Posts Tagged ‘folklore’

Howto create Linux Music Audio CD from MP3 files / Create playable WAV format Audio CD Albums from MP3s

Tuesday, July 16th, 2019

cdburning-audio-music-cd-from-mp3-on-linuxcomapct-disc-tux-linux-logo

Recently my Mother asked me to prepare a Music Audio CD for her from a popular musician accordionist Stefan Georgiev from Dobrudja who has a unique folklore Bulgarian music.

As some of older people who still remember the age of the CD and who had most likely been into the CD burning Copy / Piracy business so popular in the countries of the ex-USSR so popular in the years 1995-2000 audio ,  Old CD Player Devices were not able to play the MP3 file format due to missing codecs (as MP3 was a proprietary compression that can't be installed on every device without paying the patent to the MP3 compression rights holder.

The revolutionary MP3 compression used to be booming standard for transferring Music data due to its high compression which made an ordinary MP3 of 5 minutes of 5MB (10+ times more compression than an ordinary classic WAV Audio the CPU intensiveness of MP3 files that puts on the reading device, requiring the CD Player to have a more powerful CPU.

Hence  due to high licensing cost and requirement for more powerful CPU enabled Audio Player many procuders of Audio Players never introduced MP3 to their devices and MP3 Neve become a standard for the Audio CD that was the standard for music listening inside almost every car out there.

Nowdays it is very rare need to create a Audio CD as audio CDs seems to be almost dead (As I heard from a Richard Stallman lecture In USA nowadays there is only 1 shop in the country where you can still buy CD or DVD drives) and only in third world as Africa Audio CDs perhaps are still in circulation.

Nomatter that as we have an old Stereo CD player on my village and perhaps many others, still have some old retired CD reading devices being able to burn out a CD is a useful thing.

Thus to make mother happy and as a learning excercise, I decided to prepare the CD for her on my Linux notebook.
Here I'll shortly describe the takes I took to make it happen which hopefully will be useful for other people that need to Convert and burn Audio CD from MP3 Album.

 

1. First I downloaded the Album in Mp3 format from Torrent tracker

My homeland Bulgaria and specific birth place place the city of Dobrich has been famous its folklore:  Galina Durmushlijska and Stefan Georgiev are just 2 of the many names along with Оркестър Кристал (Orchestra Crystal) and the multitude of gifted singers. My mother has a santiment for Stefan Georgiev, as she listened to this gifted accordinist on her Uncle's marriage.

Thus In my case this was (Стефан Георгиев Хора и ръченици от Добруджа) the album full song list here If you're interested to listen the Album and Enjoy unique Folklore from Dobrudja (Dobrich) my home city, Stefan Georgiev's album Hora and Rachenica Dances is available here

 


Stefan_Georgiev-old-audio-Music-CD-Hora-i-Rychenici-ot-Dobrudja-Horos-and-Ruchenitsas-from-Dobrudja-CD_Cover
I've downloaded them from Bulgarian famous torrent tracker zamunda.net in MP3 format.
Of course you need to have a CD / DVD readed and write device on the PC which nowdays is not present on most modern notebooks and PCs but as a last resort you can buy some cheap External Optical CD / DVD drive for 25 to 30$ from Amazon / Ebay etc.

 

2. You will need to install a couple of programs on Linux host (if you don't have it already)


To be able to convert from command line from MP3 to WAV you will need as minimum ffmpeg and normalize-audio packages as well as some kind of command line burning tool like cdrskin  wodim which is
the fork of old good known cdrecord, so in case if you you're wondering what happened with it just
use instead wodim.

Below is a good list of tools (assuming you have enough HDD space) to install:

 

root@jeremiah:/ # apt-get install –yes dvd+rw-tools cdw cdrdao audiotools growisofs cdlabelgen dvd+rw-tools k3b brasero wodim ffmpeg lame normalize-audio libavcodec58

 

Note that some of above packages I've installed just for other Write / Read operations for DVD drives and you might not need that but it is good to have it as some day in future you will perhaps need to write out a DVD or something.
Also the k3b here is specific to KDE and if you're a GNOME user you could use Native GNOME Desktop app such brasero or if you're in a more minimalistic Linux desktop due to hardware contrains use XFCE's native xfburn program.

