upgrade notes

[Charles Hallenbeck]

After upgrading my system to Slackware 7.1 and also upgrading numerous
other related packages (alsa, realplayer, trplayer, etc.) I have observed
a couple of things:

1. The program 'vsoung' which captures output intended for /dev/dsp used
to work fine on my old system, but produces corrupted .wav files on the
new one. The author is unable to duplicate the problem, though he
installed realplayer and trplayer in order to do so. He is using OSS
drivers instead of ALSA drivers as I am using, and he suspects a
peculiarity in the ALSA package. However, he informed me of a new version
not yet officially released and while it also produces corrupted files
when used the same way as the older version, it can be used
successfully. It has a new swithc "-d" which "duplicates" the output so
that you can hear the output and capture it at the same time. Using the
"-d" switch with version 0.4 of vsound solves the problem of corrupted
files. 

Second, my new wav file editor 'afix' calls on 'play' which is an
interface to 'sox' in order to play pieces of a file being editred. It
turns out that my new distribution contains a current copy of sox
(12.16) which uses a different set of command line switches for
play/sox! I made the necessary changes to afix and posted a fix this
morning. The revision also uses a "-d" switch on the call to vsound, so
that when converting .ra or .rm files to .wav, you will hear them playing
during the process.

The new afix release is at:

http://www.mhonline.net/~chuckh/afix-0.02.tgz

This is not a major upgrade - just a fix for the consequences of getting
modern!
Cheers - Chuck


My web site is http://www.mhonline.net/~chuckh 
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