System Sounds missing / not working

Yesterday I lost all my system sounds after a new install (done as an upgrade ) of Mint Sarah.

Actually it had been lost in 17.3 and I had done the upgrade after screwing it up there while trying to change the sound inputs to accept a 5.1 surround sound system. I had hoped with the new Kernel it would fix it.

Lot's of complicated advice out there for this issue and ideas for fault finding.

Turns out all I had to do was open Synaptic Package manager and search for libcanberra-pulse, it was not installed so I ticked it and applied the change. Voila I now have desktop sounds again.


Incidentally the issued with the Creative 5.1 surround sound system was a fixed to an extent,  after screwing everything up by following several different fixes first.

My internal sound card on the motherboard  has three, three-pin phono input/outputs.

My Sub woofer was connected to PINK (mic) connection nearest the board.
Next to that was FRONT connecting to the middle LIME (line-out).
Finally REAR was connected to LIGHT BLUE (line-in).

With these connections set up correctly from the manual's of both the ASROCK 960GM motherboard and the CREATIVE Inspire T6300 surround sound system it was just the software to tackle.

It seems like you have to change the options in the /etc/modprobe.d folder. there can be found the text file alsa-base.conf

By changing (as root) and adding the yellow highlighted line to the file I seem to have made the sound chip on the motherboard's connection be recognised as an analogue 3 pin phono connector thus enabling it to send the correct signals out and not expecting a microphone signal in and line in to be received.

# Prevent abnormal drivers from grabbing index 0
options snd_hda_intel model=3stack
options bt87x index=-2
options cx88_alsa index=-2
options saa7134-alsa index=-2
options snd-atiixp-modem index=-2
options snd-intel8x0m index=-2
options snd-via82xx-modem index=-2
options snd-usb-audio index=-2
options snd-usb-caiaq index=-2
options snd-usb-ua101 index=-2
options snd-usb-us122l index=-2
options snd-usb-usx2y index=-2


I still have some work to do on this as I'm not sure if everything is working OK but I am getting there.

Finally I checked that the option of 5.1 was now there in the sound options of the control panel and moved the option from 2 channel stereo to 5.1 stereo.

I also checked alsamixer from the Terminal which seemed to only show the first 5 channel volume options by moving across with the right arrow the other options appeared from the edge of the screen to check also. I made sure the correct options for volume were set here also.

Thats where I'm up to.

XBOX 360 gamepad Install

Finally found a good driver install for Ubuntu/Mint that works correctly for this gamepad.

From:
http://www.noobslab.com/2014/08/configure-xbox-controller-on-your.html






sudo add-apt-repository ppa:rael-gc/ubuntu-xboxdrv

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-xboxdrv

sudo service xboxdrv restart

D-Link IP Camera setup on Linux Mint

Well last night I gave in to shopping temptation and got a D-Link DCS-932LB1

It was cheap and on offer and although it only said Windows / Mac use I thought I would take a chance to get it working under Mint. That BUY NOW button eh !

So first I found Zone Minder, which looks a great program but I had real trouble setting it up so I gave up trying after following a few guides. Something to do with systemd and systemctl I could not figure out.
So I looked for something simpler and I found it.

Motion

I've just started to play with it but I need to get this down before I move on to saving video and using it via my android phone & other places, so the basics of setting it up.

First I found a guide on how to just set up the camera with my router at sensor.org

This was basically connect by ethernet cable to my router
plug the camera in
navigate to my router setup homepage where I found the WPS connection button,
then press the button on the back of the camera and the WPS button on the setup page
The router found the IP camera and I was away.

I found the new connection on the list of active connections on the router info page
copied the internal IP address 192.168.x.x
and pasted it into my browser
This brought up the IP cameras setup page where I entered the supplied username and password
from the manual. The first thing I did was change this and follow the setup from there
keeping the simplest options for now.

