Assume you have a whole mess of WAV files that you want to convert. First let's turn them into MP3s. lame --preset insane *wav This basically creates the mp3 at 320, which is, uh, insane, but it's the highest quality level. If its not 320, I don't want it. You may choose 192 or above; unless it's speech, I would NEVER use anything less than 192. Now let's convert your WAVs to FLAC files. shntool conv -o flac *.wav If you're using a Debian-based system, you'll probably need to do this first: sudo apt-get install shntool Is that not easy or what? (Check out all of our posts on conversions, WAV, MP3, & FLAC.) ...

OK, here's the situation: you have some sounds, but you don't like they sound. Sounds like you want your sounds to sound like another sound. So it sounds like you need to convert those sounds to another sound. So how do you do that? SoundConverter, of course! It outputs as Ogg Vorbis, MP3, FLAC, or WAV, & for OGG & MP3 you can choose a quality level, which is as it should be. OK, fine, but what's it accept as input? Why, anything that GStreamer can read. On my system, that means the following, plus a WHOLE lot more: mp3, wav, FLAC, Windows Media Audio, Real, Shorten, and the list goes on and on and on. SoundConverter does its job quickly, and it just … works. Sounds like you should give it a try! (Check out all of our posts on OGG, mp3, FLAC, sound, & music.) ...

I write a monthly column for Linux Magazine called Do It Yourself. LM has a policy that they don't publish stuff online until 60 days after it's published in print, which is fine with me - at least everything in the mag makes its way online, which is more than a lot of pubs do. One of my columns from a few months ago just went up: "Rip, Convert, Listen". As I say at the beginning, "If you don't know how to convert CDs into audio files on Linux, this column is for you." This is actually part one of a two-parter on converting CDs to digital music; in this one, I look at Grip and oggenc, two programs that together get your music off of CDs and into the patent-free, smaller-than-mp3-while-sounding-better OGG format. Check the column out - I know you'll learn something. ...

AbiWord can convert documents in one format (it doesn't have to be AbiWord, just a format AbiWord supports) to OpenOffice.org Writer, or Word, or any of a heck of a lot other formats. Even better, you can do these conversions via the command line. For instance, let's say you have a Word document named foo.doc, and you want to convert it to AbiWord format without having to open the program. $ abiword --to=abw foo.doc You'll have a document named foo.doc and one named foo.abw. What if you wanted the new document to have a different name too? Just use this: $ abiword --to=bar.abw foo.doc The process is the same if you want to convert foo.doc to OpenOffice.org Writer. $ abiword --to=sxw foo.doc And so on. You can use several different formats, including zabw, rtf, txt, utf8, html, latex, & many, many more. Just open up AbiWord, go to Save As, & take a look at the various formats supported. Of course, the real power comes in when you write a simple script to batch ...

I write a monthly column for Linux Magazine called Do It Yourself. LM has a policy that they don't publish stuff online until 60 days after it's published in print, which is fine with me - at least everything in the mag makes its way online, which is more than a lot of pubs do. One of my columns from a few months ago just went up: "Rip, Convert, Listen: The Sequel". This is the final part of a two-parter on converting CDs to digital music. The first one covered Grip and oggenc; in this one, I introduce readers to two of my favorite programs, KRename and EasyTAG. I use KRename to change the names of the OGGs I created using Grip and oggenc, and then I use EasyTAG to make sure that meta tags that identify the songs are just exactly the way I want them. Trust me: even if you never work with digital music, you'll still find KRename in particular very useful. It's an essential item for your toolkit. ...

