Daniel Lange's blog (Entries tagged as convert)

Replicating BIND DNS slave configurations from BIND DNS master servers

nospam@example.com (Daniel Lange) — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 17:00:00 +0000

Manually copying the BIND master zone configuration to slave servers is a tedious and error-prone process. There are configuration management systems available for large deployments and BIND can support database backends as well which allow synchronization virtually behind the scenes.

For my use these options are overly complex and have unwanted risks associated with it.

The better option is to automate generating the BIND slave configuration from the BIND master named.conf.local.

Continue reading "Replicating BIND DNS slave configurations from BIND DNS master servers"

Apple iPhone ring tones Linux style

nospam@example.com (Daniel Lange) — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 09:55:00 +0000

Apple has crippled the iPhone to not allow normal music files as ringtones. Business decision. Technically any sub 40 second MP4 audio file will do once you rename it to *.m4r and drag-and-drop it to the ringtones folder of your phone in iTunes. Longer ones will work, too. But you'd need a jailbroken iPhone for that as iTunes will refuse to transfer the ringtone file if it's too long. Not much of an issue imho, who keeps ringing your phone for 40 seconds or more?

There's a gazillion websites available telling you how to convert a single .mp3-file to a ringtone with or without iTunes help and there are hundreds of tools doing that for you if you can't find out how to do it with just iTunes itself. Still the ones I tried failed for me as I wanted to convert my 20 or so standard ringtones from the good old Motorola K3 to iPhone ringtones all in one go. Without having to edit each one by hand. They are already nice ringtones and have served me well for years, just too long for the iPhone and in .mp3 format.

The basic processing sequence needed is

Cut the .mp3 down to 39s
Convert the .mp3 -> .wav (with mplayer, normalize output gain while we're at it)
Convert the .wav -> .mp4 (with facc)
Clean up, GOTO 1 for next file

So below is the free shell script to create multiple ringtones in one go on any Linux system. You need to install cutmp3, mplayer and faac for it, so apt-get install cutmp3 mplayer faac on Debian or Ubuntu. cutmp3 is currently not in the portage tree for Gentoo, but you can download an ebuild from Polynomial-C's overlay (mirror). Or you just download the cutmp3 binary from Jochen Puchalla's homepage. There's no error checking in the script, so know your way around the shell before running it.

Without further ado:

#!/bin/sh
#
# convert_to_ringtone file1.mp3 [file2.mp3, ...]
# Placed into the public domain by Daniel Lange, 2011.
#

for arg
do
echo "Processing $arg..."
cutmp3 -c -a 0:0.0 -b 0:39.0 -i "$arg" -O "$arg.tmp"
mplayer -vo null -vc null -af volnorm -ao pcm:fast:file=tmpfile.wav "$arg.tmp"
faac -b 128 -c 44100 -w tmpfile.wav
name=`echo $arg| sed 's/.mp3//g'| sed 's/ /_/g'`
mv tmpfile.m4a $name.m4r
rm tmpfile.wav
rm "$arg.tmp"
echo "$arg done."
done

Update

23.12.14 Apparently the faac package in Debian and Ubuntu has had the MP4 writing capability removed in v1.28-5 and later due to a minor license incompatibility. See the Debian Changelogs. Duh.

faac (1.28-5) unstable; urgency=low
  [ Andres Mejia ]
  * Disable mp4v2 support.
    This only disables mp4v2 for the faac utility program. The faac
    utility is GPL-2 but the mp4v2 library is MPL-1.1. The two licenses
    are incompatible with each other.

So ... unfortunately you have to built faac from source yourself or pin the v1.28-4 version which is identical except for the castration anyways.

Random distro dev: "Why oh why doesn't my distro ever head mainstream...?"
Hint: Because of stuff like this.

Converting a DVD film (mpeg2) to DV

nospam@example.com (Daniel Lange) — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 23:30:00 +0000

There are a gazillion web pages telling you how to convert DV to MPEG2 for DVD use. But I got a DVD from a corporate event and needed to convert it to DV to be cut in kdenlive. So just the other way around. Try to find a web page about that direction (needle in haystack, anyone?).

Giving up on google, I tried unsuccessfully with the swiss army knife that comes to mind first (ffmeg).

While something like ffmpeg -i vts_01_1.vob -i vts_01_2.vob -i vts_01_3.vob -sameq -target dv ../Raum_Video.avi creates a nice .avi, even mplayer complains about it violating the dv and avi standards.

So back to digging around in tutorials and forums and trial and error with other tools. Finally I found Avidemux to be the tool of choice. It encapsulates ffmpeg and other tools nicely to make them produce the expected results. Set video to DV (lavc), Audio to WAV PCM and the container format to AVI and go grab a ~~coffee~~ meal. It creates a nice DV file that you can easily work with in your favorite video editor.