I was now ready to install Motion

sudo apt-get install motion
sudo apt-get update

apparently this should automatically create a

motion group (I learnt a bit from trial and error about there from installing Plex !)
it should also add a motion user

This info is on Linux.com at how to operate linux spycams with motion

after making sure this was right I started motion

$: motion

mistake it wouldn't give permission to use
silly me

$: sudo motion

and it started up. I then found it had failed to find the video device

I followed the instructions on Linux.com down to the point where the author talked about
permissions again.

Her name was carla so I noticed she gave the instructions

~$ sudo chown carla:carla .motion/motion.conf

Her group name was obviously carla and so was her user name.

I replaced the carla with my group name and user name so it all worked.

I followed the info to make more directories then saved localhost:8081 and localhost:8080 to my browser favourites
The first port 8081 is the feed to see the camera output and the second port 8080 is the configuration
file where you can enter and change different set up options.

I went to config then list and all the changable options were there

To see my camera I then went back to the IP Camera's setup page and found the link to the feed by
right clicking on the video feed and using inspect on my chromium browser to pick up the link as shown on Linux.com.

pasting that link into netcam_url =
and then pasting admin:mypassword
into netcam_userpass =

Bang. the feed came up on the hocalhost:8081 webpage

Now I can mess about with other options another day to add functionality

Mupen64plus

Just a little about setting up Mupen64plus, the Nintendo 64 emulator.

It seems this puts files everywhere and none of the Ubuntu places that are suggested in most tutorials.

So easiest after installing the deb file, do a search in the Nautilus file manager for Mupen64 and watch all the places its stuck itself show up.

Install the frontend "M64py" to make it a little easier to point to where the Rom's are stored along with where the executable is and Data files / Plugins. Leave the search results handy so you can see where everything is.

One problem I had was setting up my controller. I used a Xbox360 Pad and tried to follow the joystick setup walkthru that is an easy find online.

https://code.google.com/p/mupen64plus/wiki/ControllerSetup

Two things to point out about this, the config.ini file it talks about is in the $HOME/.config hidden file in your home directory.

(Dot). files need to be seen in a folder by going to the menu bar and selecting View then scrolling down to hidden files and selecting so they are shown. There also may be other config.ini files for other emulators there also.

This file is nice to view and only needs a little amending (as root).

The parameter needs to be changed in the Core section of mupen64plus.cfg. It should look something like this:

Joy Mapping Stop = "j0b10"

That's for joystick 0, button 10

This gives you an ESCAPE from the emulator mapped to button 10.

The InputAutoCfg.ini file which is the file used to set various joypads up was harder to find thus the Nautilus search. The controller Setup info was wrong for me. I found it at /usr/share/games/mupen64plus 

Before I go any further I have to say I had lots of trouble getting the controller to work until I realised my controller itself was not connecting correctly. I was forced to try a few different USB ports for it to connect. I checked that the system was seeing it by doing a lsusb command at the terminal until it showed up.

I grabbed the Xbox 360 controller configuration file and pasted it into the InputAutoCfg.ini and tried and tried to get it to work with the controller setup GUI in M64py frontend. No luck

Finally I found a post on the Ubuntu forums that had the answer. Call the programme from a Terminal window. I did this and all the setup configuration options were there to be changed and saved. easy when you know how.

One final thing I've been finding with emulators in general. Quite a few I've used have been opening in full screen and I've had trouble escaping from the full screen view.

There have been some quite bad tempered replies to posts from people who had this problem from some unsympathetic dicks. They should just be nice and tell them on some emulators to escape full screen it is ALT and ENTER. Even with random pushes that was hard to find and when its buried somewhere in the midst of a manual its even harder to work out.

Rotating timelapse Images in bulk & converting to AVI using ImageMagic

CD to your folder  eg.

TERMINAL

cd Desktop/camera/



Make a bash script. My images are upside down so I need the rotation 180% using ImageMagic's convert.


