mlmitton

When you run it from the terminal, what output do you see when it runs? Anything at all? Do you see anything from oggenc or lame? And pay attention--there are many errors that won't cause the script to stop. - Jan 23 2006

I honestly don't know what the problem is, but AFC won't handle unicode correctly. It sucks for me, too--I could have sworn I ripped my Sigur Ros, but where is it? :) I've put a lot of time into trying to figure out how to handle unicode, but I haven't succeeded. It's probably not hard, I just don't know what I'm doing. Too short on time and too dumb. - Dec 13 2005

Look at the earlier comments--there's one on Ape. I wrote a version of the script which, I hope, includes support for Ape. However, I haven't been able to get the Ape encoder/decoder working on my system, so I haven't been able to test it. I asked people to let me know whether it worked, but so far, no one has said either way, despite its being downloaded about 100 times.

So give it a try, and let me know. If it works, I'll include it in the release itself.

As for SHN, I actually have never heard of it before. Always been a FLAC man myself. - Nov 30 2005

Well, there's not much info to go on here. Take the python script itself and run it from a console, i.e., not from amaroK's script manager. (You can download here, unpack it, then "python ****.py" (whatever the file name actually is) Then you'll be able to see all the error output and I can be of more help.

Oh, this might be overly pedantic, just remember to have amaroK open, with some MPC files in the playlist before you run the script from console.

Also, make sure that the first panel of the script indicates that you have the package required to decode MPC. - Nov 03 2005

I guess I'm not sure what you mean. Do you mean ripping CDs to whatever audio format? If so, I think you can already do it in amaroK, though having never tried, I'm not exactly sure how. (Probably drag and drop like all things.) But it's not something advertised, because it really is just better to use something like Grip. AmaroK is an audio player, not a file organizer, so I think I'd just as soon leave that to programs focused on ripping.

If you mean something else, let me know. - Oct 24 2005

Well, the 2 "which" errors are telling you that that it can't find mppdec or mppenc in your standard path. That is, mppenc and mppdec are not located in any of the folders listed in parentheses, so they can't be run by simply typing "mppenc" in the konsole, which is in essence what the script does. So there's a good chance you don't have these packages installed. If you do, then you just need to put them in one of those folders (or add whatever folder the mppenc/dec binaries reside in to your standard path, but that's more complicated.)

As for the next two errors, "could not find" and "rm...", what's happening is that the decoder you're trying to use, for whatever reason, isn't actually decoding the source file into temp.wav, and since you aren't creating temp.wav, you obviously can't encode it or remove it. If you're trying to transcode a musepack file, these are the exact errors you would get since you don't have mppdec installed. I suppose that's what's happening. If not, give me more info about the decoder step in your conversion (or try a different type of source file and see if that works). - Jul 19 2005

I suspect it's either not encoding or decoding, probably decoding since dealing with wma is a bit trickier. If either encoding or decoding fails for some reason, the script keeps running despite the error.

Start amaroK from a terminal. (Most likely simply "amarok" will do.) Now, when you run the script, the terminal will give you the output of the mplayer command, which decodes the wma, and lame which encodes to wav. It will also give you what the error is if one of the commands doesn't work. My guess is it's probably an issue with mplayer.

Oh, also, watch the top-level of the directory where the transcoded files should end up--if you never see "temp.wav" appear, then you know there's a decoding problem. - Jul 18 2005

You do get to decide. If you want to convert something, put it in the playlist. If you don't want to convert it, leave it out. (Ref: the first sentence of the description on this page, or the first sentence in the "About" in amaroK, or the second sentence of the first panel when you run the script.) - Jul 04 2005

I think I found the problem. I'll have an update posted some time in the next 1-2 days. - Jul 03 2005

I haven't forgotten about the request. I haven't been able to get gstreamer to play .ape, and I also can't get MAC to compile properly on my AMD64. So it's been pretty hard to test encoding and decoding .ape files:)

But, here's a version of the script which may (or may not) decode your .ape.

http://www.mlmitton.com/files/monkeytest.py

The command line options for MAC are dead-simple, so I probably have the right decode command, but of course I can't check this.

