Episode: 283
Title: HPR0283: Convert Ogg to MP3
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0283/hpr0283.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 15:31:54

---

.
Welcome to Hecker Public Radio.
I'm Monster B and on the call with me is 330.
Hello.
Claude 2.
Hello.
And Peter 64.
Hey, it's Dune.
Today's topic is how to convert Og to MP3.
Why in the heck would we convert two lofty formats?
We wouldn't.
But I guess you might have to if your device doesn't play Og.
That would be a reasonable...
Reason for doing that.
Well, if you could.
If I were a podcast, I'd be a bloody relational.
You're going to have a bloody choice anymore.
But I'm not winning, Jim.
Well, say, Peter, the two you're talking about,
they sound bad in any format.
Yeah, because they're not recording the best of fidelity anyway.
And if you're playing it on a portable player,
you're not going to get the best sound anyway.
Yeah.
Because they might have cheaped out on some part
between the processor and the headphone jack.
Well, the headphones for that much.
You say, and then you plug in, you know,
the headphones they gave you that they got for a quarter of a piece
from, you know, some huge manufacturing place
in China, Taiwan, insert, whatever you want.
Or, you know, you went and bought a $20 pair of headphones
at a supermarket or something.
I mean, you're not going to get the greatest sound quality anyway.
Yeah, that's quite true.
A lot of times when you're listening to a compressed format,
you're doing it for convenience rather than for, you know,
fidelity sound, obviously.
And as long as it surrounds out the screaming kid on the bus.
Right, yeah.
The industrial grade lawn mower.
As long as you're drowning out your surroundings,
you're usually pretty happy with the quality anyway.
Yeah.
Well, this podcast is dedicated to like the people
that got zoons for Christmas because they were cheap.
No, because they're, you know,
their wife might have got them a zone,
and they're afraid to ask for the receipt to return it.
It gets something good.
Well, zoons were really cheap for a while, aren't they?
Like, no one wanted them so they were like clearing them out.
They were literally giving them away.
Yeah, so it might not be that.
They said not a zone two now.
I think so, yeah.
For some reason, they're still at it.
They're still trying.
Hey, it's Microsoft.
It takes until version three for anyone to actually care about it.
You know, it's really cool about the zone.
Is that three dates, three play limitation?
Yeah, let's see.
Somebody shares the track with you.
Yeah, see, see, we all had like brown zoons,
except for Peter had a hot pink one.
And I send all of you guys to Lennox Crank's podcast.
You could play it three times.
Oh, God, who would want to?
But if you don't play it in three days,
it'll automatically delete.
That's a pretty cool feature.
What you're saying is we need to build that into the website.
So if you don't download it in three days,
it just saves you the trouble of deleting it yourself.
You know what I'm saying?
I think we're quickly diverting from the top of the hand,
which was converting Aug to various other formats.
The good thing about Lennox and three software is that they do,
they're brilliant enough that there are like a thousand ways to convert,
you know, from one format to another.
There's like a lot of different programs to do it.
And I think we're all on here because we all have our own favorite.
I think so.
We'd like to use the GUI 330, don't you?
Yeah, I'm lazy.
I use the GUI.
There's an app I know it's in the various Debian derivatives,
but it's called Sound Converter,
and that's what it does.
It converts sound.
Good name.
And that's all it does.
It takes the ID3 or the Aug comment file or whatever.
From the one track and puts it on the other and changes the encoding.
That's it.
You can do some special things in it.
We bring it up here so that I don't...
This is in the one that...
An entry on your right-click menu in Nautilus, isn't it?
Is that the same one with that on Lennox Cranks?
No, that was a totally different one that I don't use anymore
because I don't use Nodless.
Yeah, that is another option.
I'd say it was on Lennox Cranks somewhere in Season 3.
If someone wants to go to LennoxCranks.info-flash-blog
or LennoxCranks.info-flash-forums
and look at the show notes,
you'll find it in there somewhere.
But Sound Converter is a GTK app.
And if you go into the preferences,
you can convert Aug MP3-flackwave and AAC.
And you can take any of them and convert them to any other one of those.