If you're a console / terminal geek like me you will definitely enjoy to use cdw
 

root@jeremiah:/ # apt-cache show cdw|grep -i description -A 1
Description-en: Tool for burning CD's – console version
 Ncurses-based frontend for wodim and genisoimage. It can handle audio and

Description-md5: 77dacb1e6c00dada63762b78b9a605d5
Homepage: http://cdw.sourceforge.net/

 

3. Selecting preferred CD / DVD / BD program to use to write out the CD from Linux console


cdw uses wodim (which is a successor of good old known console cdrecord command most of use used on Linux in the past to burn out new Redhat / Debian / different Linux OS distro versions for upgrade purposes on Desktop and Server machines.

To check whether your CD / DVD drive is detected and ready to burn on your old PC issue:

 

root@jeremiah:/# wodim -checkdrive
Device was not specified. Trying to find an appropriate drive…
Detected CD-R drive: /dev/cdrw
Using /dev/cdrom of unknown capabilities
Device type    : Removable CD-ROM
Version        : 5
Response Format: 2
Capabilities   :
Vendor_info    : 'HL-DT-ST'
Identification : 'DVDRAM GT50N    '
Revision       : 'LT20'
Device seems to be: Generic mmc2 DVD-R/DVD-RW.
Using generic SCSI-3/mmc   CD-R/CD-RW driver (mmc_cdr).
Driver flags   : MMC-3 SWABAUDIO BURNFREE
Supported modes: TAO PACKET SAO SAO/R96P SAO/R96R RAW/R16 RAW/R96P RAW/R96R

You can also use xorriso (whose added value compared to other console burn cd tools is is not using external program for ISO9660 formatting neither it use an external or an external burn program for CD, DVD or BD (Blue Ray) drive but it has its own libraries incorporated from libburnia-project.org libs.

Below output is from my Thinkpad T420 notebook. If the old computer CD drive is there and still functional in most cases you should not get issues to detect it.

cdw ncurses text based CD burner tool's interface is super intuitive as you can see from below screenshot:

cdw-burn-cds-from-console-terminal-on-GNU-Linux-and-FreeBSD-old-PC-computer

CDW has many advanced abilities such as “blanking” a disk or ripping an audio CD on a selected folder. To overcome the possible problem of CDW not automatically detecting the disk you have inserted you can go to the “Configuration” menu, press F5 to enter the Hardware options and then on the first entry press enter and choose your device (by pressing enter again). Save the setting with F9.
 

4. Convert MP3 / MP4 Files or whatever format to .WAV to be ready to burn to CD


Collect all the files you want to have collected from the CD album in .MP3 a certain directory and use a small one liner loop to convert files to WAV with ffmpeg:
 

cd /disk/Music/Mp3s/Singer-Album-directory-with-MP3/

for i in $( ls *.mp3); do ffmpeg -i $i $i.wav; done


If you don't have ffmpeg installed and have mpg123 you can also do the Mp3 to WAV conversion with mpg123 cmd like so:

 

for i in $( ls ); do mpg123 -w $i.wav $i.mp3; done


Another alternative for conversion is to use good old lame (used to create Mp3 audio files but abling to also) decode
mp3 to wav.

 

lame –decode somefile.mp3 somefile.wav


In the past there was a burn command tool that was able to easily convert MP3s to WAV but in up2date Linux modern releases it is no longer available most likely due to licensing issues, for those on older Debian Linux 7 / 8 / 9 / Ubuntu 8 to 12.XX / old Fedoras etc. if you have the command you can install burn and use it (and not bother with shell loops):

apt-get install burn

or

yum install burn


Once you have it to convert

 

$ burn -A -a *.mp3
 

 

5. Fix file naming to remove empty spaces such as " " and substitute to underscores as some Old CD Players are
unable to understand spaces in file naming with another short loop.

