Puddletag 1.0 Beta Released With Fixed MusicBrainz and Discogs Tag Sources

Puddletag is an audio tag editor for Linux, very similar to the popular Windows application Mp3tag.

The MusicBrainz and Discogs music tag sources stopped working in the latest stable Puddletag version for quite some time because of API changes but today, a new Puddletag version has been released (1.0 beta), finally bringing support for the latest MusicBrainz and Discogs APIs.

Puddletag 1.0 beta also comes with full support for Mp3tag tag sources (in my test though, I couldn't get any Mp3tag tag sources to work for some reason - bug reported), mass tagging improvements and other changes.

This is a beta so you might encounter bugs - report them here.

Download Puddletag

Because this is a beta release, I didn't upload it to our stable Puddletag PPA. You can however install the latest Puddletag 1.0 beta in Ubuntu and stay up to date with future beta releases by using the WebUpd8 Unstable PPA. You can also download the .deb / source from its website.

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Lossless Audio Split Tools Updates: Flacon, Split Lossless Nautilus Script

Split Lossless is a Nautilus script created by WebUpd8 reader CokiDVD to split single lossless audio files (ape, flac, wavpack) by .cue file into flac or mp3 (320kbps or 192kbps). Further more, the script also adds tags to the new files so all the resulting flac or mp3 files will have the artist, album, title and genre tags set up automatically.

The latest Split Lossless version (released a couple of days ago) comes with two new features: track name editor and album information editor and improvements such as: show selected tracks on main window.

Split Lossless is available in a PPA so to install it in Ubuntu, use the commands below:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:cokicd/split-lossless
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install split-lossless

In the future, a batch version might be released too. Using this version, you'll be able to load a bunch of cds and split them automatically without any user input.

For other Linux distributions, see: http://code.google.com/p/split-lossless/.

Flacon is a python tool to split lossless files like APE, FLAC, TTA, Wav or WavPack and automatically add tags to the resulting files. With Flacon, you are in total control of the output file which can be set to AAC, FLAC, MP3, Ogg and so on.

Flacon 0.6.0 has been released today and comes with the following changes:

• support for AAC
• improved error handling scheme
• bug fixes
• internal code optimizing

The GUI has also been tweaked in a way that it should be easy to use by both new and experienced users.

Please note that I haven't tested Flacon because I'm not currently using my main computer and don't have access to my files, etc.

Just like Split Lossless for Nautilus, Flacon is also available in a PPA for easy Ubuntu installation:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:flacon/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install flacon

Thanks to Alain-Olivier Breysse and CokiCD for the tips and images!

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Record Audio From Sound Card Or Microphone [W/ Built-in Skype Call Recorder]

Audio Recorder is a Linux tool to record audio from your system's sound card or microphone and comes with some interesting advanced features such as a timer, automatic Skype call recorder and more.

Audio Recorder features:

• records your system's sound card, microphone, browser, webcam and so on
• built-in timer: you can start, stop or pause the recording at a pre-defined time or after a certain amount of time
• automatically start recording on either voice or sound
• automatically stop recording on silence
• it can be automatically controlled by Rhythmbox, Banshee, Amarok and other MPRIS compatible players as well as Skype. For instance, it can record all your Skype calls without any user interaction
• supported formats: OGG, flac, mp3, mp2, m4a, spx and wav
• Ubuntu AppIndicator support

To get Audio Recorder to automatically record your Skype calls, make sure you select "Yes" and check the "Remember this selection" box when Skype asks to authorize Audio Recorder:

Install Audio Recorder in Ubuntu

Audio Recorder has its own PPA, available for Ubuntu 11.10, 11.04 and 10.10 - add it and install Audio Recorder using the commands below:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:osmoma/audio-recorder
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install audio-recorder

To be able to record in various formats, you'll have to install some Gstreamer plugins: base for OGG, "good" for Wav and Flac, ugly/multiverse for mp3 and bad/multiverse for AAC and m4a. Install them all using the following command:

sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-plugins-base gstreamer0.10-plugins-good gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad-multiverse

To download the source code or report bugs, check out Audio Recorder's Launchpad page.

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Arista Transcoder 0.9.7 Released With Revamped UI, Ability To Edit, Manage, Export Presets [PPA]

Arista Transcoder is a really cool video converter for GNOME. It comes with a huge list of presets: from iPod, iPhone, PSP, Playstation 3 to Android, Nokia, DVD and lots more. It supports MP4, WebM, Matroska, AVI, Ogg, FLV (codecs - video: H.264, VP8, MPEG4 / DivX, MPEG2, Theora, Flash Video / audio: AAC, Vorbis, MP3, FLAC, Speex, WAV) formats and it can rip straight from DVD or v4l (Video 4 Linux) devices too.

A new Arista Transcoder version (0.9.7) was released yesterday with a revamped user interface ( now you can click on a device in the "Live preview" to select the preset for it), the ability to edit and manage device presets, export presets and lots of small fixes.

(Arista - Live Preview)

Arista is one of the easiest to use multimedia transcoders for Linux thanks to its huge list of presets. All you have to do is select a video, your device and click "Create". It also comes with a Nautilus extension so you can simply right click a video, select the format and start converting the video:

But of course, if you want to customize the presets, that's possible: click the "i" button and you can edit the audio/video codec, container, etc. (starting with the latest version - 0.9.7):

Install Arista Transcoder 0.9.7 in Ubuntu

Because I couldn't find any PPA for Arista Transcoder 0.9.7 and I had some time last night, I've created a PPA for Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal and 10.10 Maverick Meerkat (it didn't work on Ubuntu 10.04 in my test). The PPA will only provide Arista.

Add the Arista PPA and install the latest 0.9.7 version in Ubuntu 11.04 or 10.10 using the commands below:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/arista
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install arista

Also install the following packages to get support for most formats:

sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad-multiverse gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse

If you want to install the Nautilus extension, use the command below:

sudo apt-get install nautilus-arista

Using Arista 0.9.7 in other Linux distributions

If you don't use Ubuntu and Arista 0.9.7 is not yet available in your distro repositories, you can download Arista from here, extract it and double click the "arista-gtk" file. To make sure you have all the Arista dependencies installed, you may want to install whatever Arista version is available in your Linux distribution repositories (install it just for the dependencies).

Thanks to Daniel G. Taylor for the tip!

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Puddletag (Audio Tag Editor) Gets Improved Mass-Tagging, Export Artwork To File Option, More

Puddletag is a Linux audio tag editor similar to Mp3tag (a popular Windows audio tagging tool) that supports ID3v1, ID3v2 (mp3), MP4 (mp4, m4a, etc.), VorbisComments (ogg, flac), Musepack (mpc), Monkey's Audio (.ape) and WavPack (wv).

I had this post saved as a draft for a few days because of a bug in Puddletag 0.10.4 which was finally fixed today in Puddletag 0.10.6.

So versions 0.10.5 and 0.10.6 only come with bug fixes but Puddletag 0.10.4 which was recently released, comes with some very interesting improvements:

• export artwork to file option
• a filter that behaves like the one in Mp3tag (more info about that here) 
• retrieve track artists for Various Artist albums (for the Discogs tag source)
• Unicode support for Replace with Regular Expression function
• Tag to filename and Tag->Dir functions now handle patterns like '../%artist%' and './%artist%/%album%' correctly.
• improved mass-tagging feature
  

You can find the complete changelog here.

As usual, the latest Puddletag is available in the Puddletag WebUpd8 PPA so Ubuntu users (Lucid, Maverick, Natty and Oneiric) can install it using the commands below:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/puddletag
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install puddletag

For other Linux distributions, see the Puddletag download page.

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