And you can actually change whether it's constant bitrate,
an average bitrate, or a variable bitrate.
And you can go from very low to very high quality.
And you can actually do a thing where it'll delete the original file.
So it just replaces the whole file itself.
So you don't have duplicate sitting on the same folder.
You have one version of the MP3 and one of the soggy.
It'll just remove the one that it was converting.
Have you ever had any times where you were converting in the conversion failed,
but it's still deleted the old file?
That would be my fear for that kind of thing.
I had that fear and it's never happened.
Well, not a single time.
And it's a really simple interface.
Is it like a front-end?
For something that I was using?
I think it's probably using FFN page or something.
Yeah, probably.
I've never had an issue.
So I never went digging to see what it was a front-end for.
Right.
It just worked and I went, hey, you do have to go and download a special thing
to be able to do MP3.
But there's a link, like a URL link, inside the program,
that you click and it takes you right to the page and you click the one link there
and it sets it all up for you.
Because, you know, like the two podcasts we talked about earlier
that went on only, it's not really legal for you to make your own MP3
without paying a fee.
That's what I understood and someone else was telling me otherwise for a little while.
But that's correct.
I mean, MP3s are patent-encumbered and if you're going to encode to MP3,
you really have to have someone who has to have paid that licensing fee.
Is that correct?
Well, up to a certain amount.
But if you're a free software project, you don't want to be any part of that.
You don't want to be in trouble for the guy that is making a,
we'll assume a podcast makes more than $10,000 a year.
If they were using this program to create the MP3 from an org file,
you could end up, you know, the writer of the free software
could in some way be trapped into the battle.
And just having to show up to court to go, look, it's not my problem.
Still cost you money.
Yeah, absolutely.
So I think they're just being extremely cautious and I think for good reason.
Sure.
Plus to me, who wants to play that game?
You know, like, yeah, I just don't even want to have to think about that.
If I can do org, then I'll do org.
It's a lot easier.
Yeah, but unconverted is really easy and for the people that won't want to do
what things you guys have come up with, they could use this
and be fairly brandlessly.
So it goes out to MP3 only not to just do like it.
Oh, no, no.
No, no.
Or it does AAC wave flag in three or org Bourbus.
And you can switch from any of those to any of those.
Very nice.
So if you wanted to take your horrible MP3 that you stole off the internet
and make it a flag, you can.
It won't sound any better, but you can do it.
All right.
Cool.
What do you use to convert?
I actually use programs called SOX, which is, I think it's called the
Found Exchange, but everyone calls it kind of a Swiss Army knife of audio manipulation.
It's just, it's a command line tool.
I just kind of, that was the first one that I ran into.
I think I was just looking, when I first was looking to convert audio files
from one thing to another rather than doing it in something like audacity,
where you can just, you know, you can open up an org or an MP3 or a wave or something.
Well, MP3 provided that you have lame lips installed, rather than doing that
and exporting it as something else, just do it in the command line.
And the syntax is really, really easy.
It's just, you just type in SOX and then whatever you want to convert from.
So let's say that this is a, I don't know, bad apple, Linux cast, episode 17.og.
We could do a dash C, a dash capital C for compression level.
And we have anywhere from, well, it depends on the format that you're doing.
So for MP3, it would be like a bit rate.
So we could probably say, like, I don't know, 96, okay.
And then just rename it to whatever you want it to be called,
bad apple, Linux 3, 17.mp3 hit enter.
And it's converting.
And that's pretty much as simple as it is.
You can also do it out to like, I think you can do AAC, Impag, various Impag.
If you type in SOX format, it will, or man SOX format, it lists all the formats
that are conceivably possible for it to do.
There's a lot.
I mean, it's just every single imaginable format for sound, it will pretty much go out to.
Now, just like with something like FF Impag, it just kind of depends on where you get your version of SOX.
Like if me, if I'm doing it on a Fedora system, which, you know, evitually loves freedom,
not something like, you know, Ubuntu, then they don't have like all the MP3 libraries
and, you know, all these sort of patent, risky formats.