I write a monthly column for Linux Magazine, but it doesn't appear on the web until 3 months after the print pub date. My column from the December 2004 issue has hit the web: "Rip, Convert, Listen: The Sequel" (in order to understand it best, read the first column in the series, "Rip, Convert, Listen"). The first column was about converting your music from CD to OGG using Grip and the command line, but in this month's web-published column I look at KRename, a program that does batch renaming of files, and EasyTAG, which edits ID3 & other tags found in digital music files. If you're into digital music, you might find this short overview helpful. And by the way - KRename can be used for any type of file, not just music, so it's a good one to learn no matter what. I use it for text files, pictures, OpenOffice.org documents, and so on. It's really an excellent app. ...

No big shocker here, but MSFT publisher ONLY works on Windows. I've tried installing it on Linux using CrossOver Office, but it doesn't work, through no fault of CrossOver. Even better, the ONLY program that can read a Publisher file is … you guessed it! Publisher! So what do we Linux (& Mac OS X) users do when we get a Publisher file? If it's one we have to edit, we're hosed. No workee. If, however, we just need to view the damn thing, we can use this web site at http://convert.neevia.com/ to convert a Publisher document - and one heck of a whole lot of files in a host of other formats - into a PDF file. One limitation: the file you're converting can't be more than 1 MB in size. That may be a dealbreaker, but hey, it's better than nothing … & it's free. Now ya know! (Check out all of our posts on Publisher, Scribus, & PDF.) ...

On the CWE-LUG list, my buddy Ed asked a good question yesterday: "Is mbox format the same as MAILDIR format? I've seen references to both in the googlesphere, but nothing that immediately backups this claim. I have a larege mbox format file I want to convert to mbx. I've found things to convert it to MAILDIR. Are they the same?" My answer: Heck no. Let's say in your email app you have three folder: INBOX, Personal, & Work. mbox is basically all your emails for a folder, in one big ass text file named for the email folder. In other words, you'd have 3 files: INBOX, Personal, & Work. The INBOX mbox file contains all the emails you see in the INBOX in your email client, one after the other. Same with Personal & Work. maildir is each individual email in a separate file, with all the files in a folder corresponding to an email folder. In other words, you'd have 3 folders: INBOX, Personal, & Work. In the INBOX folder, you see a file for each message that you see in ...

It's simple, really: OpenOffice.org is free & community-developed; StarOffice is based on OOo & sold by Sun (starting at $35 per user: cheap!). What's the big dif? Sun adds features for businesses & offers paid support. Today, StarOffice 8 was announced. What are the new features aimed at businesses? Actually, they're pretty dang cool, at least according to the description provided by eWeek:"StarOffice includes bundled management tools to simplify installation and configuration across a company's desktops. It also includes a Microsoft Office file analyzer. This will enable administrators to estimate the size of a migration from MS Office to StarOffice. The new StarOffice also has a Macro Migration Wizard, which can convert VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) macros." Dang - that sounds really, really useful! Good stuff, Sun! (Check out all of my posts on OpenOffice.org & StarOffice.) ...

Ah, WordPerfect. You were king of the world at one point, but now? Barely a blip on the screen, unless you're to be found in a law firm somewhere (& let me tell you, lawyers, by and large, are tech dinosaurs). For those who wish to move on from WP to something more modern - something like OpenOffice.org, say - there's wpd2sxw, which converts documents from WP to OOo (& even StarOffice as well!). If you're using Debian, just apt-get install wpd2sxw & you're done. Otherwise, download it from http://sourceforge.net/projects/libwpd/, where you can find a couple of other SourceForge-based WordPerfect projects. Now, just in case you get wpd2sxw & realize it's a command-line driven program: don't panic. Scott's here to help you. Just cd to the directory with the WP docs you want to change using your command line, & run the following: mkdir OOo ; for i in *wpd ; do bn=`basename $i` ; wpd2sxw $i OOo/`basename $bn .wpd`.sxw ; done That should do the trick. ...

