Category Archives: Media

Serving up media (Part 1)

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

A couple of weeks ago I embarked on a wee project.

I have a fairly large collection of LPs, CDs and even a few cassettes that have survived the years.  I decided it was time to digitise the lot onto one drive acting as a media server.

Why bother, you ask?  There are a few reasons why I am doing it.  The main reason is to create a central store for all my media, so at least I know where it all is.  Also the fact that it is all stored on a small box not much bigger than a paperback means the “hard copies” can be put away into storage.  As it is a media server, its contents can be accessed from anywhere in the house by using a laptop or television.

For my server, I am using my otherwise redundant Iomega iConnect box which has a built in media server.  The media is all stored on a 1Tb external drive plugged into the iConnect.

The media is accessed either on laptops or via an XBox which is connected both to the network and the main television in the house.  The software for the laptops was one of the areas where I did have some difficulty however.

As a Linux user, I had the option of using one of the main two packages – Banshee or VLC Media Player.  I had problems with each of these. where VLC took an age to connect and then had a nasty habit of duplicating everything, and Banshee was just plain flakey.

A good friend then recommended XBMC Media Center.  This is available for all the main platforms so I installed the PPA for Ubuntu and installed the package.

I was impressed.

XBMC is not just an application but can actually be installed as a standalone operating system.  To say it is graphically rich is an understatement.  It is also fairly intuitive and I had no problem in hooking it up to my server (it automatically recognises most protocols including UPnP which the iConnect uses). 

XBMC

So far I have only had a couple of minor problems with the programme.  The first is that it tends to just vanish if memory gets a bit tight (which just means I don’t run any memory intensive programs such as VirtualBox when I am running it).  The second was a little more problematic – I discovered that some skins, while claiming to be mouse enabled, in fact weren’t.  The problem then is that there is no way of changing the skin to one that works.  In the end I used brute force and attacked the XBMC configuration file (home/.xbmc/userdata/guisettings.xml).  I deliberately corrupted the skin entry (under <lookandfeel>) and then restarted the program.  As it couldn’t find the corrupted skin it defaulted back to the standard one.

Problems notwithstanding, this is now my media player of choice.

Media streaming on an iConnect

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

Well over a year ago I bought an Iomega iConnect USB hub.

From day one it didn’t work and I documented some of my troubles on this site.

A couple of weeks ago to my amazement it started working properly.  I haven’t a clue why as I did nothing to it.  I didn’t upgrade software or anything.  It will have to remain a mystery.

One of the features of the iConnect is that it is a media streamer.  I had disabled this during “the troubles” so I re-enabled it and stared loading some music onto an attached drive.

I have no experience of media or uPnP so it was an interesting experience.

The first thing I learned was that the metadata on each and every track was critical for success, and also found that some of the tracks off my CDs had incorrect information in them.  A misspelled item on one track would isolate that track from the others which ended up in a messy setup. This meant I had to do a lot of editing.

I have a reasonable selection of CDs and the only method I could think of at first to edit metadata was to load each track into Audacity.  This was a very lengthy and very time consuming progress so it was clearly out of the question.  That’s when I found EasyTAG.  This is an excellent little program that did everything I wanted and did it quickly and efficiently.  It even batch processed a full CD (or rather a full directory of files).

Another problem I had was caused by a little quirk of the iConnect – it could categorise any track it found on the drive, but I was unable to play anything that was further than one directory from root.  If, for example I had a file /pop/Beatles/Abbey Road/Something.mp3 it would be listed in the Media stream but wouldn’t actually play.  Being a somewhat methodical sort of bloke I didn’t like the idea of dumping every single file into the one spot without ordering them in some sort of fashion.  I decided that changing the file names would work well.  However the idea of rewriting a thousand or two filenames didn’t appeal.  I installed Métamorphose and that proved perfect for the job. Now I could rename my files as, for example /pop/Beatles_Abbey_Something.mp3, simply by adding “Beatles_Abbey_” as a prefix to every filename.

My final problem was that several of the albums were in FLAC format which was fine but bulky.  I decided to convert all the files to MP3 format as it suited my needs better.  Here I came across SoundConverter which was a little slow but very happily ran batch jobs so it was just a question of pointing the program to the relevant directories and leaving it to it.

It was a lot of work, but worth it.  I can now play my entire collection on a Wifi portable or on the PC which save a lot of time and effort hunting for CDs!

From soundcard to Audacity

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

For a long time now I have been looking for a way to record directly off the soundcard.  While I had no difficulty with this in Windows, Linux proved a little more elusive.

I trawled the Internet and came across a lot of solutions, such as hot-wiring the speaker socket to the microphone socket, or lengthy sessions with Terminal.

The other day I found the solution I had been looking for, and as I suspected, it was simplicity itself.

My sound editing programme of choice is Audacity.  That gives the option of selecting the source for recording and this is where I was making my big mistake.  The trick is to leave that alone.at its default setting.

Open up Audacity and also Pulse Volume Control.  In Audacity, click the wee drop-down by the microphone symbol and select ‘Start Monitoring’

Sound1

Now select Pulse Audio Control and go to the Recording Tab.

In the resulting screen, you will see Audacity listed as ALSA Plug-in [Audacity]

Sound2

All that is required now is to make your selection from the drop-down list provided.  Select one that starts “Monitor of ..” and you should be OK.

That’s all.

Simple.

UPDATE

I just replaced Linux Mint 10 with Mint 11 and to my surprise, Pulse Audio Control was missing.  It took a bit of research but I fond that the package I was looking for was pavucontrol.  I tried installing it from the Software Manager but it kept getting stuck at 12%.  I then tried

$ sudo apt-get install pavucontrol

That worked perfectly!