On Sunday 25 May 2003 6:42 pm, Charles Philip Chan wrote:

Please don't take this as an insult, but BladeEnc is known to produce poor quality Mp3's. None taken :)

Which encoder would you suggest I switch to? I am using SuSE 8.1 :)

On Sunday 25 May 2003 11:16 am, The Purple Tiger wrote:

On Sunday 25 May 2003 6:42 pm, Charles Philip Chan wrote:

...

Please don't take this as an insult, but BladeEnc is known to produce poor quality Mp3's.

None taken :)

Which encoder would you suggest I switch to? I am using SuSE 8.1 :)

LAME is the only descent mp3 encoder. I find it superior. And I have also found the grip is good for ripping and encoding at the same time. It seems to lack quality if you just rip to wave. I did this with a my Steve Vai cd. With wave it seems to skip, and/or stutter. But I put the cd back in and was going to rip again and encode. Nice thing is that it puts things in its own dir and it read the cd, match to the directory of the .wav files and straight encoded them - fairly fast. The sound of Vai's music is much better now that it's been converted to mp3. On the issue of ArtSD input abilities I have to agree however that ArtSD is horrible on the input side. I have a midi external keyboard and it won't produce any descent sounds with a straight line in, and forget get about using it via midi - it won't trigger any sounds what so ever. You can get lame here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/lame/ I used checkinstall to make it rpm and put it the rpmdata base. I highly recommend it. Cheers, Curtis.

On Sunday 25 May 2003 04:57 pm, Charles Philip Chan wrote:

On Sun, 25 May 2003 18:41:37 -0700

Curtis Rey wrote:

...

It seems to lack quality if you just rip to wave.

This is not true. Grip is only a frontend and it all depends on the program that you use for ripping. Set it to use cdparanoia (which is considered to be the best ripping program on *any* platform) and you should be OK.

Charles

True, I stand corrected. I still is a nice little package. And yes It's set to use cdparanoia. But I still find the quality of the .wav files lacking a tad. Or it could be the new kernel 1(0) stuff. I find that if I use some of the sound/multimedia stuff it gets very laggy and won't sometimes let go even after shutting the program down. I found this out by going into top and see the multiprograms still running. I am, to be honest, a little frustrated with the latest sound code and configs in 8.2. I chalk it up to interim devel cycle, e.g. alsa, threading, i/o, etc in the 2.5/6 kernel and some of it being implemented in the 2.4.x kernels. I have been playing around a bit but think a do some shakedowns and see if I can find anything worthwhile and repeatable to give to the devs. Cheers, Curtis. :)

On Sunday 25 May 2003 07:19 pm, Charles Philip Chan wrote:

On Sun, 25 May 2003 19:55:07 -0700

Curtis Rey wrote:

...

And yes It's set to use cdparanoia. But I still find the quality of the .wav files lacking a tad.

It could be the options that Grip uses with the build in cdparanoia. Change grip to use the external cdparanoia binary instead. This way you can specify the switches used.

...

Or it could be the new kernel 1(0) stuff. .... I am, to be honest, a little frustrated with the latest sound code and configs in 8.2.

Don't know, I never use SuSE's ALSA package. I always use the latest from the ALSA site.

If you know how to compile a kernel, do yourself a favour, download the vanilla 2.4.20 kernel and apply Con Kolivas patchset:

http://members.optusnet.com.au/ckolivas/kernel/

You might also want to apply the optional "Interactivity Update to O(1) from 2.5" patch and "Swap prefetching" patch located on the same page. In order to enable SuSE boot logging, you will need the TIOCGDEV patch from Joerg Prante's patchset-2.4.19-jp14 and you might want to apply the "ptrace exploit" patch (a security fix) for 2.4.20. If you would like, I can send you the latter two to save you some time googling.

Charles

Great Charles. I'll run it through on my test machine first and get my chop down. Then when I get this figured out and tweaked I go for the production machine.. Nice heads up! Thanks, Curtis.

On Sun, 25 May 2003 14:44:12 -0500 Paul Benjamin wrote:

You need to disable aRts if you are running KDE, that is in the control center under sound.

You don't need to do that if you set aRtsd to auto-suspend or use artsdsp when starting an OSS program. Charles -- We come to bury DOS, not to praise it. (Paul Vojta, vojta@math.berkeley.edu, paraphrasing a quote of Shakespeare)

On Sun, 25 May 2003 17:32:29 -0500 Paul Benjamin wrote:

I tried artsdsp but it is broken for line input recording but it works great for sound output.

Can't comment on that since I haven't tried recording from line-in.

Until then get it out of my way so I can use something that works.

Like I said, just use auto-suspend. Since you are using a SB Live! (a multi-channeled card) you don't really need to use it though. The only reason for using it is to convert the output to 48KHz because that function on the card in known to be subpar. This is what I do.

If you don't want to use command line tools there are two projects that have a GUI interface...

Another option is to use the XMMS FM-radio plugin: http://silicone.free.fr/xmms-FMRadio/ for input and output it to either the oggre (Ogg Vorbis) or lame-out (mp3) plugins. Charles -- "Besides, I think [Slackware] sounds better than 'Microsoft,' don't you?" (By Patrick Volkerding)

On Sun, 25 May 2003 18:52:55 -0500 Paul Benjamin wrote:

The XMMS radio plugin doesn't record.

That is what the oggre and lame-out plugins are for. It outputs the sound to an Ogg Vorbis file and mp3 file respectively. Unfortunately, you can't listen to it at the some time. The best solution is actually vsound which will hijack the sound from any program and output it to a wav file with the option of outputting it to the soundcard at the some time. Unfortunately, the program is no long available since the author is afraid of a law suite. I do have an archive copy of the source though, if you are interested.

I have never understood why KDE is the only desktop including Windows that has to have an Analog Realtime Synthesizer (aRts) built in.

To tell you the truth neither do I. I am not really a big fan of aRts either. Unfortunately, it is the only solution that I can find right now to output everything in 48KHz to compensate for the deficiency of the SB Live!. In case you don't know, the emu10k1 chip converts everything to 48KHz before outputting it, but unfortunately that function on the chip is subpar.

The good news is that maybe they have fixed my problem if you believe this message:

Hopefully they have.

Like I said aRts is a great idea, as an option for people who want to create music. It has no business being in the default desktop. aRts would suck for games,

As I understand it, someone is working on a JACKIT output plugin. Hopefully that will solve some of the latency problem. AFAIK though, no musician would touch that synthesizer. Hopefully when MAS: http://www.mediaapplicationserver.net/ becomes more mature, they will drop aRts altogether. Charles -- "I once witnessed a long-winded, month-long flamewar over the use of mice vs. trackballs...It was very silly." (By Matt Welsh)