Although VLC can perfectly hanlde .m4b audiobook files, I usually prefer to split them to mp3 in a way that each mp3 file is one chapter of the audiobook. If you want to do do the same, I highly suggest you to use m4b-tool. You can download the .phar file from the GitHub releases page. This really nice tool requires php, ffmpeg and mp4v2. In order to install them in Archlinux, I gave the following command:

I hate bloated software. This is the reason I use Archlinux with i3wm or I root my smartphones to remove unneeded applications and this is the exact same reason I chose ympd to be the default MPD client of Archphile. ympd doesn’t offer many goodies. It does one thing (file browsing mode) and it does it right, while its software dependencies are almost zero, comparing to other web based clients that need a dedicated webserver or/and interpreter.

Even though all my music library is 99,99% FLACs, there are times when I need a quick FLAC –> MP3 conversion (for example to put music on the smartphone for running purposes).. The best and quickest tool I have found so far, is whatmp3, that uses lame to do the conversion. In order to install it in Archlinux, I got it from AUR: yaourt -S whatmp3 As a last step, I (re-)installed lame :

This post is about something I wanted to create for years: a complete .pls set for Athens (Greece) FM Radios. Two months ago I found a very interesting m3u file (by dennmtr) on which I based my work and created the following GitHub repository: https://github.com/archphile/AthensFMRadios I tried to include almost every FM Radio station I found online. If you didn’t find a station you want, this means: I forgot it I did not find a usable http stream (ex.

Reading a forum thread regarding “audiophile” USB cables for computer audio, I rememembered a really nice head-fi.org topic, where a forum member named svyr decided to send some questions about usb and audio to usb.org. To his surprise, he got a reply and below I will quote the whole email conversation without any further comment from my side: Email to usb.org From: svyr [mailto:xf_mad:gmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, August 03, 2011 4:27 AM To: admin [AT] usb.

Two months ago I wrote this article regarding all the value for money IEM and earbud headphones I had at that time. Enjoying my VE Monk Plus made me want to try more vfm earbuds and below you will find a small list of some more I bought and tested so far. TY HI-Z-HP-32 Hi-Z is a very cheap set of earbuds that make the Monks sound like a toy for kids.

One of the biggest disadvantages of DSD files is their size. Most of the users who like DSD format, keep large SACD ISOs or split them to dsf/dff files. In both cases, the result is horrible space-wise as the majority of music albums need more than 1.5GB (only for the 2 channel files). It was not long ago that Wavpack project came with a solution to the above: a lossless compression algorithm for dsf/dff files, resulting in up to 60% smaller files.

DSD, although a very old and failed technology, is again one of the hottest trends in computer audio. Below you will find a quick guide for MPD (Music Player Daemon) that will cover most of your needs: MPD and DSD with DoP  Assuming that your DAC supports the DoP protocol, the only you need to do is to add the following line in audio_output section of mpd.conf: dop "yes" Below you can see an example of this section:

Although I am not a big fan of the 70’s Rock, there are some albums from this era I love and I always try to find a good CD master for my digital library. One of these albums is Rumours from Fleetwood Mac. Long time ago, I ripped my father’s cd with EAC . It’s a US release, for which unfortunately I don’t remember much. Below you can see its dynamic range report using DR14 T.

Let’s assume that you have a music album in one flac file and you want to split it so that each song is a separate flac file. The linux tool needed for this task is called shntool. In order to install it in Archlinux you need to give the following: pacman -S shntool The command you need to give in order to get the separate files is: shnsplit -f blabla.