2004-01-24-0450Z


Some good luck for a change. I got a script working that calculates the primary frequency of a sound file. It's off by one octave and one hertz, but I think I know why and in any case it will be trivial to fix. It's the start of my wav2mid program I've been promising for years now. Finally the intuitive understanding of the fourier transform that I've had for about 15 years has matured to a partially functional understanding; it will probably take another 15 years before I have a mathematical understanding of it.

I also learned how to sing vibrato using the free online lessons at http://www.vocalist.org.uk/. Of course, it needs practice, but I'd been trying to do it for at least 30 years with no success until today!

I'm thinking of starting an archive of conversion programs. They will have a common naming convention of xxx2yyy, where xxx is the source format and yyy the destination format. 3-letter abbreviations (extensions) will be used even if they aren't the most common extensions for the files, e. g. "sgm" instead of "sgml". If there isn't a 3-letter extension but there is a 1- or 2-letter extension, that will be used, e. g. ps2htm for postscript to html. There will also be a common syntax, e. g. executing the program without arguments should consistently print a usage message to stderr, -o should set the output, -o "*.txt" should append ".txt" to the name of each input file to make the output filename, and "-" should indicate stdin or stdout depending on where it's used: 'cat file.html | htm2txt -o - -' should work as expected, sending the text output to stdout.

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