TERMINAL


for file in *.jpg; do convert $file -rotate 180 rotated-$file; done


This script takes files all files (* wildcard) within the folder that are jpg format and rotates them 180 degrees. It then renames the file by adding a "rotated-" to the start of the file name.

I just remove the unrotated jpg's cos I'm lazy then

TERMINAL

ls *.jpg > stills.txt


List all jpg files and send that down a pipe to a text file called stills.txt

I can then use memcoder (if installed) to convert the timelapse pictures to a short avi video

mencoder -nosound -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:aspect=16/9:vbitrate=8000000 -vf scale=1920:1080 -o timelapse.avi -mf type=jpeg:fps=24 mf://@stills.txt

Wow, been some time and rzip

Wow, forgot how long it's been on here. My little place I keep my hints for myself and any others who get the same issues as me.
Obviously there are less issues with Linux Mint and I've not broken anything enough yet.

Anyway needed to do some compression on files today. Did a search, read a bit and it looks like rzip, from the repository was the one for me. Apparently lrzip is slightly better but I'd started encoding by the time I looked at that and it's just an upgrade to rzip.

So first I install it.

do a : rzip --help   for the info.

 -0            fastest (worst) compression
 -6            default compression
 -9            slowest (best) compression
 -d            decompress
 -o filename   specify the output file name
 -S suffix     specify compressed suffix (default '.rz')
 -f            force overwrite of any existing files
 -k            keep existing files
 -P            show compression progress
 -V            show version

Important notes being without the "-k" it deletes the original file after compression. I may not want that sometimes.

Major Fail ...bios corruption...keyboard not working

Well last night I installed some software, well a few pieces of software actually and I didn't check them out just expected them to work and trusted the recommendations from a website. The articles name was something about "Things to install after a new install of Mint Petra" or something like that.
I was really tired and didn't switch the PC off that night just fell asleep on the sofa till this morning. i headed back to the PC and was just sorting e-mail and messaging friends when....Shutdown. The PC just crashed.

I have been messing about with help from the Mint forum's, changing my bios memory settings as Mint seems not to recognise both my memory chips on my ASROCK 960GM motherboard. I thought maybe this was it.

Or the problems I've had with USB 3.0 connections also. Maybe this was all connected to my current troubles in hindsight.

Anyway on boot up again, my keyboard was not recognised and I was unable to get into bios to check things there. I got the GRUB menu but with no keyboard I couldn't access my Desktop either.
I disconnected all my USB connections and tried the keyboard and mouse in other USB ports first (I've heard some motherboards will only recognise the first USB port), no luck, then up to the loft for an old style keyboard and mouse. plugged them in to the Din sockets. nothing again. The PC was still not working just hitting GRUB and staying there waiting for  input from the non existent keyboard.

I needed help from the internet.

No computer ....

Up to the loft again and I pulled out one of my old PC's (I never seem to get around to getting rid of them) and 3 hours later after searching through several Hard disks to find a working one I know have a running Intel 2Core E8400 with 1mb ram and 160gig hard disk. I loaded the Mint Live CD I always keep around up. It had Nadia on it so just used that to download Petra and burnt over that copy (it's on a re-writeable). I know I could have updated in other ways but it just seemed the simplest.

Anyway I now have second PC to play with and this one has a floppy disk on it so i can check out those dozens of really old floppy disks I have lying about that I've meant to check for anything interesting I may have put on them years ago.

Back to my immediate problem. After some forum searches I decided to replace the Bios battery in the faulty PC. This didn't work to get the keyboard running again but now I had access to my cloud storage (where I keep PDF manuals of all the stuff I have) I could check out the Motherboard manual and reset the Bios jumpers.

Well this has worked, I have my Keyboard working again.
My first thing to do now is what is happening this second. Back-up... I've loaded the Mint Petra disk on the faulty PC and I am copying all the files in the home folder to a second Hard drive. There's a lot and really this has not been done for a while so it also gives me a chance to sort the trash in there out as well.

