[Lame-dev] New lame upstream release?

[Rogério Brito]

Hi, Reinhard.

I hope that you're having a good DebConf... I miss chatting with you...

On 2011-07-27, at 16:22, Reinhard Tartler wrote:

> On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 19:48:05 (CEST), Rogério Brito wrote:
>> I'm in the middle of a power outage right now, using the last few
>> drops of energy of notebook battery and a 3G connection, so I will be
>> brief. (Oh, please keep in the CC'ies to me).

The energy just came back and I'm taking that time to charge my  
battery, but I won't be able to compile stuff here.

>> On Tue, Jul 26, 2011 at 14:41, Andres Mejia <mcitadel at gmail.com>  
>> wrote:
>>> On Jul 26, 2011 12:49 PM, "robert" <Robert.Hegemann at gmx.de> wrote:
>>>> From my point of view, there may be some small patches to apply
>>>> and then release 3.99:
>>>>
>>>> 1 - pending LGPL patch
>>>> 2 - eventually changing default behaviour for ID3v2 unicode tags.
>>
>> Robert, it seems that Andres just adopted the suggestion that I gave
>> him of backporting some changes. Regarding a new release, I think  
>> that
>> we may need to include one extra thing in our TODO list. See below.
>
> Andres, may I suggest that instead of placing patches inline in
> debian/lame-get-orig-source.sh, we create an 'upstream-dfsg'  
> branch, do
> modifications there directly and roll tarballs from that?

I would like to take a peek at how you guys are packaging it... Will  
do as soon as the power is back.

>> Andres, I just saw that LAME was rejected by the FTP masters:
>>
>>     http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-multimedia- 
>> maintainers/2011-July/020498.html
>>
>> That part is only used if we use lame's internal IO routines. Just  
>> rip
>> that apart and link with libsndfile and we're done. Please reupload
>> that...
>
> Unforunately, this won't work easily because frontend/main.c uses
> functions from portableio.h unconditionally. We'd therefore need some
> more patches. Anyone familiar with the codebase and willing to
> contribute that patch?

Oh, shit. I'll take a look at that... I thought that the code were  
ifdef'ed... Isn't it?

>> Most of the functions in portableio.[ch] are quite trivial, anyway...
>> You can tell that I *badly* want LAME in Debian, can't you?
>> (Especially now that it seems that the FTP masters are convinced that
>> such software is Free Software).
>>
>> Oh, hint, hint for the multimedia maintainers: what about  
>> uploading my
>> already packaged mp3packer from my launchpad PPA? [0]
>>
>> [0]: https://launchpad.net/~rbrito/+archive/ppa/+files/ 
>> mp3packer_1.20-1~ubuntu1.dsc
>>
>> OK, the battery of my laptop is running out... :-(
>
> Doesn't the package lack a dependency on lame?

No, absolutely *no* dependency on LAME.

> AFAIUI it is a tool to
> reencode .mp3 files. I persume that it uses lame for that, but the
> documentatin isn't entirely clear on that.

It doesn't reencode. It only "rearranges" the frames in a lossless  
manner. Like, for instance, getting the bits that are already  
produced by an MP3 encoder (any one) and "putting them in bins" so as  
to make the files smaller (taking a better advantage of the bit  
reservoir, etc).

The program is so darned cool... The best thing with this MP3 thing  
is that even though you already have a file that is encoded by  
anyone, it is possible to a great extent to manipulate it losslessly:

* mp3gain, to avoid clipping while decoding (of course, clipping  
before encoding is not remediable);
* mp3packer, to squeeze some extra bits and make the files smaller  
(reduding the bitrate).

In my very humble opinion, the combo (mp3packer, LAME) breathes at  
least a little bit of life in a format that many already thought that  
was dead, while still being, say, universally compatible... With  
them, you can raise the bitrate of your encodes a notch to get better  
sound and then losslessly rearrange the file to a lower bitrate...

A side effect of it is that it also fixes many old VBR files that may  
have incorrect lengths reported (and, thus, renders my package vbrfix  
obsolete).

OK, enough blurb. The packaging of mp3packer is really trivial (as  
you can see) and I would volunteer to maintain it under the pkg- 
multimedia umbrella.


Regards,

-- 
Rogério Brito : rbrito@{ime.usp.br,gmail.com} : GPG key 4096R/BCFCAAAA
http://rb.doesntexist.org : Packages for LaTeX : algorithms.berlios.de
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