Vakkotaur

Last night after work I did a bit of shopping, getting things I'd find useful at MFF and on the way there and back. I also got gas for the snowblower since snow was predicted, and not a trivial amount. It's snowing now but hasn't started accumulating just yet.

I'd planned on doing a bit of pre-packing for MFF as well, but got distracted and annoyed by getting mp3 encoding going on Fedora Core 4. I found an audacity rpm that had mp3 decode support compiled in, so that went well enough. Then I installed lame. Or tried to. Eventually, with some guidance from yakko I got that taken care of.

I still don't have Audacity exporting mp3 though. Audacity tries to use one of the lame libraries and evidently this package doesn't quite manage it. I kept getting tiny files with nothing or almost nothing in them rather than the proper result. Audacity will export wav and ogg just fine. I can use the command line: lame input_file.wav output_file.mp3 and get a proper mp3.

I did at least get Grip going, or it looks like it. I ripped a CD this morning and it looks like xmms isn't registering the track length. I'll listen to the results tonight and see if entire tracks really encoded right. I hope so. It's a bunch of tunes sung by Fred Astaire and it'd be nice to get those onto a USB stick for the drive on Thursday.