***USEFUL BIT***
It seems when you use the LIVE CD it will not let you copy files from one drive to another. It says permission denied. To bypass this a quick search told me I needed to be administrator to do this, which makes sense. To be able to do this on the Desktop all you need to do is right click on the folder you want to copy from and open as root then right click on the folder you will be sending to and open that as root also. you can then pull files and folders over. Use go up one folder on the folder menu to access that folder to open it's child.

I'm thinking I may just do a re-install as I can't find any answers yet on how to remove a program from a broken installation from the terminal in a Live CD. I assume it may be possible but being root and checking the dependencies in where-ever the list of programs are kept by the package manager.
I'm thinking this just because Windows kept things in the Registry. I may be wrong but this is all a learning process eh.
At least I've got a spare PC out of this mess to use to sort things out with.

Opening a graphical program from Terminal

One thing I have had to work out myself as it may seem obvious to many or it may be stated somewhere I've never looked is sudo and gksudo

I've come across errors many times in Terminal such as

IBUS-WARNING

Gtk-WARNING

This I now know is because I was trying to open a programme with a graphical front end from within the Terminal.

I now know if I try to open it as root using the sudo command I need to do it as gksudo. This is to warn the system it is opening a graphical programme which may have other environmental variables it needs to set up which would not be otherwise.


So for example in Terminal and wanting to use gedit (the editing programme) I use from the command line:

$ gksudo gedit

and not

$ sudo gedit

Old forgotten encripted files

Dear me, I've just found some old embarrassing poetry from the 1990's. Well I know that's what it is but I encrypted it to stop nosey family members from looking when I lived with my family and used their computer.
It looks like to find out what I wrote I'm going to have to decrypt it but I forgot the password. I better try  "Rarcrack-0.2"

make sure I have libxml2-dev build-essential on my system if not

Terminal

apt-get install libxml2-dev build-essential


Download Rarcrack from the Internet. Sourceforge.

place rarcrack-0.2.tar.bz2 in the home folder along with poetry.rar

unpack rarcrack

Terminal
tar -xjf rarcrack-0.2.tar.bz2

got to the folder

Terminal
cd rarcrack-0.2

then build the program

Terminal
make

then as root install it.

Terminal
sudo make install

Now all I have to do is use it as a command in Terminal for anything I want to try and decrypt. Hope I didn't put too long a password on this thing.

Terminal
rarcrack poetry.rar

Non-existent Drive Mounting on boot

I've had this problem before once and recently it happened again.

When I start the computer it hangs during the Mint load-up screen with the message:
Key: Disk not mounted. Press S to skip or M to manually mount (or something like this anyway)

Sometimes I use software like PhotoRec and GParted to check friends damaged hard drives and recover their files for them. I use my external Hard disk Caddy to do this. I back-up the drive first and then start messing with it sometimes booting to a windows partition to use CHKDSK the windows disk tool along with other things such as Hyrons boot disk etc.

Somehow I seem to on occasion reboot to Linux Mint without removing the damaged drive, I think I've done it when I have been tired or frustrated but the end result is Mint automatically adds the drive to my start up. This is probably the Automount programme (I need to read up more on that one).

Result, on a boot up the computer expects to find a disk that is not there after I have removed it from the caddy.

To fix this, once booted into Mint and after the message (Press S to skip the mounting) I need to go into Terminal and change the fstab script which controls the disks expected to be found.

Terminal
sudo fdisk -l

As Root. This lists the drives. Check the ones available. sda (first physical disc), sda1 (first physical disc, partition 1), sdb2 (second physical disk, partition 2) for examples.

Terminal
gksudo gedit /etc/fstab

As Root. Use "gedit" text editor to view contents of file "fstab" located in folder "etc".

Once this is up and viewable I can see the instructions and options for each partition to be mounted. There is a  description above each instruction with a hash (#) symbol in front of it  which is used like the old REM comment tag in Basic's.