 

for f in *; do mv "$f" `echo $f | tr ' ' '_'`; done

 

6. Normalize audio produced .WAV files (set the music volume to a certain level)


In case if wondering why normalize audio is needed here is short extract from normalize-audio man page command description to shed some light.

"normalize-audio  is  used  to  adjust  the volume of WAV or MP3 audio files to a standard volume level.  This is useful for things like creating mp3 mixes, where different recording levels on different albums can cause the volume to  vary  greatly from song to song."
 

cd /disk/Music/Mp3s/Singer-Album-directory-with-MP3/

normalize-audio -m *.wav

 

7. Burn the produced normalized Audio WAV files to the the CD

 

wodim -v -fix -eject dev='/dev/sr0' -audio -pad *.wav


Alternatively you can conver all your MP3 files to .WAV with anything be it audacity
or another program or even use 
GNOME's CDBurn tool brasero (if gnome user) or KDE's CDBurn which in my opinion is
the best CD / DVD burning application for Linux K3B.

Burning Audio CD with K3b is up to few clicks and super easy and even k3b is going to handle the MP3 to WAV file Conversion itself. To burn audio with K3B just run it and click over 'New Audio CD Project'.

k3b-on-debian-gnu-linux-burn-audio-cd-screenshot

For those who want to learn a bit more on CD / DVD / Blue-Ray burning on GNU / Linux good readings are:
Linux CD Burning Mini Howto, is Linux's CD Writing Howto on ibiblio (though a bit obsolete) or Debian's official documentation on BurnCD.
 

8. What we learned here


Though the accent of this tutorial was how to Create Audio Music CD from MP3 on GNU / Linux, the same commands are available in most FreeBSD / NetBSD / OpenBSD ports tree so you can use the same method to build prepare Audio Music CD on *BSDs.

In this article, we went through few basic ways on how to prepare WAV files from MP3 normalize the new created WAV files on Linux, to prepare files for creation of Audio Music CD for the old mom or grandma's player or even just for fun to rewind some memories. For GUI users this is easily done with  k3b,  brasero or xfburn.

I've pointed you to cdw a super useful text ncurses tool that makes CD Burninng from plain text console (on servers) without a Xorg / WayLand  GUI installed super easy. It was shortly reviewed what has changed over the last few years and why and why cdrecord was substituted for wodim. A few examples were given on how to handle conversion through bash shell loops and you were pointed to some extra reading resources to learn a bit more on the topic.
There are plenty of custom scripts around for doing the same CD Burn / Covnersion tasks, so pointing me to any external / Shell / Perl scripts is mostly welcome.

Hope this learned you something new, Enjoy ! 🙂

A living saint in Bulgaria Dqdo (Elder) Dobri of Baylovo village – The living Christ example we Christians should follow

Saturday, April 2nd, 2011

elder-dobri-from-baylovo-a-great-saint-like-example-christians-should-follow

In this dark days of humanity, we can rarely find persons who live in a holy way like the saints from the Holy Bible or the Books of the Living of the Saints

Saintship has been slowly disappearing from earth just like it's prophecised by Christ our Saviour and the Holy Apostles and in later times by many monks, Church hierarchs, patriarchs and hermits.

In Bulgaria as in most parts of the Orthodox world the Christian faith apostacy is also clearly seen.
We can no longer see saint hermits like our patron saint of Bulgaria Saint John of Rila

Even in this dark days God still shows mercy to us and still present us some of his saints.
The topic of this article as you have already red in the title is Elder Dobri of the Baylovo village

Elder Dobri of Baylova has been a regular person like all of us with a family and children just until 12 years ago.
About 12 years ago the I would call him The Living saint has decided to let all the earthly passions and sorrows for Christ and his eternal salvation.
He despised the earthly goodness and become a beggar, all the collected money he got were distributed among other poor people or donated to Churches and monasteries belonging to the Bulgarian Orthodox Church.

