Some Notes on the Machines

For quite a while ESI has made top-quality hardware. This one:

https://www.esi-audio.com/products/u22xt/

is absolutely stellar, in this writer’s experience. Very compatible with Windows, Mac, and Linux too.

Right here:

http://www.abacus.fm/

Lots of other interesting stations too.

I have trusted this one to work for my sweet wife Lori!

http://coolsoft.altervista.org/en/virtualmidisynth#download

It’s called DroidCam, and it really works, Windows and Linux.

Under Linux you’ll need kernel module compilation capability, headers only for source. If you use the Adobe Flash Player for camera, or any other V4L version 1 application, you’ll want to start it like the below for the Pale Moon web browser:

LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so palemoon

In Windows, some audio drivers provide something called “Stereo Mix” and some don’t; this is what is usually recommended if you want to record everything audio happening at once in Windows. But increasingly this doesn’t exist. There are software replacements which do the job:

http://vb-audio.pagesperso-orange.fr/Voicemeeter/

http://www.virtualaudiostreaming.net/

First, we have the excellent http://www.audacityteam.org. This is a longstanding project, and has by far the most functionality of any cross-platform (Windows, Linux, Mac, others) project of which I’m aware. It can handle as many tracks as CPU and RAM will permit, and has an excellent array of effects, including the ability to remove tones from a complex whole using its Noise Reduction facility.

Additionally, we have a newcomer, http://www.ocenaudio.com.br. This is a wonderful piece of work, and is much easier when trying to do a simple edit on a single audio file. Its UI is a work of art, both visually and in function.

Try this:

http://handbrake.fr

This:

http://www.rogueamoeba.com/airfoil/speakers.php

is amazing. The above are the free ‘receivers’ apps and listings; the same company makes a ‘sender’ app for Windows and Mac which works direct from the OS sound system, extremely low latency.

To convert many formats to MP3, and to extract audio from many video formats to MP3 files, one may use FFMPEG:

ffmpeg -i sourcefile.xyz outputfile.mp3

A bash script to create an mp3 from every file in a folder, is thus:

#!/bin/bash
for sourcefile in *; do 
	ffmpeg -i "${sourcefile}" -ab 192k "${sourcefile}".mp3
done

Notice the “-ab 192k”. By default, ffmpeg seems to transcode to MP3 at 64k, regardless of input; this is not very high quality, whereas 192k does well for general use.

You’ll need the standard utility “sox”, which does conversions. Then, use this line:

for flac in *.flac; do sox -S "${flac}" -r 44100 -b 16 new/"${flac}"; done

in a shell file, having created the directory “new” underneath the existing files. The above will convert all .flac files to 16-bit 44.1 kHz.