LegRoom.net Kick back and relax

Contrary to popular belief, it turns out that I am, in fact, NOT random. Here's the proof:

I know, I'm actually pretty surprised about that myself. :-)

Update
I was bored so I took one more:

So in addition to not being random, I also apparently have confirmation that I have no life whatsoever. Yay!

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Introduction

apeinfo is CLI (command line interface) program designed to display tag data and audio format information for APE (Monkey's Audio) files.

Monkey's Audio is a lossless audio compression format, similar to FLAC.  It's become fairly popular, but suffers from two primary limitations; very limited cross-platform support (only Windows is officially supported), and a non-free license (note: this may have recently changed).  As a result, I wanted an easy way to convert APE files to the FLAC format, which is my preferred lossless compression format.  There are no available CLI APE tag readers available for Linux at the time of this writing, so I modified a sample program included in the MAC distribution to output this information.  I then use this information in my Convert to FLAC script to migrate the APE tags to the new FLAC file.

apeinfo is written in C++, and utilizes the MAC (Monkey's Audio Codec non-win32 ports) libraries written by Matthew T. Ashland.

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Download  Current Version: 1.0, Released: 08/13/2006

apeinfo binary (127.54 KB) - This is a compiled version of apeinfo.  It was compiled on a Gentoo Linux system running with GCC 3.4.4 and glibc 2.3.5.  It may work on your Linux system directly, but if you get any error messages please compile from source as described below.

apeinfo source (6.79 KB) - This is the apeinfo source code.  To compile it, also download the MAC source code and follow the instructions below.

ChangeLog - apeinfo development details

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Installation

Downloading apeinfo binary

Installation of the apeinfo binary is simple:

1. Download the binary
2. Copy to a directory in your $PATH (eg, /usr/local/bin/)
3. Ensure that the binary has the execute bit set (eg, chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/apeinfo)

Try executing apeinfo after installation.  If it returns usage information, then you're good to go.  If you get any error messages, then you'll likely need to follow the compilation instructions below.

Compiling apeinfo from source

To compile apeinfo, follow these steps

1. Download the apeinfo source tarball above
2. Download the MAC source tarball
• Note: This was originally written and compiled against MAC version 3.99-u4-b5.  Other versions should work as well, but are not guaranteed.
3. Extract the MAC tarball
4. Extract the apeinfo tarball to the following directory: mac-<version>/src/Examples/Analyze/Sample1/
• Note: This will overwrite the two makefiles in that directory
5. From the root of the MAC source code, run ./configure --disable-shared --enable-static && make
• This will configure the MAC environment and compile a static apeinfo binary
6. Copy mac-<version>/src/Examples/Analyze/Sample1/apeinfo to a directory in your $PATH (eg, /usr/local/bin/)

Execute apeinfo to verify that compilation and installation was successful.  Once apeinfo is installed, you can delete the MAC source code if you'd like.

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Usage

Execute apeinfo -h to display the apeinfo help information.  This will describe the syntax for running the program and list all available options.  Depending on which option is used, apeinfo will display detailed information about the given APE file, or will display a list of all tags in VORBISCOMMENT format.  The VORBISCOMMENT tags can be be applied to another file using a separate program, such as Convert to FLAC.

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By the way (since I'm actually posting some news right now), I wanted to mention that I'm currently working on an overhaul of LegRoom.net. This current version has served me well for about 2 years now, but it's starting to show its age.

I hope to have the new site ready sometime within the next month. Porting over all of the content is going to take quite a while, but I've already started making some progress. Once I get farther along (and make a final decision on which CMS I'm going to use), I'll post a preview link for some feedback before it goes live.

In the meantime, if I don't seem to be posting very often, just know that it's because I'm hard at work on LegRoom v3 (and other projects). :-)

Reg Developer has recently published an article exploring the "support vacuum" created when a distribution substantially modifies an application's default configuration in its package system. From the article:

They've configured it right, but Apache ignores it because it needs some extra distro-defined magic to activate the configuration file in question. Now they're banging their head in desperation, and we can't help because we don't know the magic. And we get the blame.

The author uses Apache and Debian/Ubuntu as an example, but this is an issue with most (if not all) distributions. I've had similar problems myself trying to get Apache configured correctly under Gentoo (though the situation has improved substantially in recent versions).

Obviously a distribution will have to make certain modifications to a given application to make it fit in properly with the rest of the system. Sometimes there's just no avoiding it. But the author raises a great point; who will support the applications? If the application developers don't know what changes the distribution made to the application, and package maintainers do not know enough about the application to answer a question, who does it go to?

I hope package maintainers read this article and take it to heart. As I stated above, there will likely always be changes that need to be made here and there to provide a consistent feel across the distribution, but it's important to remember that the more drastically the application is changed, the more difficult it will be for the distribution's own users to get help.

Article link:

http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2006/11/04/apache_packages_support_vacuum/