First US Tool Tour Dates!

Toolshed has an updated listing of the tour dates. According to liveDaily, they’ll be playing a show at New Orleans’ Voodoo Music Experience alongside Red Hot Chilli Peppers and Duran Duran. I might actually have to fly out for that one…

Looks like we’ll see the tour dates continue to trickle out over the coming weeks, with all dates expected by the middle of July. They gotta have one at the RBC Center. Right?

Tool tour announcement?

According to Fourth Eye, Tool is gonna be making a “huge announcement” on Monday. Here’s hoping it’s the much anticipated US tour dates!

Those dates better include Raleigh.
BTW, if you haven’t bought 10,000 Days yet, you are really missing out…

New Beck CD

Product Image: Guero
My rating: 5 out of 5
Got my hands on an advance copy of the new Beck CD intitled Guero last night and have been quite impressed so far. He’s blended some of the sounds from his past two CD’s with his signature quirky style and it works. It’s always nice to see a true artist evolve and grow. This is one I’ll be ordering as soon as it’s released.

New Beck CD

Real review here

Shuffle my GStreamer

I bought Tiff an iPod Shuffle for her birthday (which she absolutely loves) and have had to figure out what to do about my ogg collection. I found info on adding ogg support to iTunes and had no problems getting it mostly working. Tho iTunes will recognize most of my oggs (as quicktime movies!) and convert to aac on the fly, it won’t read all the info from the tags so my track numbers don’t show up. I also had an issue with it importing my Zeppelin How The West Was Won set that required finding a quick n dirty conversion option.

I tried using SoX, but it didn’t retain the tags so I looked at some of the ogg2mp3 scripts floating around and was sorely dissapointed. They either didn’t keep tags, or were too old to be of any real use. Enter GStreamer and it’s beautiful pipeline system. I was able to run the simple bash script below and convert an entire directory to 128k mp3’s while keeping the metadata intact.

#!/bin/bash

file="$@"
mp3name=${file/ogg/mp3}

gst-launch-0.8 filesrc location="$file" ! oggdemux ! vorbisdec ! audioconvert ! lame ! filesink location="$mp3name"