Day by day and a coin by coin, he has collected thousands of levs (the bulgaria national currency).
The gathered money were given to support the live of monasteries and Churches, by this very date. This old man is the greatest donator for the Cathedral Church St. Alexsander Nevski (situated at the heart of Bulgaria's capital Sofia)

His words spoken just like the saints are full of grace and goodness. One of his famous sayings are:

Man has Always two wills in himself in every moment of his life, the will to do good and the will to do evil
As all the truths his sayings are simple but represent the ultimate truth which was also said in many other forms in The Holy Bible Gospels and God's law.

The external outlook of Dqdo Dobri is also saintly, he has long beard a shining eyes and a national folklore dress.
He looks like he has been out of some old Bulgarian tale.

It's very striking fact that he that this old man is the biggest donator for our Cathedral Temple, we have many millionaires and businessman in Bulgaria but nobody has decided to donate to our Church such a high sum of money.

Elder Dobri's donation for the St. Alexander Nevski's Church is in value 35700 levs (around 19000 euros).
Dqdo Dobri is a beggar for Christ, this is one of the major types of saintship we read about in the living of the saints.
All the collected money from people are given for God's Glory. It's amazing heroism and an example, all we the Christians should follow to fulfill Christ's law of love and inherit the internal salvation.
A friend of mine who has the blessing to see Elder Dobri with her own eyes and have a small talk with him, has shared with me that even though he wears an old ragged clothes, his clothes and body emit a roses like odor!

As the fame about the same has grown these days, the Bulgarian National television has prepared a small video about the saint. I believe the video as a true blessing for us the Christians and will encourage us to persist in the good deads.
Here I present you the videos you can see the living saint, I hope by his holy prayers God will show mercy to all us who watch his graceful words:


The Living Christian Saint from Baylovo Village – Bulgaria


Elder Dobri from Baylovo – Bulgaria

Inteview with Elder Dobri in his house in Baylovo (the interview is in Bulgarian)

Free Software Songs and Videos Collection – (Anthem of Free Software) various interpretations

Friday, November 18th, 2011

Richard Stallman picture

I've gathered a collection of 15 Audio and Video songs dedicated to the Free Software / Open Source movement . All of the songs are based on the The Free Software Song Anthem written by Richard Mathew Stallman in the year 1991. The motive of the song is a Traditional Bulgarian song called Sadi Moma Bqla Loza – translated to bulgarian to something like Maid is Planting white Vines
The original Free Software Song symbolizes all free software and the Free Software Movement and GNU and is in the Bulgarian unique / specific folk rhythm of 7 / 8 beats .

Most of the songs which I post hereby could also be found and downloaded from GNU's official Free Software Song page
However some of the songs were only available from Youtube in the non-free format Flash Video (flv) . Hence, since the songs were dedicated to Free Software and apparently were being spread in a non-free format they either was missing any licensing or licensed under GFDL free music / art GNU like license.
To fix up this irragularity and add some freedom in terms of audio format of spreading, I've downloaded them and used ffmpeg2theora to convert the songs to the Free / Open Standard format Ogg Vorbis
I'm quite sure that many people, who use Ubuntu or Linux Mint are pretty much unfamiliar with the Free Software Songs existence, also many people most likely have never heard the Free Software Songs or even those who heard it have rarely heard more than 2 or 3 of the song variations.
Hereby, I'm sure many people who are lovers of Free Software will highly benefit and get inspired to continue in the Free Software by listening to these post shared little Free Software Song Collection .