If people give me positive feedback that this works, I'll put it into a formal release. Until then, just use the script here. - Jul 03 2005

I've heard of one other report of this happening. I haven't yet had time to look into it, but I'm hoping to this weekend.

Can you email me more information?

Like, if you remove those 5 or 6 files, do you still get the problem? Or does it happen after any 5 files? What type of files are they? If there's a particular file that's gumming up the works, have you tried decoding/encoding that particular file on the command line? In the top level directory where you're saving the transcoded files, is there a temp.wav file? If so, is it of a song that was successfully transcoded, or is it of a song that didn't get encoded?

Answers to any of these questions would be helpful to me. My suspicion is that the decoder is hitting a file it doesn't like and killing the process. Though in that case there should be some error output...

Anyway, please, if this has happened to anyone else, also email me any info you can give me. Email can be found in my username link. - Jul 01 2005

You're absolutely right. I do mention this in the README. That said, I think for a fairly high percentage of people, the warnings about lossy-to-lossy conversions are overstated. A lot of people can't tell the difference between a CD and ~128kbps variable bit-rate lossy format, especially when they're listening on the speakers that came with their computer, or the headphones that came with their iPod. People with good ears probably already know the problems of lossy-to-lossy.

My recommendation is people should never convert from one lossy to another (or a different bit-rate of the same format) just for the sake of having it in a different format. As the poster noted, quality will *always* decrease. If you have to do the conversion (iPod won't play my ogg and I can't re-rip!), well, you gotta go what you gotta do. If the conversion is optional (I'm using 180kbps mp3, but I could fit everything on my Rio Karma if I converted them to 128), then try the conversion on a 10 or 20 tracks, and see if you can tell the difference. That way you can decide for yourself whether the loss in quality is sufficient to stop you from doing the conversion. - Jun 04 2005

I can try and do that soon. In the meantime, just choose "OTHER" and type in "--preset voice". - May 31 2005

Good point, since, as a general rule, it is good to skip the mp3-->mp3 conversion, because that will lower the sound quality. It wouldn't be that hard to program it to skip these conversions, but there are still people who have good reasons for mp3-->mp3 conversions, for example, taking big mp3s and squeezing them to a smaller size for a portable player.

Until I can think of slick way to make both groups happy, I think I may leave the burden on you to clean the mp3 songs from the amaroK playlist window, leaving only the oggs. I will, though, think about a solution. - May 16 2005

For input, it's done. I haven't been able to get faac running on my system (suse 9.3 amd64), so there's no encoding support yet. Also, having no familiarity with this format, I'm just using the default settings for faad. If I need to make changes (for example, changes for LC, LD, LTP object types) let me know. - May 15 2005

Right now, the script only works with ascii characters. If there are non-ascii characters in the metatags, it will still convert, but the tags will be screwed up. But, if there are non-ascii characters in the to-be-encoded file path itself, then it won't convert at all.

I'm lost with all of this encoding stuff. If anyone can help, or at least guide me to good places to learn how to solve the problem myself, I'd appreciate it. Several hours on Google, and I don't know much more now than when I started searching. - May 11 2005

Done. I've never used .mpc, so I did only limited testing. Keep an eye out for problems, and let me know if you find any.

To all: thanks for the kind words. - May 07 2005

You certainly can run it using the instructions you gave (and that's how I run it while I'm programming/debugging), but it's not intended to be run that way. It's intended to be run from within amaroK itself. Go to Tools-->Scripts-->Install Scripts, get formatconverter.amarokscript.tar.bz2, and amaroK will unpack and install it. Then you can run it from there. - May 03 2005

I've got the same problem, except I am using .36. I do get an error when I try to load LW3.11:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/mlmitton/DownloadFiles/superkaramba/liquid_weather_plus/liquid_weather.py", line 13, in ?
import os
ImportError: No module named os

I'm using Suse 9.3 which comes with Python 2.4--is this possibly the reason why I get the Python error? I know one of the fixes from SK .35 to .36 was to be able to use Python 2.4. Is the same thing happening here? Also, when I just run Python from the command line, it has no problem importing the modules that LW3.11 uses. - Apr 22 2005