Sysadmin: an exercise in being functionally lazy.

I'm sitting on my couch, working really hard on my laptop. Everything is perfectly arranged around me while I study.

The linux box sitting 15 feet away from me has an internet radio station playing on amarok. The next song comes on, and it's louder than the other songs.

I really don't want to get up.

Surely some linux user has had this grave problem before. I was about to do a google search for an app on my Windows 7 laptop that would do it, then i realized I already had Putty set up to connect to my pc. All I need is the command for the command line.

To reduce your volume 15%

aumix -v-15

Too much? Increase 5%

aumix -v+15

(You may need to install the aumix package to use the commands above)

apt-get install aumix

I'm sure there's many other ways to pull this off (it is Linux, after all). Feel free to share if you have one!

Converting m4a files to mp3

I have some m4a files I would like to keep in mp3 or ogg format. From what I found, you need to do this via the command line in Linux/Kubuntu.

For a refresher, m4a file are propietary iTunes music files. They may or may not have DRM, so they may or may not convert properly.

To convert a m4a file to mp3, you need faad and lame installed. Use Synaptic Package Manager to get them. Install. In your konsole/terminal, type:

$ faad foobar.m4a # to convert to wav
$ lame foobar.wav foobar.mp3 # to convert to mp3

If you need to change it to ogg, you need oggenc. Then you can do:

$ for nam in *.mp4; do nice mplayer -ao pcm "$nam" -ao pcm:file="$nam.wav" && nice oggenc -q5 "$nam.wav" -o "$(basename "$nam" .mp4).ogg"; rm "$nam.wav"; done

That's all one line. See link here and here.