Today, I wanted to edit a few MP3 files into suitable ring tones for my phone. The idea seemed simple at first: load up a song, chop off a few bars and loop that as a ring tone.
Nice in theory, except that sound editing software on a free desktop is challenging, at best: most of it was designed back in the days of OSS and GTK 1.2, some wants to use JACK for playback, while the most recent crop indeed supports ALSA but insists upon having exclusive access to the ALSA device.
Dammit! My understanding was that, with Gstreamer and PulseAudio, the free desktop had finally acquired a comprehensive, standardized sound framework, but not many applications seem to support it — or is there something I have missed?
5 comments:
What's wrong with audacity?
btw jack is generally a good idea
Recent versions of Audacity support ALSA if you build them with portaudio v19 (Debian does). Jokosher uses GStreamer and might be suitable; I haven't tried it myself as this is not something I often need to do.
If you want to create a good sounding ringtone, you want to do some equalization while it is still in WAV form, then run it through a loudness filter to maximize loudness, and loop it, and THEN convert it to compressed audio.
I used Audacity to make my ringtones. It uses ALSA, and it also requires libjack (but libjack doesn't require jackd).
As far as stuff using PulseAudio, I think it is just too new (especially as de facto standard). Slower moving projects just haven't had time to add support for it.
When I made my ringtones, I just grabbed the mp3 and chopped off the bits I didn't want. They sound fine in my opinion.
There are two issues with Audacity:
It still uses GTK1.2 (minor issue).
It insists upon having the ALSA device all to itself; it refuses to share it. That one is a show stopper.
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