The soundgrab Home Page

soundgrab is designed to help you slice up a big long ogg vorbis or raw audio file (by default 44.1 kHz 2 channel signed sixteen bit little endian) and save your favorite sections to other files. It does this by providing you with a cassette player like command line interface. Commands like ff <secs>, rw <secs>, jump <offset_from_start> can be used while the volume is being played or while it is stopped to move the player head around. The commands mark and name allow you to give names to sections between the mark and the current position of the player head (like emacs mark and point concept), and the export command exports the named sections to other files in wav, cdr (CD mastering), or raw format (or ogg or flac format if the appropriate encoder binaries are found on your system).

Its quite possible you don't need soundgrab at all: especially for getting music from internet radio stations, streamripper may do everything you need done. The man page has a few more details, though most information is in the online help.

soundgrab is from the perl department of the Maximegalon museum of diseased imaginings. It needs some other common things in order to work:

If you want support for Ogg Vorbis or FLAC (a lossless compression format), you will need some or all of the following:

Download...

The latest stable version can be downloaded from here.
You can view the ChangeLog for the latest version.

If anyone sees fit to package this as a .rpm, let me know so I can add a link, thanks.

How you would use soundgrab

These days the internet is a likely source of data that you may want to dissect interactively with soundgrab. Unfortunately, many net audio stream players don't offer recording functionality. Some things to try (more details available here):

Usually you can look at the page source of a web page to determine the URL of the stream you get when you click on a link. Just search for the visible text of the link in the page source to find the URL. Streamripper will work with a single M3U URL argument, while ogg123 and mpg123 need just the URL of the actual stream listed in the M3U file. You might want to use wget to download the M3U file itself and have a look at its contents to determine the actual stream URL you want. This same wget trick works with PLS files and probably others. Now all you need to do is make sure your file is in Ogg Vorbis form and launch soundgrab:

sox audio_foo.mp3 audio_foo.ogg # If necessary. soundgrab audio_foo.ogg Type help at the prompt and follow the instructions.

But suppose you aren't starting from an already digitized audio source. For example, suppose there is an hour long radio-only show which comes on at 2 in the afternoon on March 5th, and plays all sorts of eclectic hard-to-find stuff that you love (mixed in with eclectic stuff that you hate), but you have a mean and nasty boss who insists that you should be at work by that time of day. You might do zsomething like this:

# Set mixer parameters to record from line in. amixer set Capture cap # May vary depending on sound card. amixer set Capture 60% # May vary depending on sound card. # Other commands may be required to get input set up, # depending for example on microphone vs. line in recording, # etc. See the arecord man page. One might also use # alsamixer or a graphical mixer if interactive operation is # ok. echo 'arecord -d 3600 two_oclock_show.wav' | at 14:00 Mar 5 echo 'arecord --channels=2 --rate=44100 --format=S16_LE ---duration=3600 - | sox -t wav - two_oclock_show.ogg' | at 14:00 Mar 5 # I just wanna bang on the drum all day... # Set mixer parameters to allow audible playback of dsp data, # if necessary. Note that modern hardware allows you to have # capture enabled without disabling playback. # Run soundgrab. soundgrab two_oclock_show.ogg

If you find a bug

If you find a bug or want to contact me for any other good reason, you are welcome to email me.

soundgrab is copyright Britton Leo Kerin.
Last modified: Sat May 5 15:25:50 AKST 2007