Siu Lun

Ok folks. I know each of us probably have a million or two mp3 files on our hard disk of our favourite music. We can say we’ve almost taken the mp3 format for granted all these years. A little known fact to those not in the business though is that mp3 is a proprietary format and they are actually charging a hefty sum for royalty payment!

Little do we know that when we do podcasting with mp3 files. While the sound that comes out of the file is copyrighted by us. The fact that you’re using a mp3 format to stream your podcast is enough for you to pay for a license before you use it!

Those in the business knows all about this. They also know about an open-source alternative codec that is truely free to use and distribute and free from royalty called ‘Ogg Vorbis’. But for one reason or another, major manufacturers of mp3 players (Apple) are not incoporating support for ogg files on their players!

Many smaller manufactuers of mp3 players such as iRiver have been incorporating such features for a while now! Guys, I believe it is time to re-encode all our files into ogg.

Come on, make some noise for ogg! (Flac is a lossless alternative format)

http://www.vorbis.com/

I’m officially switching alliegance to the ogg format. Though my iPod nano has no chance in playing ogg. I’ll have to just endure a slight delay when I use iTunes to re-encode ogg into aac for the iPod. No biggie, and at least I know that I’m not paying some tossers who’ve come up with the mp3 file format just to have some sort of patent on it and collecting royalties for something that should never have been.

I would like to pledge those who’re in the music ‘scene’ to start releasing files in ogg format!

Later
/rant over

Many people had problems installing the fileinfo pecl extension into Mac OS X. I believe this is probably a problem in a lot of other packages as well. From a search through the net I cannot find any workaround but I’ve come up with me own.

First of all I need to state that I’ve installed Apache and PHP via MacPorts. PHP is configured with Pear.

Once you’ve got that set up.

Do:

sudo pecl install fileinfo


At which point you’ll get an error saying something about libmagic doesn’t exist etc…

First of all. If you haven’t installed libmagic yet. Do:
sudo port install file

If you couldn’t install file and it was about it couldn’t fetch the file file… >.> then it’s probably about this: http://trac.macports.org/ticket/15831

Anyway, once you’ve got file installed via macport, we’ll go back to that error message about libmagic.
To address it, you should find the files under /private/tmp/pear/download/Fileinfo

what we’ll do essentially is now to just change the configure script. By:
mate /private/tmp/pear/download/Fileinfo*/config.m4

Once you’ve opened it up in textmate (or an editor of your choice) do a search for “SEARCH_PATH=”
and add in /opt/local into the mix. At the time of writing with Fileinfo v1.0.4 it is on line 8 and you should end up with: SEARCH_PATH=”/opt/local /usr/local /usr /usr/share/file”

Save the file. Now we’ll install PECL modules manually.

To do that, simply follow this:
http://php.net/manual/en/install.pecl.phpize.php

Hope this will help someone. (if anyone ever finds my blog =])

edit: Oh, and when you start using it. You may have to manually specify where the magic database file is. I had to and mine was at : ‘/usr/share/file/magic.mime’ OR you can choose to rebuild it to your chosen path by editing config.m4 and find: MAGIC_MIME_DIRS and add in your chosen magic database file’s path to the front of the mix.

This is how mine looks like:
MAGIC_MIME_DIRS="/usr/share/file /opt/local/share/file /usr/local/share/file /usr/share/misc/file /etc /usr/share/misc"
MAGIC_MIME_FILENAMES="magic.mime magic"

Once you’ve rebuilt it then restart apache and it’ll work. (remeber to do a clean rebuild!)