[kde-linux] Sound conversion from .rm to.mp3

[James Richard Tyrer]

Sergey Kulikov wrote:
> James Richard Tyrer wrote:
>> LM--- wrote:
>>> Hello everyone,
>>>
>>> I have been a plain user of Linux for almost three years now, sporting
>>> Debian 4.0 Etch, now with Kernel 2.6.18, KDE 3.5 on a Pentium PC with
>>> AMD Athlon1800+, and I'm very satisfied.
>>>
>>> I was looking for a tool to convert sound, i.e. .rm files to .mp3 files.
>>> I was told to try SoundConverter which I found in the Debian repository.
>>>
>>> Now I realised that the programme is not able to convert .rm files to
>>> .mp3 files. Several gstreamer plugins are installed (several of the
>>> gstreamer0.10 series AND I installed gstreamer0.8-lame and
>>> gstreamer-mad, as I read that they were necessary) and the corresponding
>>> libraries libgstreamer0.8 and libgstreamer0.10 but there's nothing to be
>>> done. I still can't convert as I wish.
>>>
>>> Does it have to do with a new built-in limitation (a licencing problem?)
>>> or did I miss something?
>>>
>>> Anybody having help for me?
>> First, you need to realize that any GUI application for audio is a front 
>> end for an application that can be accessed from the command line.
>>
>> So, if I wanted to convert file <x>.rm to Vorbis I could use the command:
>>
>> 	mplayer -ao pcm <x>.rm | oggenc -o <x>.ogg -
>>
>> {note the "-" at the end; this IS required}
>>
>> should convert <x>.rm to <x>.ogg IF, and only if, mplayer can play the file.
>>
>> I don't seem to have an <x>.rm file available, so I can't try this.
>>
>> IAC, if MPlayer won't do it, there are other Linux players (e.g. Xine & 
>> FFMPEG) that might work.  There might be a GUI front end that would do 
>> this, I don't really know. Perhaps someone else knows.
>>
> 
> I guess mplayer -ao pcm <x>.rm | oggenc -o <x>.ogg - won't work. Because 
> you try to perform on-fly encoding from stdout. -ao pcm argument won't 
> perform any stdout output and will write audiodump.wav on your hard 
> disk. So you can't use this kind of piping. 

How unhelpful of MPlayer.  Yes, I checked and it doesn't pipe the 
output. :-(  I didn't notice that it doesn't have an "-o" switch.
I suppose that this would be considered to be a bug -- that it needs a 
"--stdout" and/or an "-o" switch.

Actually, IIUC, piping doesn't have to be on the fly -- the system will 
create a temp file if needed.  E.G. if you pipe the output of 'sort', a 
sorted temp file is created which is then read into stdin. But, with 
MPlayer you have to do it manually:

  mplayer -ao pcm Mission_Impossible.mp3 && cat  audiodump.wav | oggenc \
-o Mission_Impossible.ogg - && rm audiodump.wav

Probably not the best syntax, but it shows how piping should work.

-- 
JRT