Well besides my normal projects such as video editing, sorting through old VHS tapes (only 90+ to go) and wedding planning, I’ve made significant progress on one initiative in particular, Project Audio Clean. The goal, to completely convert my entire cd collection to an open source format and scan in all the cd covers along the way.

I’ve been growing weary of mp3 over the years, the annoying id3 tag format but mostly the fact that FhG (the creator of mp3) wants to charge for it’s use.

So what’s my new audio format of choice? Why Ogg Vorbis of course. It’s open source, very efficient (especially at lower bit rates), supports more than 2 audio channels (think 5.1 surround sound or more!), has a killer fish logo and best of all it’s starting to get supported on new hardware devices coming out. Really a no brainer from any company producing a digital media player. It costs them nothing to license all they have to worry about is software which is open source anyway.

I’ve been a fan of Ogg Vorbis for at least 2 or more years but back then the time wasn’t quite right for me to re encode my whole collection. Maybe because I had just finished the very long (I’m talking more than one year) project to correctly tag all my mp3 files.

So now each day I’ll hopefully be grabbing a cd, opening up Exact Audio Copy, batch converting to Ogg with proper tags and lastly scanning in the cd covers to PNG (another great free format!) while savoring my new fresh digital songs. Mmm… musicalisious. *slurp*

There are certain quests I undertake on what seems like a regular basis. One of these which has been going for a few months has been Project: Audio Save. The goal, to convert all audio cassette tapes to 44hz, 16bit, stereo. (Aka cd quality)

I thought I had the pile of 50 some odd tapes finally beaten… when suddenly reinforcements from Parr’s room arrived. Another 25 tapes circled around me. I wiped blood from the side of my mouth and stared grimly at them. “Your going down… just give me a few weeks!”, I spat at the tapes.

Oh well, listening to hours and hours of classic Dr. Demento isn’t too bad. Plus we have saved a lot of really wacky and rare pieces. We’ll even post some clips for ya all later when the last tapes are saved.

Odn makes waving motions at the lost and lonely tapes scattered around the room. “Come quickly little ones, the digital savior is here.”

Happy little tapes make cute noises as the waddle over to the benevolent computer, their new home.

It’s here, the thing I’ve been working on for more than a month of countless nights. It’s a PHP mod file reader and it works bloody great!

The project started when I was thinking about hosting my old mod collection so that others could enjoy it. I wanted to make it a bit more informative than a directory listing though. I wanted to display the song title from inside the file, channels and file size.

After reading up on the mod file format and opening my mind to new concepts, I did just that. I created a nice little php script that could open and parse the mod file format and return the info I wanted. But wait… there was more goodies buried in the format. Things like the sample list which frequently contains messages from the author plus there was the holy grail, estimating the song length.

I kept working on more features each night, after a bit I was able to read the sample list messages, sample size, loop info and more. Things were going really well and I was learning a lot of new programming skills reading through these binary files. I decided that I would try to loop through all the pattern data and figure out how long each song is. What a quest it would be.

I started our reading the first note position then move on to different channels, rows and then finally patterns. I kept adding new functionality each night. An order reader, recording speed/bpm changes, delay effects, order jumps, pattern jumps and eventually odd song loops. It took me countless hours of work and quite a few major code changes along the way. Each problem brought with it more puzzles and eventual enlightenment when I figured out what was going on.

I can truly say I feel more like a programmer now more than ever. I’ve taken my lust for knowledge applied to to my beloved music collection and learned a lot of stuff along the way. I feel one step closer to my ultimate dream of becoming a video game programmer. I don’t know how long it will take or if I’ll even be successful but I know I’ll enjoy the quest and I will make a video game one day.

So without further ado please check out the new Music section which contains over 200 mod songs. Enjoy!