I am working on a simple application using Gstreamer on C, that involves playing a song and show some info about it on terminal. Thta info includes the total length of the song in seconds. As usual, I used the function gst_element_query_duration to get this data. The thing is, when I run my program, sometimes it shows the right time on screen, but then I run it again and the total time showed is about 6 seconds less. Because is just a simple trial application, I am using playbin as the general bin for reproduction, so I tried with different file extensions and it seems this only happens with mp3 files. Have anyone ever experienced this? Any ideas on how to fix it?
MP3 has the problem that there is no duration stored inside the file (usually). With constant bitrate files you can simply check the bitrate and the file size, but for variable bitrate files you can only do an approximation based on that. Your problem is probably exactly that.
The only way to know the exact duration of a variable bitrate MP3 file without header information with the duration (see Xing header) is to parse the file until the end and count the exact duration. With playbin you should get the accurate duration at the end of the file.
Related
I am trying to write a program to play a frequency for a time. I can't find any way of simply just playing a certain frequency. How do I go about doing this in OpenAL?
I eventually found a video on properly reading form a WAV file (huge credit to this video) and how a WAV file is formatted (explained here in detail) and did some trial-and-error work until I figured out how to do it. I figured that if I could make a WAV-style file with the frequencies in them and set up the OpenAL buffer and source manually, it would work.
I ran into some trouble when I found that the format differed from the first explanation of WAV file format I found, as some apparently have additional meta-data, which I had to test for and skip over when trying to load a WAV file. Then I made a WAV file containing the frequencies and played it, which worked as well as I could have hoped for.
Here's another article about how bit-depth works that really helped me understand what I was doing.
Hopefully this helps anyone else who is trying to do something similar to this!
I have a huge 1.9 GB data file without extension I need to open and get some data from, the problem is this data file is extension-less and I need to know what extension it should be and what software I can open it with to view the data in a table.
here is the picture :
Its only 2 lines file, I already tried csv on excel but it did not work, any help ?
I have never use it but you could try this:
http://mark0.net/soft-tridnet-e.html
explained here:
http://www.labnol.org/software/unknown-file-extensions/20568/
The third "column" of that line looks 99% chance to be from php's print_r function (with newlines imploded to be able to stored on a single line).
There may not be a "format" or program to open it with if its just some app's custom debug/output log.
A quick google found a few programs to split large files into smaller units. THat may make it easier to load into something (may or may not be n++) for reading.
It shouldnt be too hard to mash out a script to read the lines and reconstitute the session "array" into a more readable format (read: vertical, not inline), but it would to be a one-off custom job, since noone other than the holder of your file would have a use for it.
I come to you completely stumped. I do some side work for a company that uses an old DOS based program to input and retrieve data. This is a legacy piece of software, and they have since moved to either QuickBooks or Outlook for all of their address or billing related needs. However there have been some changes made, and they work with this database fairly regularly. Since the computer that this software is on, is running XP (and none of the other computers in the office can run it) they're looking to phase this software out for when the computer inevitably explodes.
TLDR; I have an old .csv file (roughly two years) that has a good chunk of information on it, but again it's two years old. I have another file called ml.dat (I'm assuming masterlist.dat) that's in the same folder as this legacy software. I open it with notepad and excel and am presented with information like this:
S;Û).;PÃS;*p(â'a,µ,
The above chunk of text is recognized much less within notepad or excel. It's a lot more of the unrecognized squares.
Some of the information is actually readable however. I can for example read the occasional town name, or person's name but I'm unable to get all of the information since there's a lot missing. Perhaps the data isn't in unicode or something? I have no idea. Any suggestions? I'm ultimately trying to take this information and toss it into either quickbooks or outlook.
Please help!
Thanks
Edit: I'm guessing the file might be encrypted since .dat's are usually clear text? Any thoughts?
.DAT files can be anything, they are usually just application data. Since there is readable text, then it is very unlikely that this file is encrypted. Instead you are seeing ASCII representations of the bytes of other content. http://www.asciitable.com/ Assuming single byte values, the number 77 might appear in the file somewhere as M.
Your options:
Search for some utility to load and translate the dat file for that application.
Set up an appropriate dos emulator so you can run this application on another box, or even a virtual machine running freedos or something.
Figure out the file format and then write a program to translate the data.
For #3, you can attach a debugger to the application to trace how the file is read and written. Alternatively you can try to figure out record boundaries (if all the records are the same size, then things are a little bit easier.) Then you can use known values to try to find field boundaries. If you can find (or reverse compile) the source code, then that could also give you insight into the file format.
1 is your best bet, and #2 will buy you some time so that you don't need that original machine anymore. #3 would likely be something to outsource.
If you can find the source or file format, then you just recreate whatever data structure was dumped to the file and read the file into it.
