[olug] quick hacks: audio au to wav, many pdf to 1 pdf

[Brian Wiese]

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1st hack, SOX converting a .au sound file to .wav

After searching for a couple days on how to do this (and I thought a .au
file was a M$ format at first) I found out it is actually a:

bwiese at franklin:tmp$ file thankvm.au
thankvm.au: Sun/NeXT audio data: 8-bit linear PCM [REF-PCM], mono, 8000 Hz

well, google came back with this gem:
http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/quickhacks.htm
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To convert it to a .wav, do this:

$ sox mysong.au mysong.wav
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Wow, was that simple. =) Top result on google was some experts-exchange
group trying to figure out how to do this in Windoze, and I thought that's
what I'd have to do... find some shareware and install it on a windoze box
to convert these files.  Apparently, thats like the default UNIX audio
file format for recording audio on a mic.

"To record a song from the microphone, just do this:  $ rec mysong.au"

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2nd hack, PDFTK t

The PDF toolkit (http://www.accesspdf.com/pdftk/) "If PDF is electronic
paper, then pdftk is an electronic staple-remover, hole-punch, binder,
secret-decoder-ring, and X-Ray-glasses. Pdftk is a simple tool for doing
everyday things with PDF documents. Keep one in the top drawer of your
desktop..."

I had used some online e-book site and was getting pages one at a time to
save, so I saved them all to <page#>.pdf and so on, then just ran:

$ pdftk *.pdf cat output OneFile.pdf

and viola.  Very nice.  I love GNU/Linux, free software, and the CLI!!!

Brian

-- 
Brian Wiese          "What we do in life, echoes in eternity."
bwiese(at)cotse.com  gpg: 0x46D4332E    keyserver: pgp.mit.org
phone: 402.296.3008  aim: unolinuxguru  www.unomaha.edu/~bwiese
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 Free Culture - http://free-culture.org - by Lawrence Lessig