Wednesday, February 24, 2016

Install headless bittorrent client

apt-get source bittornado 
 
I set up aliases to btdownloadcurses.py and btdownloadmany.py
 
 
btdownloadcurses --max_uploads 4 --max_upload_rate 32 to_be_downloaded.torrent
 
btdownloadmany --max_uploads 4 --max_upload_rate 32 .
 
  
where . is a directory full of torrent files. 

Wednesday, February 10, 2016

Monday, February 8, 2016

Streaming NES (.NSF) file audio over a network using gstreamer

Now, to check on alsa
cat /proc/asound/cards should show some available cards

alsamixer should also work if you run it from the commandline. If alsamixer gives the following error:
cannot open mixer: No such file or directory

You may need to add yourself to the audio group in /etc/group, then log out and back in to update permissions.

First, we test remote piping of sound.

On the listening machine (Macbook Air for me, so using sox vs. aplay as you would/could in Linux):
nc -l 8000 | sox -traw -r44100 -b16 -e unsigned-integer - -tcoreaudio

On the source machine (Ubuntu 12.04 for me):
cat /dev/urandom | nc ip_addr_of_listening_machine 8000

If you hear white noise, the connection between machines seems to work correctly.

Next, we want to set up gstreamer

sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10*

Check that we can play the .nsf files from gstreamer (where ${file} is the file to play)

gst-launch-0.10 -v filesrc location="${file}" ! nsfdec ! pulsesink 

You should hear the game audio of your choice. If this doesn't work, you may need to install libgme-dev by doing:

sudo apt-get install libgme-dev

Now you can try a file over the network.

gst-launch-0.10 -v filesrc location="${file}" ! nsfdec ! audioconvert ! wavenc ! udpsink port=8888

You can then connect to this port with netcat and listen to the wavenc encoded data (basically just raw PCM, if you missed the header).

nc sourceserver 8888 | sox -traw -r44100 -b16 -e unsigned-ineger -tcoreaudio

Capturing audio output with gstreamer

To figure out which output gstreamer's pulsesink will be using, and try to capture it, check

pactl list | grep -A2 "Source #"

Look for a monitor device which seems to correspond to speakers in this list - in my example this is "alsa_output.pci-0000_00_14.2.analog-stereo.monitor", shown as source #1 in my list.

Now catch the output using gstreamer, and save to some filename

gst-launch -e pulsesrc device="alsa_output.pci-0000_00_14.2.analog-stereo.monitor" ! audioconvert ! wavenc ! filesink location=test_wav.wav

You can listen to this file (if something was playing through xmms2 already), and verify that this gstreamer command is catching the right output device. It took me a few tries to figure out which monitor output was the right one.

This filename dump can also be a fifo, which means that the output can also be used with netcat.

First, on the listening machine
nc -l 8000 > test_wav.wav

Next, on the streamer

mkfifo streamer

gst-launch -e pulsesrc device="alsa_output.pci-0000_00_14.2.analog-stereo.monitor" ! audioconvert ! wavenc ! filesink location=streamer

then in another terminal, in the same directory

nc ip_addr_of_listening 8000 < streamer

Saturday, February 6, 2016

Installing xmms2 with NSF support on Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install xmms2
sudo apt-get install xmms2-plugins-*
sudo apt-get install libgme-dev

kill the currently running xmms2d process with kill, then run
xmms2-launcher

To see if things are working, add files (for example .nsf files) and play them

xmms2 add *.nsf
xmms2 list
xmms2 play