Porcupine Tree and the loudness war

Porcupine Tree - clippings

This is the second track from Porcupine Tree “Deadwing” called “Shallow”.

WYSIWYG… It sounds just like the graph in SND.  Especially if upsampled without decreasing the volume – like badly scratched disk. And yes, loud. Can it be any worse?

/usr/local/bin/sox effects: polyphase clipped 329755 samples; decrease volume?

SqueezeCenter and Compress::Zlib

After upgrading to Nevada b92 SqueezeCenter refused to start with the following error:

The following modules failed to load: Compress::Zlib
…
# perl -MCPAN -e shell
cpan> install Compress::Zlib
. . .
Module [Compress::Zlib] failed to load: is only available with the XS version
. . .

But the actual problem is Scalar::Util. To solve the problem reinstall Scalar::Util and then Compress::Zlib. Use force install if CPAN says that the latest version is already installed:

# perl -MCPAN -e shell
. . .
cpan[1]> install Scalar::Util
CPAN: Storable loaded ok (v2.12)
Going to read /var/tmp/cpan/Metadata
Database was generated on Tue, 24 Jun 2008 10:02:57 GMT
Scalar::Util is up to date (1.19).
cpan[2]> force install Scalar::Util
. . .
cpan[3]> force install Compress::Zlib
. . .

Sources: whirlpool.net.au and Usenet forums.

DIY audio places

http://www.diyaudio.com
http://www.diycable.com
http://diyaudioprojects.com
http://www.takefiveaudio.com
http://www.vhaudio.com
http://www.uoguelph.ca/~antoon/circ/circuits.htm
http://www.vhaudio.com
http://www.bmm-electronics.com
http://www.partsexpress.com
http://www.heatshrink.com
http://www.jensencapacitors.com
http://www.passdiy.com
http://www.ezdiyaudio.com

NL:

http://www.ae-europe.nl
http://www.audiofreaks.nl
http://www.deaudiofabriek.nl
http://www.platenspeler.com
http://www.hifisupply.nl
http://www.n-joymusic.nl
http://www.zelfbouwaudio.nl
http://www.tweaks4u.com
http://www.speakerenco.nl

DE:

http://www.hifi-tuning.com
http://www.hifi-zubehoer.info
http://www.dienadel.de
http://www.conrad.de
http://www.schuricht.de

X libs and X fonts

Alan Coopersmith wrote :

FreeType2 is what converts a TTF or other font file into a pattern of bits displayed on the screen, but it has lots of flags that control how that’s done (anti-aliasing, hinting, LCD optimization, etc.).

Xft2 is the library that calls FreeType to get a bit pattern and then displays that bit pattern on the X server, via either the Render extension or plain Xlib (but plain Xlib is slow).

fontconfig is the library that finds /usr/X11/lib/X11/fonts/TTF/Times.ttf when you ask for “Times Roman 12”. (It’s called by either Xft2 or pango, I forget which.)

pango is the library that calls Xft with a list of glyphs and locations to display them at, after determining what ordering and spacing they should be laid out in, and what glyphs to display for a given character string (which is much easier for English than for languages like Arabic
or Hindi).

GTK+ is the library that applications call to draw their interface on screen (the toolkit), and it calls pango to draw the text portion of those interfaces.

I’m not sure if cairo calls pango or goes direct to Xft2.

Firefox 3.0 and Solaris

Just a brain dump.

SqueezeCenter 7.1 under Solaris

The idea was to use “bare” SqueezeCenter without bundled CPAN (the CPAN directory was moved away) modules, Solaris 11 (or Nevada build 88) and supplied with Solaris PERL and MySQL.

Then if you start slimserver.pl the errors will let you know which CPAN modules to install. For example:

The following modules failed to load: version JSON::XS YAML::Syck GD
. . .
Can’t locate JSON::XS.pm in @INC (@INC contains: squeezecenter-7.1-19407-noCPAN/CPAN/arch/5.8/i86pc-solaris-64int
…

Or For Nevada b95:

The following CPAN modules were found but cannot work with SqueezeCenter:
File::Temp (loaded 0.14, need 0.17)
I18N::LangTags (loaded 0.29, need 0.35)

To fix this problem you have several options:
1. Install the latest version of the module(s) using CPAN: sudo cpan Some::Module
2. Update the module’s package using apt-get, yum, etc.
3. Run the .tar.gz version of SqueezeCenter which includes all required CPAN modules.

Usually, the bundled CPAN is not up to date. So, let’s install it first:

# perl -MCPAN -e shell
cpan[1]> install Bundle::CPAN
. . .
cpan[2]> quit

To install (or upgrade) a module run the following:

# perl -MCPAN -e shell
cpan[1]> install JSON::XS

The only exception is Encode/Detect/Detector.pm or Encode::Detect::Detector. It’s has not being touched by the developer for many years and is not recommended for use. The module can be compiled with c++ or g++ (instead of used by default cc or gcc), but with a lot of pain and manual intervention. The easiest way is to get rid of it completely:

  • Remove Encode::Detect::Detector from modules.conf (in the root directory of SqueezeCenter)
  • Remove or comment the following line in Slim/Utils/Unicode.pm:
    use Encode::Detect::Detector;