Anyway I use this hash (#) tag to comment out the instruction which loads the now no longer existent drive. I save the file to make the changes and use menu to reboot the machine.

The computer now loads as normal without searching for a non-existent drive.

September: Memes, Music and 2D modelling

September has been quite quiet really. Everything I have wanted to do using Linux Mint I've been able to do easily and quickly.

I've made a few Memes to post for friends. Knocked them up, no problem using "Gimp" and "Pinta" (the Linux equivalent of PaintNet). One thing I didn't realise with "Pinta" though was that you cannot print with it. It just took an extra stage saving the file then opening it with an image viewer and printing it from there.

I've started to use "Clementine" as my music player instead of "Quod Libet" as it seems to be a bit faster, it also has a nice Tag editor built in and a few other options but not too many as to make it bloated and too much. One point with "Quod Libet" also was that it had a few problems associating itself with my various music file types Ogg and MP3. I did fix it but it kept breaking. In the end I just could not be bothered with finding out why as I had discovered "Clementine" by that time and decided to use that.

One other thing I've been messing with over the last month is trying to make 2D plans for some  wooden weathervanes, windmills I wanted to build. Gimp was no good for this so I tried Inkscape the Vector graphics program, thinking it could size things up more accurately. It was too complicated for the casual use I wanted so I moved onto looking at other modelling programs.
Blender the 3D modeller was again just too much as I just wanted a basic 2D plan to print and paste onto wood to be cut out on my bandsaw.
LibraCad hit the sweet spot. Not to over complicated and 2D. It's a bit light on tutorials and help files but I have managed to get some plans drawn on it. Its still a learning curve having done nothing like this since Technical Drawing at school where we had a pencil and a ruler. I think I will improve soon though with a little work. YouTube did have a reasonable set of tutorials but as I said there's a lot missing for the novice like me.

All in one converter

FF Multiconverter

Converts Video, Documents and Images.

Terminal



sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ffmulticonverter/stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ffmulticonverter

Supported formats:

Audio/Video formats:

aac, ac3, afc, aiff, amr, asf, au, avi, dvd, flac, flv, mka, mkv, mmf, mov, mp3, mp4, mpg, ogg, ogv, psp, rm, spx, vob, wav, webm, wma, wmv
And any other format supported by ffmpeg.

Image formats:

bmp, cgm, dpx, emf, eps, fpx, gif, jbig, jng, jpeg, mrsid, p7, pdf, picon, png, ppm, psd, rad, tga, tif, webp, xpm

Document file formats:

doc > odt, pdf
html > odt
odp > pdf, ppt
ods > pdf
odt > doc, html, pdf, rtf, sxw, txt, xml
ppt > odp
rtf > odt
sdw > odt
sxw > odt
txt > odt
xls > ods
xml > doc, odt, pdf

Iomega Buzz and Linux

This is a really old capture card and unit I had lying about in a box that I decided to hook up after having loads of problems with my EasyCap USB capture device. Once this worked but now, whatever I do it will not.

Anyway I thought why not throw the card in the PC and see what happens ? If nothing else I will have a SCSI card that may come in useful one day (the Card has one built in).

Well it wasn't as easy to get results as I was hoping until today when I decided to go back to it and try again.
The latest Mint Olivia has drivers for this models chip built into the Kernel but I have never up to yet got it to display video, until now. I found a post on the Ubuntu forums referencing people having problems with the aforementioned EasyCap device. Someone had posted a solution for getting video out of it. Well it didn't work for MY easyCap when I tried it but I thought as it's plugged in why not check the fix out using the Buzz ?

It worked !

So, this solution.....

Apparently the EasyCap assumed (my simple understanding) that input from the transmitting device, whether it be a Camcorder, VCR, camera, Satellite receiver, whatever was transmitting S-Video format, so if you are using the composite input to the EasyCap you would get no Video unless you were sending an S_video signal using the S-Video input.
I have no S-Video leads for anything so had never checked if anything worked this way. All my old stuff has composite or SCART outputs which I use a SCART to Composite converter plug on.

