, I’m tired of fighting with devices that don’t understand OggVorbis or FLAC—like the in-dash media player in my car. That’s just not a battle worth fighting. MP3 has won, another case of a technically inferior standard achieving supremacy via overwhelming network-effects. So, it’s time to sweep the drive and downcode FLAC to MP3.
How to do this? Well, flac -dc FILENAME.flac | lame --preset extreme - -o FILENAME.mp3
is the recipe of the moment. That’s one itch scratched, the next one is more complicated.
gPodder ← ಠ_ಠ
gPodder has really gotten on my bad-side of recently with broken releases. I tried going to Miro which didn’t work well anymore (like it used too) and even iTunes for a bit. No happy. Not at all. I’m a victim of my want of simple-UNIX-like-tools-that-do-just-one-thing-well. When it comes to agents that perform work for you on their own, they’re awful with syndicated media downloads. I’m this far (||) away from considering using cron
and wget
and bailing wire to download the media. Somehow. Take the “Back to Work” podcast for example:
# remove the old copy of the RSS file
rm back2work
# grab the feed
wget http://feeds.feedburner.com/back2work
# gank out the last three episodes and
# download if not seen before.
grep enclosure back2work |head -3| \
cut -d '"' -f 2|xargs wget -nc
At least for now, that’s a version-0 idea of what I want done. Just the files, downloaded. For now, there’s no setup or configuration and I haven’t decided where this is going to happen on the computer yet.
Syndicated 2012-04-09 04:07:39 from sj4̄nz