December, 2005 | Ady's Blog

Scotts Valley, CA, and Milpitas, CA, December 21, 2005: Seagate (NYSE: STX) and Maxtor (NYSE: MXO) today jointly announced they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Seagate will acquire Maxtor in an all stock transaction.

Read more about it here: http://www.seagatemaxtor.com/

Quantum was acquired by Maxtor, now Maxtor acquired by Seagate. I still have a Quantum Fireball on my old desktop… 😉

*Thanks to Azidin for updating me with this story.

In an another area, Macromedia has been acquired by Adobe. Go to http://www.macromedia.com/ and you’ll see Adobe – formerly Macromedia.

Read more about it here: http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/acquisition.html

And… uh oh.. Happy New Year!!! My new year resolution is to stop smoking, but the damn nicorette gum gave me a sore throat!!! 🙁

Nowadays I have a habit of recording my phone conversations through my k750i. The problem is that the files are saved in AMR format and my PC can’t play it.

Googling around reveals that AMR files can be converted to WAV and MP3, so I created a shell script to do this for me.

Prerequisites:

AMR encoder/decoder – http://www.3gpp.org/ftp/Specs/2003-09/Rel-5/26_series/26104-520.zip
sox
lame (to encode mp3. If all you need is wave format, you don’t need lame and you can just change the script up to when it creates a wave)

Before you compile the AMR decoder/encoder, make the following changes:

Remove all occurences of -DETSI in the Makefile
Add #include “sp_dec.h” in decoder.c

That’s it. All you have to do is compile it normally. (Otherwise you will get segfault when running the binary)

Now the final part, the script I created (or you can download it here):

#!/bin/bash
 
#
# Script to convert .amr to .mp3
#
# by Ady Romantika (ady at romantika dot name) https://blog.adyromantika.com/
# December 2005
#
# Needs:
# 1. amr encoder/decoder http://www.3gpp.org/ftp/Specs/2003-09/Rel-5/26_series/26104-520.zip
#	(to decode amr)
# 2. sox
#	(to convert raw file to wave)
# 3. lame
#	(to convert wave to mp3)
#
# Usage: amr2mp3.sh <inputfile>
#
# Warning: overwrites previous outfile
#
 
# Change this to where you place your decoder
CODECLOCATION=/opt/amrcodec
# Set to 1 to delete intermediate raw and wav files
DELINTERMEDIATEFILES=1
 
INFILE=$1
FILENAME=`echo $INFILE | sed -e "s/.amr//"`
SOX=`which sox`
LAME=`which lame`
 
# Check prerequisites
if [ x${SOX} == 'x' ];
then
	echo I cannot find sox. Are you sure it is installed and in your PATH?
	exit
fi
 
if [ x${LAME} == 'x' ];
then
	echo I cannot find lame. Are you sure it is installed and in your PATH?
	exit
fi
 
# Check for arguments
 
if [ x${INFILE} == 'x' ];
then
	echo I need filename as argument
	exit
fi
 
# Check for input file
 
if [ -e $INFILE ];
then
	echo Found input file $INFILE
else
	echo Input file $INFILE not found, exiting
	exit;
fi
 
# Start conversion
 
echo "Converting AMR to WAV ($1 to ${FILENAME}.mp3)"
 
$CODECLOCATION/decoder $INFILE $FILENAME.raw 
 
$SOX -r 8000 -w -c 1 -s $FILENAME.raw -r 16000 -w -c 1 $FILENAME.wav 
 
$LAME $FILENAME.wav $FILENAME.mp3 --silent --tt $FILENAME --tl AMR --ty `date +%y`
 
# Delete intermediate files if needed
if [ $DELINTERMEDIATEFILES == 1 ];
then
	echo Deleting raw and wave files. Keeping original amr.
	rm $FILENAME.raw $FILENAME.wav
fi
 
if [ -e ${FILENAME}.mp3 ];
then
	echo File succesfully created
else
	echo File creation failed.
fi
 
echo Done!
</inputfile>

Credits:

A sample file: besok.mp3

Month: December 2005

Seagate Technology To Acquire Maxtor Corporation

Encode AMR to MP3

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