Comprec

This program in its current state is a bad hack of Paul Everet's fixed-point shine port for Riscos. I only did an absolute minimum to get things to run, mainly to see if the Z has enough horsepower for real time somewhat MP3 encoding. It seems to have.

However, the quality of the result is pretty bad, so you certainly don't want to do bootlegging with this. It's probably ok as a dictaphone, though, maybe even at 32 kbps.

There currently is no GUI -- I may do one if I and a couple of other people find the program useful. For now, just do

shine -b 64 /dev/dsp1 output.mp3
and record. Press Control-C (that's Fn-C on the zaurus keyboard in the konsole) when done recording, allow something like 3 seconds for buffering.

You can either download a binary, comprec_0.01_arm.ipk (note: for some reason, the package doesn't show up in the "Install and Remove Software" applet, so install it from the command line -- the state the program is in now, you won't want to mess with it if you can't do that anyway) or the source comprec-current.tar.gz.

Lucas Di Pentima did an ipkg for OZ 3.3.6-pre1. I'd tend to believe it should work on all gcc 3.x-compiled OZs.

I'm hacking on a gui for this thing. I don't know much about programming Qt and I admit to being totally confused about what the proper way to build ipkgs is. Still, if you're adventurous, you may try comprec_0.02_arm.ipk or comprec-0.02.tar.gz. You probably will have to move the files to their proper position by hand -- at least I had, although I believe I followed the instructions for building ipkgs.

I also omitted the dependecies on python and pyqt, mostly because the python port for the zaurus is in a state of flux and you may get away with what you have on your machine. If not, you'll want to add the feed http://opie.net.wox.org/python/current/ to your /etc/ipkg.conf and then install at least python-core, python-fcntl, python-io, python-lang, python-pyqt, python-re and python-threading from that feed. However, those packages are ar-based (as opposed to .tar.gz-based), so you also need a more recent ipkg than what's shipped with the Sharp ROM. You'll find one at Zaurus Software Index.

After all this, it's still not certain that the GUI will come up from the program manager. It should come up from the shell, though. I warmly welcome tips on how to improve this situation. Once I get to it, I'll do the GUI in C++, so at least the dependency desaster should get resolved in reasonable time (March, I'd guess).


msdemlei@fsk.uni-heidelberg.de