Cygwin, for those of you who don't know, is basically a Linux environment that runs in Windows. Want a real Linux shell that you can run in Windows, instead of the crappy, anemic Windows Command Line? Then you need Cygwin. You can even run X & GUIs, but it's kinda slow unless you're using a monster machine. Me, I just like having a real CLI when I have to use Winders. If you're looking for info that'll help you run Cygwin effectively (& since it's on top of Windows, there are a few gotchas you'd better know about, like this one: Cygwin will automatically default to an imaginary mount point under the default POSIX path /cygdrive. For example, if Cygwin accesses Z:\foo and the Z drive is not currently in the mount table, then Z:\ would be automatically converted to /cygdrive/Z. Man, that drove me nuts when I first started using Cygwin: how the %#$^&@ do I get to the D drive? Now we both know. If you want to learn that & other essentials, check out the ...

I remember the day well that I decided to make my big move, from Windows to Linux. It was early in 2001. I'd used Linux before, but I never felt like it was really ready for me to use as my daily desktop. Then I got hold of Red Hat 7, installed it on a spare box, and knew that the time had finally arrived. Since then, it's been goodbye Windows & hello Linux, & I couldn't be happier. Making the big move can be really hard, and Novell is doing everything it can to smooth the way. It's been publishing a pretty good bunch of articles over the past several months as part of the Novell Linux Desktop Cool Solutions series, & several of them focus on transitioning from Windows to Linux - SUSE in particular, of course, but overall the series is good for anyone thinking about the switch, or new to the switch, or even experienced with the switch, as there's always something new to learn. Migrating from Windows to the Novell Linux Desktop covers a lot of stuff, including dual-booting (always ...

Arch is an interesting distro, although not one that I'll be trying anytime soon (I'm quite happy with Debian, thank you very much). Basically, it's a distro for advanced users. There are very few GUI tools for configuration: essentially all management is done using textual config files. That doesn't bother me, except for the time factor. While I don't mind editing a config file, editing ALL of them would grow tedious. However, the Arch philosophy is that you'll learn more about Linux by doing this, which is certainly true. There are other interesting things about Arch as well: pacman, its package management system and default optimization for i686 are just two features worth discussing. Two long, detailed articles about Arch appeared recently, & they're both worth reading, even if you never intend to run Arch at all. After all, we're also in this thing just to learn, right? The first, "A Week in the Life of an Arch Linux Newbie", is a hyper-enthusiastic look by a recent Arch convert at the ...

Over the past year, this blog has pretty much been written by one person - me, Scott Granneman. There have been occasional forays by other folks, but I've been your open source blogger. Starting today, I'd like to welcome another blogger on this blog, Peter Cooper. I'm not going anywhere, but now Peter & I will be blogging together to make this blog even better, more relevant to you, & more fun. I'm excited to work with Peter, especially since he & I are somewhat complementary in our interests. I'm interested primarily in desktop apps, although coding & web dev also spark my interest, while Peter is the opposite: he's more interested in coding & developing, & less so much in desktop apps. Nice mix! So, who's Peter Cooper? Here ya go: Peter Cooper is a developer and serial entrepreneur with diverse interests across the worlds of technology and open source. He began to blog before the term even existed, six years ago, back when he worked for dot-com media companies ...

My buddy Ed is a great programmer, & in the last many months he's really gotten deep into Ruby on Rails. Periodically he emails the CWE-LUG list about Ruby, & his info is always good. Here's some of those emails for your edification & enlightenment. Here's a presentation that Ed did for the Unix Users Group here in St. Louis: <begin Ed> Hello. I know its been 1.5 weeks since my tutorial on Ruby at the general SLUUG mtg, but finally the slides are up. http://www.cwelug.org/~edh/RubyForNubys.sxi An OOo Impress document. Feel free to convert it to HTML or PDF if you want. It is released under a Attribute/Non-commercial/Share-Alike Creative Commons licence. That means you can edit it and redistriute it as long as attribution is maintained and it is released under an identical license. <end Ed> Then Ed had this to say about developing Ruby on Rails for Mac OS X users (even though I'm pretty sure Ed uses Linux). <begin ...