How to convert wma to ogg

How can I convert all *.wma to *.ogg in one directory?
I first tried the approved ffmeg. That one helped me many times with good results.

Version 1:

find -name '*wma' -exec ffmpeg -i {} -acodec vorbis -ab 128k {}.ogg \;
rename 's/\.wma//' *\.wma\.ogg
(Test the renameing: rename --no-act --verbose 's/\.wma//' *\.wma\.ogg)

or

Version 2:

for i in *.wma; do ffmpeg -i "$i" -vn -acodec vorbis -ab 128k "${i/.wma}".ogg; done

# ffmpeg: -vn => novideo, -acodec vorbis => ogg-encoder, -ab set audio bitrate to 128k (64 is standard. That option doesn't seem to work with ogg :-(
# ${i/.wma} is cutting the filename $i from ".wma"

The quality gets really worse.

Best quality with version 3:

1. Step: Convert wma to flac with ffmeg

ffmpeg -i input.wma -vn -acodec flac output.flac

2. Step: Convert flac to ogg with oggenc

oggenc input.flac -q2 -o output.ogg

# -q quality 2 (1 bad .. 10 excellent)
# -o output-file

Or all in one line to convert the whole directory:

for i in *.wma; do ffmpeg -i "$i" -vn -acodec flac -y tmp.flac; oggenc tmp.flac -q2 -o "${i/.wma}".ogg; done; rm -f tmp.flac

# -y Overwrite output files.
# rm -f delete without further questions

EU Parliament elections and F/OSS

European Parliament election in 1 month and 4 days. The last months before elections politicians are listening very carefully to their voters. http://www.freesoftwarepact.eu has some ideas how to bring FS and OSS into politicians minds. Even if there is no campaign in my EU-country (at the moment there is only one in Begum, France and Italy) it reminds me (and hopefully you) that this is a good time to act. NOW!

I will tease every politician I see and ask him or her about their attitude towards

• software patents,
  
• DRM,
  
• support for F/OSS in schools and gov. administration,
  
• ...
  

And perhaps I'm going to write some emails. So they know there is something like F/OSS and there are many, many voters interested in that topic.

Presenting KDE at LinuxInfoTag in Augsburg (Hello Planet)

Sat. March 28th LinuxInfoTag took place in Augsburg (in the south of Germany). Round 250 interested people were visiting the booths of KDE, Debian, and many many more Open Source Projects and could discuss with members of the communities or listen to 20 talks. This was not only my first official event promoting KDE I also had the chance to do my first talk introducing KDE 4.2. (Talking about first times: this is my first post on planet.kde.org (thanks to Jonathan Riddell): Hello Planet!)

It was a great pleasure and honor to present KDE 4.2 together with Lydia, Eckhart and Frederik! Thanks for the fun and thanks to everyone who contributed to KDE (otherwise I had nothing to present).
Apart from a small number of comments the majority of visitors was really excited about KDE 4.2. :-)
Kudos to all of you!

P.S.: You can find the slides (German) here:
PDF (3,7MB): http://www.luga.de/Angebote/Vortraege/KDE42_LIT_2009/KDE42_LIT_2009.pdf
ODF (OOo3.0.1) (4,6MB): http://kde.org/kdeslides/LITAugsburg2009/KDE42-LIT-Augsburg2009.odp
ODF template (102KB): http://www.mevin.net/download/KDE42-template.otp

Activation and deactivation of the touchpad

Most of the hotkeys of my Thinkpad wok fine with KDE 4.2 (Fn+F4 Suspend to RAM, Fn+F12 Suspend to disk, Fn+F5 act/deact bluetooth, volumes, start/stop/previous/next). Fn+F7 (select Display) and Fn+F8 (act/deact Touchpad) don't work yet.
To act/deact the touchpad I found the following comand [1]:

/usr/bin/synclient "TouchpadOff=`/usr/bin/synclient -l | sed -ne 's/\(TouchpadOff *= *\)\([01]\)/\2/p' | sed -e 'y/01/10/'`"

Now I'm searching a way to map the key in KDE4 without installing hotkeys or other programms.

[1] http://forums.opensuse.org/hardware/laptop/388880-thinkpad-fn-f8-toggle-touchpad-example.html

KDE 4.2 RC1 tested

Today I updated my system to KDE 4.2 RC1 (factory repository). After the restart plasma crashed. I contacted the #plasma team on IRC and got a good tip within seconds: delete (or better move) ~/.kde4/share/config/plasma-appletsrc.
After that I had a fresh new shiny open source state of the art (or above) desktop environment. If you want to have a look search http://blip.tv for "kde42" or http://youtube.com for "kde 4.2".

The whole KDE community has done an amazing work. Thank you very much! You ROCK!

IBM copyed our slogan

Just read the article "The 10 Coolest Open Source Products Of 2008" and found that IBM uses the slogan "Be Free" for Lotus Symphony.


http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.nsf/home

Convert ogg to mp3

My sister is here for the holidays. Unfortunately her mp3 player only supports mp3 and no ogg. :-(
I helped her to convert their ripped ogg files from her kubuntu system into mp3 files. The following command transforms the whole directory from ogg in mp3.

for i in *.ogg; do sox "$i" "${i/.ogg}".mp3; done

(sox old.ogg neu.mp3 is the basic command to transform ogg to mp3.)