The covers of the Original version publicly sang by Richard Stallman are in different musical genres, some of the song performances are in Folklore, played on Piano other covers are performed by musical bands in pop / punk en popular music styles, there are one person performances, cheerful christmas like soundings, 8 bit free software song, Metal free software variations etc. In the collection I've included also few other nice songs which are propaganda on free software, even though not a cover of the Free Software Song , I found them myself worthy to be included in the collection..:

Herein you can download or listen all the Free Software Songs version (Enjoyment is guaranteed! 😉 ):















Fenster-Free-Software-Song.ogg
Free_Software_Song_en_español.ogv
Free_Software_Song_feat._Flat_Eric.ogv
Jono_Bacon_-_-Free_Software_Song_2_Metal_Version.ogv
Markushaist_piano_-free-software-song.ogg
Metal_Free_Software_Song_v2.0.ogv
Stallman_Free_Software_Song_Video_320x240.ogv
The_Gnu_Song.ogv
The_Pink_Stainless_Tail_Free_Software_Song.ogv
free-software-song-herzog.ogg
free-software-song-rhythmic.ogg
free_software_song_sunnata.ogg
freesoft.ogg
jonobacon-freesoftwaresong2.ogg
pjj-and-hairyone-freesoftwaresong.ogg
I've also prepared a bundle containing all the 15 Free Software Songs which you can download from here
Enjoy the nice music! Don't forget to share it with everyone you could among with educating the people how important it is to value their freedom in this age of technological human enslavement 😉
 

Happy New 2012 Year, few Bulgarian New Year traditions / customs

Sunday, January 1st, 2012

Happy 2012 New Year . Wish to everyone best of luck, good health and best of success in the new upcoming year!
There is few customs, which are very typical for Bulgarian Christmas and New Year.
As I'm so keen on tradition and I'm sure many non-bulgarians are not aware of the Bulgarian custom, I'll try to name few of them and shed some light for foreigners who are about to celebrate the Christmas or New year eve in Bulgaria.

One is the back (spine) tapping, done by youngsters to elders with a stick made of cornel-tree and decorated in a very special beautiful way.

Here is how the stick the youngsters use to wish happy new year in a traditional bulgarian custom way.Survaknica Bulgariar New Year (Survane) new year custom
The back tapping to the elder is accompanied by famous words in Bulgarian saying:

Surva, Surva Godina!
Chervena Qbylka v Gradina,
edyr klas na niva,
golqm grozd na loza,
jylt mamul na lesa,
pylna kyshta s deca!
Jivo-zdravo do godina,
do godina do Amina!

This translated to english says something like:

Healthy (Complete), Healthy Year!
Red Apple in a Garden,
Large grapes in the vineyeard,
Yellow corn in the field,
full house with children!
Living-healthy until next year
in these year until the next one.

Actually this New Yearly wishings had different minor text variations in different regions of Bulgaria, but the main meaning is anyhow preserved.

Surva Surva Godina, Vesela Godina kid back tapping an older man Bulgaria
Kid using Survaknica to back tap some older man according to our tradition

You can see how simple and the same time meaningful those wishings are. They accent to the main things which were important for our forefathers. The things on which the yearly daily life depends.

Here is a video of some children in the kinder garden reciting the Surva, Surva wishing holding Survaknici

I've seen for the last 10 years these tradition as a consequence of the internationalization is starting to disappear. Now most of the times only in villages and some small regions these tradition is still practiced.
In cities gipsys are going in the early morning of the New Year morning and knocking on each apartment door offering a back tapping. Once they back tap you with Survaknica and wish you good things you're supposed to give them some food, candies and / or money 😉

Its also common that in the morning of the New Year a lot of folklore ensambles dance on the centers of cities and villages or sing Bulgarian folklore songs.

Bulgarian Folklore Choire

Some of the other things which are a kind of traditional on New Year is to go out on the city center and fire up some fires and dance some traditional dance we call Horo near the camping fire.


 

24th May Day of Slavonic Writting and Culture

Tuesday, May 24th, 2011

st. Cyril and Methodius Zahari Zograf painted icon from Trojan Monastery from the year 1848

On 24-th of May as an old tradition we in Bulgaria celebrate the Day of Slavonic/Slavic Writting and Culture.