(Composite is the Yellow Phono plug usually next to the Red and White Audio out plugs on old stuff)

I digress, I connected up everything as I would normally for a test on a little camera I have that sends a live composite signal. I fired up "Cheese" my webcam application, checked its properties and set it to /dev/Video1 which is my little webcam and got a nice reflection of myself waving to myself on screen. So it works for that. I then changed to /dev/Video0 which is the Iomega buzz...Blank screen.
I then closed down Cheese and opened terminal, entering the fix from the forum.

Terminal

sudo apt-get install v4l-utils

This installed the v41 utilities for the Linux Video driver V4l. Then on installation

Terminal
v4l2-ctl -d /dev/video0 -i 0

This is a direct command to tell the system whether the input is composite on /dev/Video0

Opening "Cheese" again I selected /dev/Video0 once more in preferences and found a video feed that could be watched or recorded. I now need to check out my old VCR tapes and see if it records the sound also, but that's another day.

I don't yet know if this will be permanent on a reboot or if I will have to make a configuration file for this. I will know tomorrow.

The info along with how to set things up with VLC Player can be found (after a long scroll to the end of the thread) at:

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-924504.html

Thanks Guys !!

Get Plex Media Server Running Quick

OK so I've had to install Plex Media Server a few times and had problems because I had no idea what I was doing. I've read various forums and the Plex site, all of which make it seem so complex to do.
This time I knew what the problem was and did it simply and quickly.

There is no up to date Plex software in the repositories so I had to go to the plex site and download the Ubuntu 64 bit version that comes in a debian package.

I then double clicked on it to install it using the debian installer. Upon installation I opened up the menu and found under "Other" the menu item for Plex.

This opens up a webpage as it tries to log into the server as it runs. I skipped past this to the add folder page where you add your folders containing your video.

Now we come to the problem that many a page of rubbish has been written and people who know what they are doing complicate.

The problem is "permissions". The server (Plex) needs permission to read and write to the folder containing the video files.

I use my Video folder which is set up with the install of Mint in the home folder.

The easy way to set this up from the desktop without having to go into Terminal is to navigate to the home folder, right click on this folder to bring the menu up and "open as root". You need to have root permission to give Plex the permissions it needs because Plex is further down the pecking order you may say.

On putting in your password the folder will open to show its subfolders, one of which is Video (where I keep my Video files). By right clicking again on the Video folder and going to properties you open this tabbed screen where the second tab is permissions. Here is the owner and groups that can use the files within.

Go to group and scroll down the list of applications next to it until you reach Plex. You can now define which permissions plex has within these folders. Give it read and write permissions, tick the apply permissions to enclosed files and close the tab.

Voila, you can now return to the Plex web browser screen and add the Video folder or any other folders within it you wish to designate for movies, home, movies, music etc.

One other thing if there are still problems try changing permissions in the /home/.plex folder and /usr/lib, basically anywhere plex may want to write something like a config or log file. I'm just thinking of this offhand and can't exactly remember where the places are it does write but it makes sense doesn't it.

Quick safe reboot tip

If you lose your Graphics display as my previous post shows I have done this is a quick tip on how to do a safe reboot  without being able to see anything.

Press Alt + Prtscn + r
Press Alt + Prtscn + s
Press Alt + Prtscn + e
Press Alt + Prtscn + i
Press Alt + Prtscn + n
Press Alt + Prtscn + u
Press Alt + Prtscn + b

To remember; Raising Skinny Elephants Is Never Utterly Boring

Another one found on the Mint Forums.

ATI Graphics fix for Radeon HD2*** - HD4*** Cards

Well I fixed this once but then after messing about adding a Nvidia external card to my system I broke it and had to go through the painful experience of finding the fix again.
So better write this down.

The Problem.

