Setup:

• codec: lame 3.98.2
• OS: Linux 2.6.29
• CPU: Intel L2300 2x (1500MHz, 2MB)
• Testfile: WAVE (60MB), Tracklength: 5:25

Results:

The results look pretty obvious. It seems that internally –vbr-new is identical with –preset fast and the same is true for –vbr-old and –preset. So in other words, the old scheme –preset isn’t used anymore respectively there is always an equivalent for the old and the new preset style.
I still own old mp3 files where header fields say “aps” for “alt preset standard” or “ape” for “alt preset extreme”. However mp3 files encoded with current versions of lame will always be marked with the modern vbr-new style, which is also an indication that the old presets don’t have exclusive relevance anymore.
Furthermore it can be seen, that the new algorithm user by –vbr-new and –preset fast is significant faster (around 25-30%) with slight losing in compression efficiency.

Of course all this is not representative on a large scale but it gives an idea of differences and ratios of different preset types. But for all that FLAC should always be first choice for audio encoding, since good music doesn’t deserve to get encoded lossy

The most recent spleen is the migration from MP3 to FLAC. That spleen actually emerged during a nasty file system corruption which was caused by the experimental ext4 driver.  As a consequence,  a considerable amount of recently created MP3 files had audible glitches.

While I tried to find all broken music files, I realized that MP3 wasn’t exactly designed to check them for integrity - it’s lossy in every meaning

FLAC is different - it’s lossless in every meaning At least one is able to indicate a broken file as such: FLAC integrates a 16-bit CRC for each frame and a MD5 signature of the unencoded audio data. It’s also open, fast and well supported by almost every player software out there. As disk space is becoming cheaper and cheaper and the transcoding speed (eg. FLAC → OGG) is even faster as the transfer speed of USB 2.0, there are few counter arguments remaining.

How to keep Amarok statistics?

My favorite audio player is Amarok. Besides many other features it tracks which songs you like, when and how often you played them.

During the migration I wouldn’t want to lose those stats. This is where a nice feature comes into play: Amarok File Tracking (AFT). It enables Amarok to identify an audio track, even if it is moved or renamed. Moving/Renaming, isn’t that exactly what we’re doing? Right!

I asked an Amarok developer (Jeff Mitchell) how AFT could be abused leveraged for my needs. He immediately fixed AFT to work with FLAC and gave me migration instructions:

1. Use amarok_afttagger to embed identifiers into your MP3s.
2. Make sure that those files are scanned into Amarok (full rescan), so
   the UIDs in the tags overwrite the ones that were auto-generated before.
3. Use a script to transfer the identifiers into the FLACs.
4. Remove the MP3s from Amarok’s collection, add the FLACs, and do a
   full rescan.

Step 3. might be most difficult.
AFT uses the UFID header in case of a MP3 (ID3) and a Vorbis comment in case of a FLAC.
To transfer the unique identifier from MP3 to FLAC all you need to do is to “copy/paste” that tag.

After you successfully ran step 2. you can dump the UFID of a MP3 file using some ID3 tool like eyeD3:
12 Clarity.mp3 [ 7.96 MB ]
——————————————————————————–
Time: 4:03 MPEG1, Layer III [ ~274 kb/s @ 44100 Hz - Joint stereo ]
——————————————————————————–
ID3 v2.4:
title: Clarity artist: Jimmy Eat World
album: Clarity year: 1999
track: 12/13 genre: Rock (id 17)
Publisher/label: Capitol Records
Unique File ID: [Amarok 2 AFTv1 - amarok.kde.org] 62e164257a0c5c01761ac7740269d31c
Unique File ID: [http://musicbrainz.org] fec93932-51af-4f05-8aa1-3457bbc1e3b4
The identifier (62e164257a0c5c01761ac7740269d31c) can then be inserted into the corresponding FLAC file.

Automation

To automate the transfer of the identifier, I wrote a small python script (using Mutagen).
Given the case, that all files are properly assigned a MusicBrainz trackid (eg. using Picard), it can be used like that:

# cd /music/interpret/mp3-album
# amarok-ufid.py dump
# cp ufid.dump /music/interpret/flac-album
# cd /music/interpret/flac-album
# amarok-ufid.py apply
done!

I just found this nice Unix tool to hide sensible data in your multimedia files like JPEG images: steghide

It attaches the secret in compressed+encrypted form and even adds a checksum

The usage is quite simple:

# steghide embed -cf hidden.jpg -ef secret.txt
# steghide extract -sf hidden.jpg

This is where Iotop comes into play. It is just a python script which evaluates the per-task disk I/O accounting statistics exported by the Linux kernel (2.6.20+).

This is what you need to enable in your kernel configuration:

General setup
[*] Export task/process statistics through netlink (EXPERIMENTAL)
[ ]   Enable per-task delay accounting (EXPERIMENTAL)
[*]   Enable extended accounting over taskstats (EXPERIMENTAL)
[*]     Enable per-task storage I/O accounting (EXPERIMENTAL)

Firefox 3 is finally ready to download (though all servers are at the moment more or less overwhelmed, due to the worldrecord attempt).

Since it’s first release it integrates very well into the various systems because someone at Mozilla (after all) had the look & feel in mind. I think thats a big achievement though I stilled wished a support for the various password managers like the keychain or the kde wallet would have made it into the final release.

To top it all off, the UI gets even more “mac” with Aroonax’s GrApple Theme from takebacktheweb.org. (Which is an awesome domainname by the way )

So folks, have a nice day and light a candle, hoping for people around the world to finally abandon this so called “internet explorer” and get their copy of web-freedom.

word!

It’s definitely worth to check it out: There are 50 commits since 2.6.25.5, many of them backports of bugfixes in 2.6.26-rcx…

Happy compiling

At last I searched for a Java library containing an HTML-parsers and I found TagSoup. This is a SAX-compliant HTML-parser specialized in re-formating and cleaning up faulty HTML code.

This is <B>bold, <I>bold italic, </b>italic, </i>normal text

will be rewritten to

This is <b>bold, <i>bold italic, </i></b><i>italic, </i>normal text.

One advantage of TagSoup is the Xpath-like query mechanism. It parses the HTML code and generates an object structure representing this content. Now the user can access the single elements. One possible example could be:

def slurper = new XmlSlurper(new org.ccil.cowan.tagsoup.Parser())
html = slurper.parse("an_example_file.html")
table = html.body.div.find{ it.@id == "content" }.form.table.
find{ it.@id == "attempts" }

This retrieves the table “attempts” placed inside a form in the div “content”. The method findAll() will retrieve all elements for a given attribute or with given child elements.

After all I fell in love with TagSoup. It saves a lot of work when you have to access HTML content of websites, portals or similar, which are not able to send a XHTML 1.x compliant responses. But this is an other topic .

Both movies demonstrate the numerous astonishing features of Blender and caused loads of valuable feedback for improvements for the Blender developers. In order to keep up with the young tradition, Blender already started the follow-up project called Apricot in December 2007. This time the main focus lies not only on modeling and rendering, but also on the included 3D-Engine that Blender comes with.