After more than a year there is finally a new release of play it slowly. It does pretty much what you would expect, play back audio files at a different speed or pitch. Special thanks goes to Michael Donovan for helping me out with ideas and patches! I also created a debian package (what a pain).

New Features

• Settings are now saved per file
• There is a recent files button
• There is a finetuner for changing the pitch in steps of 1 cent
• The shortcuts for seeking were changed from 0 to ctrl+0 etc.
• Moved sourcecode to github
• Fixes all known bugs

I hope you like it. Feedback is appreciated!

Get it Now

I have finally made a new HTTP Ripper release. For those who don't know, HTTP Ripper is a tool that acts as http proxy to get (media) files out of websites. It is now translated into 42 languages. That's 40 languages more than I speak! The git repository has been moved over to over to github, play it slowly is now also there. Feel free to fork them.

HTTP Ripper Website

This is mostly just a note to myself, because I have to look it up every time I need to generate one, and the make-ssl-cert script that comes with debian doesn't appear to work.

openssl req -new -x509 -days 365 -nodes -out /tmp/cert.pem -keyout /tmp/cert.pem

Converting midi to wav using fluidsynth is not entirely trivial. Here is how I do it:

# convert opensolo.mid to fluidsynth.raw using the soundfont /usr/share/sounds/sf2/FluidR3_GM.sf2 
fluidsynth -l -i -a file -z 2048 /usr/share/sounds/sf2/FluidR3_GM.sf2 opensolo.mid
# convert fluidsynth.raw to fluidsynth.wav using sox
sox -b 16 -c 2 -s -r 44100 fluidsynth.raw fluidsynth.wav

You can use this together with the midi export of tuxguitar to export tuxguitar and guitarpro files to wav files.

I bought myself a M-Audio Axiom 61 to play around with. It works nicely on Linux, plug & play, literally. I tried it with the demo version of Pianoteq and Fluidsynth. Both worked perfectly on the first try. I'm happy so far.

Yesterday, I messed up my system by trying to install a NVIDIA beta driver in order to use opencl. Today I tried again with more success. Here is how I did it:

1. Download the driver from the NVIDIA website
2. Open the hardware driver manager of Ubuntu (Sytem/Administration/Hardware Drivers)
3. Select the NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver (the active one) and click remove
4. Log out
5. Press CTRL+ALT+F1 to get to the console
6. Login with your username and password
7. sudo stop gdm
8. chmod +x ./nvdrivers_*.run
9. sudo ./nvdrivers_*.run
10. sudo init 6
11. Enjoy OpenCL goodness

A WORD OF WARNING don't try this unless you understand all the steps involved and know how to recover your system in case something goes wrong!

Stay tuned for some nice opencl experiment.

It looks like the problem is still there in Ubuntu 9.10, and it looks like the old fix still works. But it looks gorgeous.

PLEASE DO NOT FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS IN THIS POST UNLESS YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING.

Pulse audio seems to be a constant source of trouble for me while providing no benefits at all (at least not any noticeable ones). So here's how to get rid of it:

Open /etc/X11/Xsession.d/70pulseaudio in a text editor and comment out everything (put a # in front of every line) and then save it.

This will prevent pulse audio from being started when you log in.

I bought myself a new HP Pavilion dv5 notebook because my old Lenovo broke. It's a bit too shiny for my taste but anyway. Installing the new Ubuntu was a breeze. After installing I noticed that audio playback using the speakers didn't work. Too bad. So here's the solution that worked for me.

Open /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf and add the following lines at the end of the file:

alias snd-card-0 snd-hda-intel
alias sound-slot-0 snd-hda-intel
options snd-hda-intel model=dell-m4-1
options snd-hda-intel enable_msi=1

Reboot and everything should work again (or just reload the snd-hda-intel with the new parameters).

I hope that helps,
Jonas