Meeting Report - SLUG/Durham - 12 Feb 2007 - Music throughout the ages

[Ben Scott]

  I was pleased to be able to attend last night's SLUG (Seacoast LUG)
meeting, at UNH Durham.  8 people were there; Rob Anderson led the
discussion.  The primary topic was working with MP3 audio under Linux,
with a follow-on digression into player pianos and reed organs.

  Rob related his experiences with a few different MP3 player devices.
 One neat gadget was his "Audio Link Car MP3 Player".  This was a
black box about the size of a pack of cigarettes.  It apparently comes
in many different flavors, each designed to plug into the proprietary
connectors on the back of various OEM car radios.  Plug any USB Mass
Storage Device (e.g., flash drive) into it, and it would play the MP3
files on said MSD.  Since it interfaces with the car radio, it can
potentially enable things like integrated displays and control via
steering wheel buttons.

  The act of ripping music from regular audio CDs to MP3 files was
discussed.  Popular tools include "KAudioCreator" and "grip".  Both
act as front-ends to CDParanoia (which enables error-free digital
audio extraction, even from damaged CDs) and encoders such as LAME
(for MP3's).

  Rob initially tried using rsync to keep his PC-based music library
in sync with his MP3 player gadgets.  That didn't work so well.  One
issue is the issue of encoding song names into something that the FAT
file system (used by most MP3 players) will accept.  Another is that
most PCs have a lot more storage than most MP3 players, and so it is
desirable to select only some music for the device.  Rob said he found
the "Amarok" tool good for this.  He also mentioned a Python-based
tool he was writing himself (still incomplete).

  On the topic of editing the "ID3" tags that embed artist, title,
etc., info into MP3 files, Rob recommended a Python tool called
"eyeD3".

  Rob mentioned that in addition to plain old filesystem copy
operations, one of his players supports something called "MTP" to sync
music.  The advantage of MTP is that it tells the player what is going
on, so the player does not have to rescan the entire drive to update
it's song database.  While MTP apparently originated with Microsoft,
it has been reverse engineered and may work with Linux.  This led Dave
M to quip that while Linux frequently uses reverse engineering,
Microsoft generally uses backwards engineering.

  Rob mentioned RockBox (http://www.rockbox.org/), which is a project
to provide FOSS replacement firmware for various music gadgets,
including the iPod.  If you have a RockBox-compatible device but find
the stock firmware annoying or limited, this may set you free.

  Rob also went into some explanation of various magic spells to
enable device detection and auto-mounting, using udev and autofs.  He
posted some nice examples, which can be found with the rest of his
slides at:

http://slug.gnhlug.org/slug/Members/rea/SLUG/talks/mp3-talk-feb07/

  Since Jon "maddog" Hall was there, and maddog *always* has neat
stories, the meeting didn't end with Rob.  maddog started off with
mention of a tool called "sweep", which is designed to remove noise
from imperfect audio recordings (such as old vinyl mag tape).

  maddog then went on to talk about an electronic organ put in place
at Trinity Church in NYC.  It uses samples to reproduce the effect of
a 100-year-old pipe organ that was damaged in the Sept 11 attacks.  It
uses a small network of Linux-based computers to do this.  I found an
article here: http://www.trinitywallstreet.org/welcome/?article&id=255

  He then related various anecdotes and history about player pianos,
reed organs, and other early music reproduction devices.  He was kind
enough to show some photos and videos of his own collection, along
with others he has visited.  This led to a discussion on what
free-vs-open formats and what happens when old recordings can no
longer be read.

  All in all, a very interesting and educational night!

  The next SLUG meeting is scheduled for Mon 12 Mar 2007, topic TBD.

-- Ben