So their SOX version, if you get it straight out of the official repos,
are not going to have a lot of those available, and you're going to find yourself converting
from like, Og to Flack and Wave, and that's pretty much it.
Whereas, or maybe PCN, and that's it.
So you might want to get your SOX version from either the official website and compile it,
or just go to some other repo, like RPM Fusion or something like that.
And I bet, I don't know how strict a devian is.
I think I do have it installed on my EEPC.
Don't remember if I just don't convert to MP3 lately, so I don't remember if the devian default SOX
has all those sort of patent, risky formats or not.
But, you know, I'm used at it, you get it from another repo, some unofficial repo,
and it should have all the different options.
That's pretty much it, to be honest, it's just in file to outfile
with the optional, like, dash capital C for your compression rate.
And, I mean, there's obviously a lot of other options with SOX.
I mean, you can give it a bit rate, you can give it a sample rate, you can adjust the volume.
I think you can even adjust the speed. I'm not positive about that.
So, I mean, you could mix two tracks together.
I mean, it's a really robust program. You can do practically anything.
The man page is just pages and pages and pages.
But, on the surface, it's just SOX in, out, that's it.
And the one that I use is called Pearl Audio Converter.
The package name is PACPL.
It's in the devian SID repo.
It's just a, well, it's command line.
And it's also extensions for Amarok, Dolphin, and Conqueror.
So, you can right-click on the, the org that you want to convert to MP3.
It's that simple. You just right-click, just click on MP3
and it just automatically converts it to whatever bit rate you want.
On the command line, it's, I mean, it's so simple.
You just type in PACPL space dash T.
And that just stands for like, you want to convert it to.
And then you just put in MP3.
And then the name of the org file that you want to convert.
And that's it. You can't get it easier than that.
And if you don't specify a bit rate, it just matches what the original file you're trying to convert.
So, if it's like saying an 80 bit rate org, it'll probably be like around 64 for the MP3.
Cool. I think that's what Fox does.
I'm similar to that. Like, if you don't specify, there's either some default or it matches what the original is.
Yeah, if you're using Debian, said this is really easy to install.
It's in the repo, but if you're using Lenny, you have to go and search for a few dependencies.
But there's a package for Sousa, Arch, Slackware, and FreeBSD.
What's the name of the package again? I want to see if it's a Dora, hasn't it?
It's P-A-C-P-L. That stands for Pearl Audio Converter.
Well, I think that mine's probably even easier than that amongst the people, because I simply use FFMP.
And all of the command is FFMP.I, which is for the input file, which is going to be file.org, space, and then the output file name.MP3.
And that takes, depending on the size of the file, it takes about a minute to convert.
And I assume not having looked into it, that it's using the same bitrate and everything is the original file.
And from what I understand, though, because I'll bitrate for bitrate is a hell of a lot better, when you do convert these things,
some people who have better hearing than me, or probably listen to it in a better environment than me, probably want to increase the bitrate.
Now, to do that, the simple thing, there would be FFMP.I input.org, space, dash AB, which is audio bitrate.
From what I understand, 256K is pretty well accepted these days.
That's quite nice. Yeah, that's pretty high.
Yeah, 192, I've even heard, is pretty good.
Yeah, I mean, for me, are you still talking about your tone up?
Probably music now, I think.
Honestly, if you convert, no, you can do on this convert and podcast, that you wouldn't bother.
You would use just the original one, I said, and that's going to be plenty planned for voice.
Of course, with FFMP, there's so many choices of formats.
After you're audio bitrate, then you can just go dash A codec, which is your audio codec.
There's plenty of FFU audio codec you can choose, but we're talking about MP3, which is, in my case, the Libyan MP3 lane codec.
But if you've never done it, just type FFMP space dash formats into your terminal, and that's going to spit it out.
Every single codec and format that FFMP can handle.
And if you're really going to get technical with FMP, a couple of things I do when I convert to watch movies on my telephone,
which uses 3GP, when I configure it, there's certain options you have to enable, because my phone loses, uses Libyan MP3 dash WB, or Libyan MP3 dash NB, which I'm not quite sure,
but there are the audio cadets that must be associated with 3GP.
