Linux : Convert Real Media Files to mp3/ogg

The first thing you want to do when converting audio files is to convert them into .wav files. Mplayer can dump almost anything that it plays (and it can play almost anything) to raw .wav format.


mplayer -quiet -vo null -vc dummy -ao:pcmheader:file=".wav file" "inputfile"

To mp3 :

Lame is a command-line tool which can convert .wav to .mp3

lame input.wav output.mp3

To ogg :

oggnec input.wav

That's it!!! No need to search over net for free tools. No patch, registration key blah blah ... Yo LINUX !!!

Antix Mepis!!!

Once again its been a long time since my last post. I had almost forgotten that I had a blog of my own. I guess I had nothing much to share.

I think a lot of people who have recently bought new PCs or laptops have quite an old machine at their homes. Atleast I have, and it's a real mess. Running windows for so long has taken its toll too :) Every time I return home for holz, I have to deal with plenty of viruses and spywares.

I really got fed up with all this this time round and so decided to install the beautiful linux on my 800MHz P3 with 128MB RAM. Yeah, it's really old :) I grabbed my gutsy CD at once and tried to boot from the live CD, forgetting that it requires a minimum of 256 MB of RAM. Also, it came to me that my system wont be able to run Gutsy or for that matter any commonly used distro these days. So I searched for distros that could run on my PC, preferentially a debian based one coz i have got quite used to Ubuntu now. And thus I stumbled upon Antix Mepis.

Antix is a fast, lightweight and easy to install linux live CD distribution based on MEPIS. It almost succeeds in providing a fully functional and flexible operating system for both newbies as well as experienced users of linux. It runs even on 64 MB P2 systems. I downloaded the 300MB iso image and installed right away. And it was worth it. It's as if my old PC has come back to life!!! With all device drivers and codecs(!) preloaded, it has very less to complain about. And with linux comes the power of customization, which I found the most useful.

And now, having installed rhythmbox and a few more utilities, even my mom doesnt really face any problem operating it. Hail LINUX and dont throw away your old machines, use ANTIX instead :)