How to Download Dale Ralph Davis Sermons and Convert them to MP3 on Linux
By David Legg, 2007/2008. Back to Main Menu
The on-line sermons of Dale Ralph
Davis are strongly recommended for everyone to listen to. You can get
them here
(Woodland PCA) or here
(Aisquith) However, non-Windows users will notice, that in the
case of the Woodland PCA web site files, they are not in a very
friendly, portable or usable format. Windows users may be able to
play them using some versions of the Windows media player, but I
wouldn't know about that :)
A neat trick is to download them, then convert them into, say, MP3 format. There are lots of other possibilities, of course, but MP3 format will allow you to listen to sermons in bed on your Palm, Nokia N810 (smug grin :), in your lounge on your DVD player, or in the bath on your iPod or MP3 player. I'm not young enuf to know about iPods either :)
Here are some instructions that work on Fedora Core 5 (FC5, FC6, FC7) and similar. Please email me if it works for you on other operating systems at dwlegg (at) gmail (dot) com, or to submit other instructions or suggestions. See the bottom of this page for a contribution from Tim Heaney.
Instructions:
1. Go to here
and download the mplayer packages and install them. You can also use
yum to install things from the livna site.
2. Go to here
and download, then install, the BladeEnc program.
3. Use mplayer to convert your .wma
file into a normal PCM audio file, i.e. like a CD track:
mplayer -vo null -vc dummy -af resample=44100 -ao pcm:waveheader "davis_sermon.wma" |
4. Use BladeEnc to convert the resulting .wav file into MP3 format:
cat audiodump.wav | bladeenc -mono -br 64 STDIN "davis_sermon.64kHz.mp3" rm audiodump.wav |
Note that this last step converts a
50MB sermon into a 25MB sermon at quite a pleasant sampling rate,
64kHz, but in mono - thus saving lots of disk space or memory card
space.
Some particularly well-worth downloading stuff:
1/7/2007
A.M. Sermon - Isaiah 53:10-12, Hebrews 2:10
"Hallelujah!
What a Servant!"
1/7/2007
P.M. Sermon - 2 Samuel 6
"A Worshipper before God's
Holiness or: Holy, Holy, Holy
See also the Bible study series on Genesis which starts July 2007.
Here's an example:
[daddy@arcturus SOUND]$ cat WMAMP3.sh # a little script to do the commands automatically :) #!/bin/bash # Convert .wma files in current directory into mp3s # mplayer -vo null -vc dummy -af resample=44100 -ao pcm:waveheader "$1.wma" cat audiodump.wav | bladeenc -mono -br 64 STDIN "$1.64kHz.mp3" rm audiodump.wav [daddy@arcturus SOUND]$ ./WMAMP3.sh '6-17-2007 PM' MPlayer SVN-r22817 rpm.livna.org (C) 2000-2007 MPlayer Team CPU: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3500+ (Family: 15, Model: 15, Stepping: 0) CPUflags: MMX: 1 MMX2: 1 3DNow: 1 3DNow2: 1 SSE: 1 SSE2: 1 Compiled with runtime CPU detection. mplayer: could not connect to socket mplayer: No such file or directory Failed to open LIRC support. You will not be able to use your remote control. Playing 6-17-2007 PM.wma. ASF file format detected. Clip info: name: Track 1 ========================================================================== Opening audio decoder: [ffmpeg] FFmpeg/libavcodec audio decoders AUDIO: 44100 Hz, 2 ch, s16le, 128.0 kbit/9.07% (ratio: 16002->176400) Selected audio codec: [ffwmav2] afm: ffmpeg (DivX audio v2 (FFmpeg)) ========================================================================== [AO PCM] File: audiodump.wav (WAVE) PCM: Samplerate: 44100Hz Channels: Stereo Format s16le [AO PCM] Info: Faster dumping is achieved with -vc null -vo null -ao pcm:fast [AO PCM] Info: To write WAVE files use -ao pcm:waveheader (default). AO: [pcm] 44100Hz 2ch s16le (2 bytes per sample) Video: no video Starting playback... A:3353.3 (55:53.3) of 3353.0 (55:53.0) 0.5% Exiting... (End of file) BladeEnc 0.94.2 (c) Tord Jansson Homepage: http://bladeenc.mp3.no =============================================================================== BladeEnc is free software, distributed under the Lesser General Public License. See the file COPYING, BladeEnc's homepage or www.fsf.org for more details. Files to encode: 1 Encoding: Standard input stream Input: 44.1 kHz, 16 bit, stereo. Output: 64 kBit, mono. Completed. Encoding time: 00:01:48 (31.04X) All operations completed. Total encoding time: 00:01:48 [daddy@arcturus SOUND]$ ll total 122048 -rw-rw-r-- 1 daddy daddy 26814590 Jul 7 19:58 6-17-2007 PM.64kHz.mp3 -rw-rw-r-- 1 daddy daddy 53944701 Jul 2 22:25 6-17-2007 PM.wma -rwxr-xr-x 1 daddy daddy 221 Apr 21 20:04 WMAMP3.sh |
Here is the kind contribution from Tim Heaney:
Hi I just stumpled upon https://davidlegg.org.uk/dale_ralph_davis_linux_howto.html and I thought I'd add that LAME http://lame.sourceforge.net/ is another popular MP3 encoder. Before downloading and installing BladeEnc, folks might want to check that they don't already have lame. If so, to convert to 64k monophonic MP3, they could run:
lame -b 64 -m m audiodump.wav -o davis_sermon.64kHz.mp3 |
However, you don't really need to download the WMA to a file; mplayer is happy to take a URL as input. For example, to download and convert the latest sermon, I could run
mplayer -quiet -vo null -vc dummy -af resample=44100 -ao pcm:waveheader http://www.woodlandpca.com/media/8-5-2007%20AM.wma lame -b 64 -m m audiodump.wav -o 8-5-2007\ AM.mp3 |
You could, of course, do the same thing with bladeenc. Tim
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