The Linux Experiment

A new episode of the Listener Feedback podcast has been released. This episode features the Internet nerdcore gangster rap super group Futuristic Sex Robotz with their album Hotel Coral Essex. Download it here.

A new episode of the Listener Feedback podcast has been released. This episode features the industrial group Fresh Body Shop with their album Doctor X. Download it here.

A new episode of the Listener Feedback podcast has been released. This episode features the extremely talented acoustic rock artist Josh Woodward with his album Dirty Wings. Download it here.

A new episode of the Listener Feedback podcast has been released. This episode features the extremely talented one-man rock band Slim with his album Interstate Medicine. Download it here.

A new episode of the Listener Feedback podcast has been released. On this episode it is the international internet supergroup Tryad with their album Listen. Check it out here.

A new episode of the Listener Feedback podcast has been released. On this episode it is the French band Drunksouls with their album On verra plus tard. Check it out here.

Just a quick update to let you know that the second episode of the Listener Feedback podcast has been released. The artist on this episode is Blackwell with his album Un4givable. Check it out here.

A fellow Linux Experiment Guinea Pig and I decided that we would start a new podcast showcasing some of the very best (and possibly worst) royalty free and creative commons music available. We’ve devised a short-format creation, so you don’t get bored, that aims to explore a new artist/album combination with each episode. In the podcast we share our thoughts, praise and criticism of each work and also feature a few songs in order to give you a taste of what to expect on the full album.

Check out the podcast over at www.listenerfeedback.net where you can listen to the show, download the episode’s featured album, leave us a comment or make a suggestion as to what we should listen to next. I hope you enjoy.

Yesterday, I picked up the newly launched (in Canada) Samsung Captivate. So far, I’m extremely impressed with the device. The super amoled display is gorgeous, the touch screen is responsive, and the UI is stunning to look at and use. Coming from a Blackberry Curve 8310, this phone is like a digital orgasm.

Once I finished gushing over how awesome this phone is, I decided to try and get it to interact with my Linux Mint 9 Isadora install. For now, I just want to be able to transfer images and music to and from the device, although later on, I’d like to get a development environment set up and try my hand at writing some apps.

My first try at getting the phone to play nicely with Linux was not successful. It took me a little bit of fooling around before I could figure it out, but here goes:

• On the phone, navigate to Settings > Applications > USB Settings and make sure that ‘Ask on Connection’ is selected
• Plug your phone into the a USB port, and when prompted, select ‘Mass Storage’ from the dialog that appears on the phone
• At this point, if you open up your Computer in Nautilus, you should see an icon that says something like SAMSUNG SGH-I896, but you won’t be able to interact with it in any way
• On the phone, grab the notification bar at the top of the home screen and drag it down
• In the notifications area, tap USB Connected, and when prompted, select Mount from the dialog
• Back in Nautilus, the icon under Computer should now say something like SAMSUNG SGH-I896: 14GB Filesystem, and you should be able to read and write to the card

With these steps complete, I was able to interact with the phone through the file system and from within Banshee and FSpot. I’m not sure why the phone won’t allow Linux to mount its storage devices by default when in Mass Storage mode, but this little work around seems to make it behave correctly.

Drop me a line in the comments if you have any Linux/Android compatibility questions, and I’ll do my best to help you out.

Recently I have started to mess around with the Vorbis audio codec, commonly found within the Ogg media container. Unlike Theora, which I had also experimented with but won’t post the results for fear of a backlash, I must say I am rather impressed with Vorbis. I had no idea that the open source community had such a high quality audio codec available to them. Previously I always sort of passed off Vorbis’ reason for being regarded as ‘so great’ within the community as simply a lack of options. However after some comparative tests between Vorbis and MP3 I must say I am a changed man. I would now easily recommend Vorbis as a quality choice if it fits your situation of use.

What is Vorbis?

Like I had mentioned above, Vorbis is the name of a very high quality free and open source audio codec. It is analogous to MP3 in that you can use it to shrink the size of your music collection, but still retain very good sound. Vorbis is unique in that it only offers a VBR mode, which allows it to squeeze the best sound out of the fewest number of bits. This is done by lowering the bitrate during sections of silence or unimportant audio. Additionally, unlike other audio codecs, Vorbis audio is generally encoded at a supplied ‘quality’ level. Currently the bitrate for quality level 4 is 128kbit/s, however as the encoders mature they may be able to squeeze out the same quality at a lower bitrate. This will potentially allow a modern iteration of the encoder to achieve the same quality level but by using a lower bitrate, saving you storage space/bandwidth/etc.

So Vorbis is better than MP3?

Obviously when it comes to comparing the relative quality of competing audio codecs it must always be up to the listener to decide. That being said I firmly believe that Vorbis is far better than MP3 at low bitrates and is, at the very least, very comparable to MP3 as you increase the bitrate.

The Tests

I began by grabbing a FLAC copy of the Creative Commons album The Slip by Nine Inch Nails here. I chose FLAC because it provided me with the highest quality possible (lossless CD quality) from which to encode the samples with. Then, looking around at some Internet radio websites, I decided that I should test the following bitrates: 45kbit/s, 64kbit/s, 96kbit/s, and finally 128kbit/s (for good measure). I encoded them using only the default encoder settings and the following terminal commands:

For MP3 I used LAME and the following command. I chose average bitrate (ABR) which is really just VBR with a target, similar to Vorbis:

flac -cd {input file goes here}.flac | lame –abr {target bitrate} – {output file goes here}.mp3

For Vorbis I used OggEnc and the following command:

oggenc -b {target bitrate} {input file goes here}.flac -o {output file goes here}.ogg

Results

I think I would be a hypocrite if I didn’t tell you to just listen for yourself… The song in question is track #4, Discipline.

Note: if you are using Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, or anything else that supports HTML5/Vorbis, you should be able to play the Vorbis file right in your browser.

45kbit/s MP3(1.4MB) Vorbis(1.3MB)

64kbit/s MP3(2.0MB) Vorbis(1.9MB)

96kbit/s MP3(2.9MB) Vorbis(2.8MB)

128kbit/s MP3(3.8MB) Vorbis(3.6MB)