Tales for My Toddler
by macmaniac
Disclaimer: I do not encourage piracy. Remember that some artists are depending upon you paying for their music.
Some time ago, I purchased a music player for my toddler.
I mention this because I like the producers' spirit (the producer of the player, not of the toddler - the latter is me). That player is built to last, energy saving by using WAV instead of MP3, easy to deal with by toddlers and to maintain by their parents. Last but not least, their answer to "Well, I use Linux..." is not "We don't support Linux..." but "Our Linux application is still being developed, but have a look at this script that some customers wrote. Maybe it's helpful."
For months everything was fine as the pre-installed music files were enough for my toddler. But some days it was enough for me. Another day of Baah Baah Black Sheep in endless loop - no way! So I decided to put some other stuff on it. If you have MP3 files, you can just convert them to WAV and put them on the player's SD card. But getting the desired sound is not too easy, as I found out.
Now I have to mention that I'm from a small country with its own language. Albeit our laws concerning pirating are rather liberal, it's hard to find content in my language. And even harder to pirate kids' stuff. Toddlers and loving parents are not known for being pirates, arrr! So I was looking through my old stuff to find music or tales for my toddler. I found some tapes. But no player.
For the blink of an eye, I was thinking of tearing the tape out and getting a pencil to roll it up again. Nah, these were the old days. I came across some Compact Discs (CDs) with nicely told tales. For DVD ripping purposes, I still own a CD drive. So I was able to rip the tale, convert it to WAV, and put it on the player.
The next thing was a song we had watched on YouTube. This was the only source I could find. A video. The sound on its own was not available anywhere.
Luckily, youtube-dl 1 still exists and hopefully will forever. It's a mighty tool to rip copyleft videos from YouTube and other platforms. But it also lets you solely extract the audio tracks. As YouTube is so big, you can get a lot of content from there.
Another big thing is Spotify.
It doesn't stream videos, but songs. And even lets you save songs offline! But these files are still encrypted. So there's no chance to just copy your favorite songs to another device. I found some dubious browser add-ons and applications that claimed they could de-DRM Spotify. No thanks. There was nothing like youtube-dl for Spotify, reason why I looked for other ways to get the latest Peppa Pig tales on that player!
Audacity came into my mind. Another powerful tool I know from the days I wanted to be a rapper and needed some professional but cheap (that is - free) audio editing software. This tool is capable of recording directly from your soundcard - which means recording without any degradation. 2 The downside: it's like old-fashioned recording - it takes time. And if you record a playlist, you need to split and export the single tracks. It wouldn't be a mighty tool if a manual didn't exist on how to do this the easy way. 3
Wouldn't it be great if some script existed that would automate the whole Spotify/Audacity process? Or even some youtube-dl equivalence for Spotify?
I'll leave these tasks to brains that are more skilled than mine.
P.S. The player is called Hoerbert. Have a look: www.hoerbert.com