12 Dec 2005 Rippit   » (Apprentice)

Ogg Frog

Since it's going to be a long time until I have a software release, I thought it would be cool to host some torrents of Creative Commons music at www.oggfrog.com, so I set about encoding MichaelCrawford's album Geometric Visions (it has the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 2.5 license) into a variety of formats (Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, MP3 and AAC) after recapturing it from the original analog master tape.

I was able to make a good digitization, and get all the formats encoded using Free Software, but it was pretty hard and I spent a lot of time pondering man pages and "--help" info. I used Audacity 1.0 on Mac OS 9 to digitize (because my old 8500 has the best audio hardware of any of my machines, and there is a painful but effective way to enable real-time audio processing on Mac OS 9, by writing an interrupt task), Audacity 1.2 on Mac OS X, flac on Debian Sarge, and VLC Media Player on Mac OS X. I'm still planning to use oggenc and faac.

I can see that a single program that could encode to any format, with a consistent user interface, would be very popular. I had been wondering if Ogg Frog ought to offer command-line tools, and I think I will, not just because they will be easier for scripting than a GUI but because I can ship something useful sooner while I write the easier-to-use GUI version for the teeny boppers to download.

Do You Offer Creative Commons Music?

I'd be happy to host torrents of your album in all the above formats. But I don't have any kind of automated way of accepting submissions. For now, if you'd like me to host torrents of your music, contact Rippit the Ogg Frog at torrents@oggfrog.com and we'll make arrangements. I'd need to get your music via snail mail as an audio CD, or a data CD containing WAV or FLAC files.

Music Writing

Again, because I have no software to offer yet, I am writing articles on the general topic of ripping, encoding, playing and backup of digital music. My first offering is:

It has the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs license.

It's about how Rippit decided to back up his CD collection after Twiggy the Ogg Dog chewed up his brand-new U2 CD.

Twiggy

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