More podcasts are coming, Hulk, never fear! I just resolved an issue that’s been the holdup for the past couple of weeks. I bought a new little recorder…crappy cheap thing, but a) line-in (for mike), and b) mounts as USB device. Cool.

But…(always a but when I buy something cheap) in the default (low-quality) record mode, the output is one funked-up WAV file. It’s 8Hz, 1 channel IMA ADPCM audio, and my standard podcast management tools (ReZound for editing, lame for encoding) are unable to read the file correctly. And even though there’s a higher quality mode I can set it to for the future, I already had several recording sessions…a cursory listen to the file sounded ok, the USB mount was fine, etc. Dangit!

mplayer (as always) to the rescue, though. You can listen to the entire file w/o issue using it (other tools could listen to about the first 80 secs, and then thought it was corrupt). I knew there was some way to pass that data on to other tools, but I’m no mplayer command line guru, so it took me a couple of passes to figure it out. For those interested (and me, in case I forget *grin*):

mplayer kaz-2006-11-18-01.wav -ao pcm

dumps out the uncompressed raw PCM audio to disk. Everything understands that. Woot! I’m back in business. Thanks again, mplayer! Expect podcasts to start streaming up soon, sportsfans. I have two that are now pretty much ready.