It seems that ATI Radeon Graphics Cards and built in motherboard Graphics using these chips (such as my ASRock 960GM Motherboard) are a bit problematic when installing the propriety drivers and the open source drivers are a bit crap (up to yet).

It has problems using the Cinnamon desktop and manifests itself by only using software rendering which has meant using 45% of the processors power and the fan runs hot and crazy sometimes. I also noticed no hardware 3D.

The reason.

After some reading and a lot of red herrings from various forums it comes down to ATI no longer supporting the Linux drivers for these cards, series Radeon HD 2*** through to Radeon HD4***. Mine is an onboard Radeon HD3000.
It seems as the x-org server which runs the desktop behind the scenes has been updated this has created incompatibilities with the driver.
The newer versions of the ATI Catalyst propriety installation program for Linux will not work for the older cards / chips and are not supported anymore.

The Solution.

The only way to fix this is to downgrade your x-org server to an older version and then install the legacy (old) driver that last worked fully.
Luckily Tomasz Makarewicz has made a fix for this and a web search for his site shows you how. https://launchpad.net/~makson96/+archive/fglrx

Now I followed his instructions but still had problems with Cinnemon not running. It crashed on start up.
I wasn't the only one and found an interesting fix on the Linux Mint forums. I can't remember the link though and this guy needs some credit too. I did write down his process to do after the makson96 fix was done and this has fixed everything. Even the Catalyst adjustment program works on the menu.
This is it.

Reboot ...... Cinnemon crashes.....

Open terminal

sudo apt-get remove --purge xorg-driver-fglrx fglrx*

sudo apt-get install --reinstall libgl1-mesa-dri xserver-xorg-core

sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg


He then says delete xorg.conf which is in the ./etc/ folder but I don't think this is necessary.

Anyway then reboot. I did it straight from the terminal with

 sudo reboot

Voila !!! My sytem was working with the ATI drivers.

Next Job getting duel monitors working. that should be fun.

My Music Organisation Process

Well I've been organising and converting my music collection, which is a mixed bag of formats. I've tried tidying it up before with mixed success. It's still a bit of a task but it's coming along.

This post is just about the method I've finally settled on and what seems to be working.

The biggest problems I've previously come across are tagging correctly, unknown albums and multiple formats. I've narrowed down the tools I need to cover all possibilities I've come across and built a handy little set that seems to do the job without installing too much stuff I will never use.

These are:

Sound Converter
MusicBrainz Picard
Quod Libet
and the command line tool BinChunker

By using these four tools I have managed to overcome just about every issue I've had. The only thing I have not sorted out is album art. I've not really looked into it yet as my priority was to sort the actual music out for easy access and cataloguing and so stuff will play to my media players around the house.

My first thought was "How am I going to store the files ?". I will be storing everything on an external Hard disc connected to my PC with Mint Olivia running as its operating system. This made my choice of file system to use wide but limited as well. I did some research.

fat16 / fat32 = too old and newer file systems seemed better at dealing with faults.

exFat = This is the system designed with USB sticks (Pen drives or whatever) in mind. It looked modern and what I was looking for but it has a flaw. Linux support is not so good from what I read and the linux drivers are slow. As I will be using Linux machines mostly I don't want search delays and stuttering music. So this option was out.

ext3 and ext4 = My operating system is formatted in this so I thought, why not ? A lot of info (the bits I understand) seemed outdated saying ext4 was untested and stick to ext3. I decided to go the ext4 way.

 On settling with ext4 I started to format an external drive I had using gparted.
I hit a problem. The drive I had was a Western Digital external drive and it would not allow me to write to it after the ext4 formatting unless i was in ROOT. A little investigation showed me the drive uses WD Elements which seems to be an external piece of software held with the driver chip and not on the Hard disc itself. This is there to do various tasks that work very well on a Windows based machine but the WD forums basically leave you on your own as a Linux user. Not being able to bypass this block without spending too much time I abandoned my choice of ext4 and made a new decision.

