Alban’s blog

When you need to retrieve a sound from a ugly format (like realaudio, windows media audio, and other proprietary things), mplayer is your best friend :

mplayer -ao pcm:file=output.wav your_file_or_url

It works fine with rtsp: and other bad protocols.

Playlist : Take care with .ram files and other playlist formats. In this case, the url content is only a text with the stream url. mplayer provides again a solution :

mplayer -ao pcm:file=output.wav -playlist file_or_url_playlist

Video : Add the option -vo null if the initial document contains video, the video part will be ignored.

Compress resulted file : The created wav file must be compressed cautiously. Most of the time, you’ve retrieved a sound already very compressed. If you create a ogg file with a low quality, you may experience problems. Use a lossless compression when possible, like flac.

Unix Command Line Kung-Fu is 33 interesting pages with a lot of shell tips (linked today by Larry Wright). My small selection with “customized” examples :


$ !!:p
$ !!



$ iwconfig
zsh: command not found: iwconfig
$ /sbin/!!



$ e app/model/user.rb
$ svn diff !$



$ ./script/generate rspec_controler user
$ ^user^session



$ seq -w 1 12



$ awk '{ print $1 }' access.log | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -5



$ less -r +G log/test.log


Some of my own favorites :


$ sudo du -s /home/* | sort -rn | head



$ echo 2048 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/min_free_kbytes



$ sudo sh -c "ls /var/archives/*home*"
$ sudo find /var/archives -name "*home*"



$ pgrep nm-applet | head -n -1 | xargs kill



$ alias ifconfig='/sbin/ifconfig'



$ alias myps='ps -u $USER'