Wednesday, November 08, 2006

Update on cups-pdf with Edgy

Edgy, at least on my computer, has made installing the cups-pdf package (allows you to print anything to a pdf) much easier. Just install the cups-pdf package using synaptic. Then go to System-->Administration-->Printing-->Choose New Printer. You should see a new local PDF printer detected so choose it. Then choose the Generic, Postscript Color Printer. Name it whatever you want--I chose PDF-Printer. And then your done. When you print something using the PDF printer, it will place the file in a PDF folder within your home folder.

Sunday, November 05, 2006

Sound Juicer for Edgy with VBR

This is what I have found to work best when trying to rip a CD to mp3 using lame with VBR:
This help article is the best for the basics. However, I changed the "GStreamer Pipeline" entry so that it would encode using VBR instead of a constant bitrate. A Fedora forum post gives a couple of entries using VBR at two different qualities. As the fedora site states, more information on the VBR quality can be found at this wiki Hydrogenaudio site. The problem is that this pipeline resulted in tags showing track times that were much too long. For example, the tag showed 20 minutes for a song that was about 4 minutes. So, after some searching, the best I could find was to add "xingmux" and "id3v2mux" at the end. Therefore, the entire pipeline entry should be (all on one line):
audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! lame name=enc vbr=4 vbr-quality=2 ! xingmux ! id3v2mux