NTFS = After my previous choice was made too difficult to proceed with I was left with just the one. I did look at a few other systems such as HFS and Reiser4 but each had their minus points that put me off. And so I was left with NTFS, which seemed to be the best option with the equipment I had.

So the external drive was formatted and ready to go. I could now write to it and all was well.

My second decision was how to organise things while I was going through the process of conversion. I decided to put a folder next to my original music folder to store the originals but after I had processed them, to make it easier to distinguish files converted between conversion sessions (we all need a break eh!). This meant at the end of each session I could just move the files over and it would be easy to see where to start again when I came back.

I then made a folder for the converted files on the external hard disc to store these files in.

I used SoundConverter next setting it up to store the converted files in the root of the external drive. I did this so I could check for errors and multiple albums before storing them in the completed folder. SoundConverter has a bulk process option which is why I chose it.

I decided to use ogg as my format to convert to, so all my files would be the same. There are various qualities and formats so I didn't think it would make too much difference and FLAC would be overkill on most. If I was unhappy with the sound quality I could always go back and re-rip the CD's from my collection although this would not be possible with my own recordings from my friends bands gigs obviously.

Any faulty TAGS were altered in Quod Libet as this has a good tag editor or updated in Picard so the file names and tags were correct.

At one point I found a Bin and Cue file which was quickly converted using BinChunker to a set of Wav files which could then be converted and tagged.

So thats how its been working so far.

File and default application association

OK, today I've been messing with my music collection. I've decided to use "Quod Libet" as my music player. It's much simpler than "banshee" which has just too many options and other rubbish I won't use on it. Quod Libet is much simpler and has the options for any plugins I may want to add in the future..and my favourite thing about it is that is has a nice file viewer which is exactly how I like to choose my music (from the folder it is stored in).

Anyway I set everything up but found under menu / system settings / details / default applications I could not associate Quod Libet with the option to play all music files as the default player. It just was not there. it wasn't under "other applications" either.

After some searching of forums I found the process to add it. Apparently you need to associate the file type to the application, just as you would in Windows, but for some reason I have not discovered on my Linux learning curve Quod Libet is not showing as an application on the list.

So how to do it. Instead of using Nemo (the standard file manager) you need to use "Thunar" an alternative one (maybe a permission thing ?). Luckily I already had that installed so I navigated to it on the menu / system tools and there I opened a music file in the .ogg format, which is the type of music file I want Q L (lets call it that from now on) to play. From within the file manager view that listed the contents of the folder I was in I chose an .ogg file and right clicked on it to bring up the properties dialogue. Here it gave me the option to associate the file type with an application. Scrolling down, Q L was there. I associated it with the file by making sure the check mark was crossed and applied using the button for this. Easy, it associated the file system wide and now everytime I click on an Ogg Vorbis music file type Q L comes up to play it.

It even shows now as linked on the system details screen.

I've come across this situation with other file types and applications and now I have the answer !

Software manager not opening from Menu ?

Well I've had this problem for ages after I messed about with menu editing in order to create a new folder showing my Emulators.
Lots of searches later I finally found the issue. I'd had an inkling it was because the application needed to be called from root. I initially put "sudo makeinstall" as the call in the command text box after opening properties in edit menu (right click on the menu in the left hand corner).
This did not work. I finally found I was correct but the command was "gksu mintInstall".
Fixed !

Saving a webpage as PDF

Sometimes I want to save a webpage for viewing offline or it has interesting info I want to collate into a package to read all at once with related info. I used to save this as a HTML complete webpage and cut out the info into a word document.
then I used an online service like Evernote but this one didn't want you to sign up (which i didn't want to). That stopped working a while ago.
So now the easiest way to take that page offline is to use the CUPS to PDF printer option.

Terminal

sudo aptitude install cups-pdf

Then its just   FILE > PRINT using PDF option from the web browser.

The PDF will have the webpage title as its filename and is found in your HOME directory.