It’s quite of feast, the streets are full of people and everybody wents out to celebrate or have a walk as the whole day atmosphere is extremely cheerful.
Until some years during communism on 24th of may was also a Church feast day of st. Cyril and Methodius, however since some years the Bulgarian Orthodox Church decided to commemorate the two saints on a different date.

However the secular educational tradition of remembering the two saints memory on today’s date next to considering the holiday as the official feast of triumph of educational enlightenment and science is still alive in the primary and secondary schools.
24th of May is also considered as the official day of Bulgarian and Slavonic Writting and Culture.
The two saints Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius are considered to be patron saints protector of all Schools, universities and educational institutions in Bulgaria.
On this date it’s common that a bit of secular icon images of the two saints to be holded in a public schools manifestation, where specially dressed pupils play music with trombones and drums and all teachers and students does a manifestation lined in a column in the streets (this tradition is a hermitage from communistic times as manifestation on major celebrations were a common thing during the communism years, when Bulgaria was part of the USSR).

24th of May public school pupil Manifestation

24th of May is considered maybe the brightest public feast in Bulgaria, even the secular atheist and unbelievers connect the day of 24th May celebrations with St. St. Cyril and Methodius who historically are the founders/inventors of the Slavonic writting letter and thus highly respected among all Orthodox Christian slavonic nations and as far as I know even are being known and venerated in some countries in the Roman Catholic western world (I’ll be glad to hear if some western people who are subscribed to my blog, give some reports if they know the two patron saints of Slavonic Culture.

Many cities in Bulgaria has an official local city feast on 24th of May. Dobrich my home city also marks off it’s public holiday on 24th of May.

Many small and middle sized villages also does celebrate heavily on this date, as the so called (people gatherings / (sbor as we call them in Bulgaria)) are occuring on this date.
On this assemblies, where people goes out to buy stuff, we have a lot of gipsies who sell a various hand-made food as well some gipsies home-made children toys 🙂

It’s very pity I have no picture to show you what kind of bulk stuff the gipsies are selling via an improvised made kiosks especially for the fesat.
The gipsies sales all kind of weird food especially for the holiday like, (pink ice-cream, all colors sugar-cotton and pink cream, pink sugar sticks (shiker as we call it) and a tons of other weird foods you cannot see anywhere else)).
I’m quite convinced that every foreigner will truly enjoy this feast of ours and I recommend, if you’re about to come to Bulgaria to try to be in our country on this feast, it’s truly wild and natural as it is and always was in the bolkans ! 🙂
It’s also traditional on this date of triumph of culture that many cultural events around the country occurs, as well as the traditional folklore performers and dancers perform on the cities centres.

24 May Horo Folklore Dance on a City centre
Horo (Bulgarian Traditional Folklore Dance on a city centre)

To generalize 24-th of May is our greatest and brightest holidays here in Bulgaria, there is some kind of established believe that on this date the weather is always nice. This year this national believe come true, as we have a wonderful sunny day here in Bulgaria :).

A Black and White Story and To Download an Apple a nice artistic videos produced by a friend

Tuesday, April 26th, 2011

Here are two really nice videos produced by Daniela Popova.

One is called Black and White Story and the other one is with the funny name To Download an Apple

The videos was produced for her Graduation assignment in NATFA (National Academy of Theater and Film arts).
Even better the Black and White Story Video has been selected for the Festival of the Orthodox Christian Cinema in Moscow.
The movie was selected by a the jury on the festival (a professor) who realized there is a deeper spiritual meaning behind the Black and White Story

The Black & White Story Video has also an outstanding bulgarian national folklore music combined with some modern day music, just check it out and enjoy.

The second movie To Download an Apple is a humorous one and I believe presents the sometimes stupid and serious efforts we do to follow fake imaginative goals.

Black and White Story

Daniela | Myspace Video

Black and White Story


To Download an Apple

As Daniela is a Christian the movies contain also a hidden Christian messages 😉
I greet her for the great work! Considering the uniqueness of the videos it’s obvious Daniela is really talented!
I’m looking forward to see some more from her works.