To find which exe opens it, you can do something like:
for %f in (*.exe) do find "ml.dat" %f -c
Assuming the original application was written in C then there would be code something like this to read the first record from the file:
struct SecretData
{
int first;
double money;
char city[10];
};
FILE* input;
struct SecretData secretdata;
input = fopen("ml.dat", "rb");
fread(&data, sizeof(data), 1, input);
fclose(input);
(The file would have been written with fwrite.) Basically you need to figure out the innards of the SecretData structure to be able to read the file.
There likely wasn't a separate utility used to make the file, dumping data and reading it back from a file is relatively easy in most languages.
I was wondering if there is a functionality in the SDL_Mixer lib to skip to a certain position in a wav file. I've found out the there is a function called Mix_SetMusicPosition but it won't work with .wav files and it won't let you choose a channel.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
EDIT:
I figured out how to do it. Instead of calling an additional function I just changed the start pointer of the abuf variable located in Mix_Chunk structure. I calculated how many bytes are in a second in a 16 bit .wav file playing at 44khz and changed the starting pointer of abuf with that number times how many seconds I want to skip. And then changed the length of alen, also a variable located in the Mix_Chunk struct, with the same number of bytes.
I just read the docs for SDL Music and apparently Mix_SetMusicPosition only supports OGG, MP3 and MOD files.
Link: http://jcatki.no-ip.org:8080/SDL_mixer/SDL_mixer_65.html#SEC65
Obvious solution; convert your wav. files to your favorite previously mentioned file format.
I'm not sure if it was asked, but I couldn't find anything like this.
My program uses a simple .txt file for log purposes, It just creates/opens a file and appends lines.
After some time, I started to log quite a lot of activities, so the file became too large and hardly readable. I know, that it's not write way to do this, but I simply need to have a readable file.
So I thought maybe there's a simple file format for log files and a soft to view it or if you'd have any other suggestions on this question?
Thanks for help in advance.
UPDATE:
It's access 97 application. I'm logging some activities like Form Loading, SELECT/INSERT/UPDATE to MS SQL Server ...
The log file isn't really big, I just write the duration of operations, so I need a simple way to do this.
The Log file is created on a user's machine. It's used for monitoring purposes logging some activities' durations.
Is there a way of viewing that kind of simple Log file highlighted with an existing tool?
Simply, I'd like to:
1) Write smth like "'CurrentTime' 'ActivityName' 'Duration in milliseconds' " (maybe some additional information like query string) into a file.
2) Open it with a tool and view it highlighted or somehow more readable.
ANSWER: I've found a nice tool to do all I've wanted. Check my answer.
LogExpert
The 3 W's :
When, what and where.
For viewing something like multitail ("tail on steroids") http://www.vanheusden.com/multitail/
or for pure ms windows try mtail http://ophilipp.free.fr/op_tail.htm
And to keep your files readable, you might want to start new files when if the filesize of the current log file is over certain limit. Example:
activity0.log (1 mb)
activity1.log (1 mb)
activity2.log (1 mb)
activity3.log (1 mb)
activity4.log (205 bytes)
A fairly standard way to deal with logging from an application into a plain text file is to:
split the logs into different program functional areas.
rotate the logs on a daily/weekly basis (i.e. split the log on a size or date basis)
so the current log is "mylog.log" or whatever, and yesterday's was "mylog.log.1" or "mylog.ddmmyyyy.log"
This keeps the size of the active log manageable. And then you can just have expiry rules so that old logs get thrown away on a regular basis.
In addition it would be a good idea to have different log levels for your application (info/warning/error/fatal) so that you're not logging more than is necessary.
First, check you're only logging things that are useful.
If it's all useful, make sure it is easily parsable by tools such as grep, that way you can find the info you want. Make sure you have the type of log entry, the date/time all conforming to a layout.
Build yourself a few scripts to extract the information for you.
Alternatively, use separate log files for different types of entries.
Basically you better just split logs according to severity. You'll rarely need to read all logs for the whole system. For example apache allows to configure error log and access log, pretty obvious what info exactly they have.
If you're under linux system grep is your best tool to search through logs for specific entries.
Look at popular logfiles like /var/log/syslog on Unix to get ideas:
MMM DD HH:MM:SS hostname process[pid]: message
Example out of my syslog:
May 11 12:58:39 raphaelm anacron[1086]: Normal exit (1 job run)
But to give you the perfect answer we'd need more information about what you are logging, how much and how you want to read the logs.
If only the size of the log file is the problem, I recommend using logrotate or something similar. logrotate watches log files and, depending on how you configured it, after a given time or when the log file exceeds a given size, it moves the log file to an archive directory and optionally compresses it. Then the original log file is truncated. For example, you could configure it to archive the log file every 24 hours or whenever the files size exceeds 500kb.
If this is a program, you might investigate apache logging libraries (http://logging.apache.org/) Out of the box, they'll give you a decent logging format out of the box. They're also customizable, so you can simplify your parsing job.
If this is a script, see some of the other answers.
LogExpert
I've found it here. Filter is better, than in mtail. There's an option of highlighting just adding a string and the app is nice and readable. You can customize columns as you like.