So when you actually run configure, there's a hell of a lot of variables there that you have to enable to get the usage sort of stuff.
Well, that's true for FFMP at almost any system, too, Peter.
I mean, like, again, just like stocks. If you're installing it from a repo from a door, you're not going to get certain lids.
If you're installing it on some other system, you're going to get a different set of lids.
So you really have to kind of check your version and see what's supported, which you can do by that FFMP space dash V as in version.
And it'll show you what lids you have enabled.
Yeah. And then you have to go and change the only codecs to and install them, or dependencies or whatever they are.
Yeah.
It can get very technical, but I would imagine, well, I'm not sure when you're converting to MP3, if you were to just install out of the repo,
so typically would Ubuntu, and I think Susa does, you can just convert anything to MP3 without configuring it and building it yourself.
So that's something you'd have to check on your distribution, I'd imagine.
Yeah, I haven't tried it on either devian, or it went to, but I know that the version that I pull from the unofficial repo for Fedora is very robust.
It's got all the good stuff enabled, so I think I have to do some piloting.
Yeah. But I mean, it's very simple. Simple for us. Like I said, it doesn't take very long to do a 50-meg old file.
Yeah. I mean, it'll just use as much CPU as it possibly can and just pump it out.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's a good point, too. I suppose if you do it on all laptops or something, it's more to take a little bit longer.
I mean, I've said it on a, I don't know how fast this processor is, but this is like an old PowerBook G4 running something or another, and it's not that fast.
For like an hour podcast, it goes pretty quickly. Well, that's going from wave to aug, but I'm sure it's very similar from aug to MP3.
Yeah. It's a 765 megahertz, but this is.
Yeah. Of course, we've only covered some. There's a hell of a lot out there, but a lot of them use FFMP just the back of it anyway.
Yeah. Yeah.
They're just typically a GUI for that or an automation is mencoder. You could probably do the same with mencoder.
Actually, that uses FFMP, I think. It's a recall crackly, yeah. Yeah, actually, I think you're right now that you mentioned that.
Another one you can do is just directly out of lame, actually. You can do that on the command line. I think it's pretty, once again, it's like pretty similar.
You're just like, it's lame, and then the input and then the output file if I recall correctly.
Or do you have to do a, okay, distribute. You know if you have to do a, I think I saw in one of your posts once that you had to do like an aug decoder or like an aug deck or something before you put it into lame.
Does that sound familiar to you?
Yeah, you have to, what the aug decoder does, it converts it into wave.
Okay.
And then lame.
Okay, so lame doesn't go straight out of aug.
No, and then lame will take care of the MP3.
Yeah, so that's a two step process. Who cares?
But everything else is pretty easy. Socks or FFMP, it seems pretty easy.
Yeah, and everything we're talking about will be in the show notes and links to our forum page with all the formulas on there.
Yeah.
It's pretty easy to follow along.
Yeah, really. There is not a lot of reason to complain.
As much as I love to complain for the hell of it, to convert these things over, there's not even inconvenience really.
Yeah, I mean, especially with commands like this, I mean, I tried to beef up my, the way that I use socks, but I mean bottom line is socks, food.og, bar.mp3, you're done.
Yeah, right.
People have said, you know, you could automate this, but I just couldn't think, hey, you could automate it to make it any simpler.
By the time you even thought of, hey, you were going to automate it, you could have converted that many anyway.
Yeah, really.
And I love the fastest type in the world.
Dan is working on a, Dan from TILTS and from various other hacker public radio endeavors, is working on a special version of bash potter that by default would take any hog file and convert it to an MP3 just as soon as it downloaded it.
That's a great idea.
I mean, yeah, that would automate it and people who needed to be MP3 get it as MP3 right away.
That he's got it running, but it's not released yet.
Cool.
Yeah, anyone that would like something like that, go ahead and pester him until he gets it out.
Well, it'd be nice if all Linux podcasts go all log, give it to the MP3 altogether.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's really good to show everyone that the Linux world has these brilliant developers coming up with our own codecs that we own, essentially.
And we don't have to play log games with companies and stuff to port those codecs and just use them.
And eventually, you know, I mean, that's going to be a whole little subculture of this alternative codec.
And I mean, you're telling me eventually that media players aren't going to be able to aren't going to have to deal with that.
You know, right now they don't have to deal with it because everyone's default, they've got that option for the MP3.
And anyone who wanders by, like the people complaining about Linux, Linux cranks going awg.
You know, I mean, these people wandered by, they found the podcast, they found it entertaining, I guess.
But they're just defaulting over to the MP3 feed because they don't want to take the trouble of using our codec, the codec that the Linux community created.
So if support that, people are going to notice it. They're going to say, hey, well, there's no MP3 format here. What do I do?
They're going to learn about awg and they're going to start wondering why more media players don't play awg.
It's going to make a noise.
And what's the about your media player that you use plays awg natively definite.
Yeah. I audio 7.
7.
Yeah.
And it wouldn't be the only one. They'd be quite a few out there.
Oh, there's a lot of them. Like I paid 120 bucks for mine. It's a four gig.
But I've seen them as low as Sandisk has a Santa clip that supports awg.
Wow.
And it starts at $35.
Thank you, you're wrong.
Yeah, I mean, it's just a player. It's not you're not going to be able to play like videos or anything like that.
You know, it's just a music player, podcast player.
Yeah, if it's Phil, that's, oh, most people want it anyway.
And you put them through the ZFM converters in the car and you probably might be right yet, aren't you?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, yeah, the only thing I've mentioned before is I've gone to listen to the bad apples.
And it's only because Clarity you've only recently done this.
And it's just a habit to pull it down with G Potter on transfer straight to the telephone and off I got to work.
And I actually, I don't know why, but I'm a little bit disappointed that I can't listen to you that day because I've bloody forgot to convert it.
But, you know, it'll be kind of a habit to convert it, so it's just a little bit inconvenient at the moment.
People get used to it.
Well, like I said, if everybody would stand together and only support AUG, we would see more players that will support it.
I mean, if the cheap little Santa Santa clip can support it, I mean, anybody could.
Yeah, you think so, wouldn't it?
And what I can't understand is why my telephone and that that runs an embedded Linux, you know, and there's a lot of embedded Linux devices out there.
Instead of putting, I suppose, I was going to say why they put an MP3 decoder chip in there instead of an OG chip.
I suppose it's because the majority of people want MP3 for their music.
So yeah, Clot 2 and I both use the Nokia in 800, which will play AUG, but it does it with a software decoder.
So it ends up using the processor to get the actual audio to you instead of being able to offload it to a little chip.
But my in 800 was skipping for a little bit.
But that was just because I would have four or five applications open and be trying to play a podcast.
Well, it kind of bugs me that they don't support AUG out of the box on the Nokia.
Such a high profile Linux device.
You'd think that they would do that.
It doesn't cost them anything to include AUG, and they just don't. It's an extra install, which I think is silly.
Yeah, and the codec isn't that easy to find either.
Yeah, you really have to hunt around for it.
Yeah, I might seem to play my odds on either my Nokia in 800, just on my computer at work, or on an iPod 4th generation that I have Rockbox loaded on to.
Rockbox is fantastic.
Well, guys, I think we've run it out of time.
Linux cranks are going to be starting here in a couple minutes.
Well, if somebody else wants to do a hacker public radio, how can they get started?
I guess they could record an episode.
Or you know what they should do?
Email either knee at clad2 at hackerpublicaria.com or winter mute at probably winter mute at hackerpublicaria.com and maybe even enigma at hackerpublicaria.com.
And pitch the show idea, just kind of tell us what they want to do.
Chances are we're going to love it since an hacker public radio has a variety of topics and stuff like that.
And then if they need any help, like if they need any tips or help editing or any information, we can probably help them with that.
And they can just record it and send to us pretty easy.
So far, people have got a lot of people just kind of top out of nowhere and they just send in some episodes, you know.
And it works.
Cool. You guys have anything else to add?
Nope. Good night and thanks for listening, everyone.
Here you go.
Thank you for listening to hackerpublic Radio.
HPR is sponsored by caro.net, so head on over to CARO.NAT for all of us in need.