Knowledge Base (Posts about music)

soundcore 2 review and notes

bgstack15 — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 12:42:00 GMT

The product in question is bluetooth speaker SoundCore 2 A3105 which was $44.99ish before tax.

I am not getting paid or compensated in any way for this information. If you wish to change that, please contact me!

Behavior of button play/pause

Here is some additional info not in the manual about the play/pause button:

3 times: restart this track
4 times: skip back

Here is what is published in the manual.

1 time: play/pause
2 times: skip forward

Thoughts

Bass doesn't sound as thorough as JBL Flip 3, but that one was damaged or broken and kept freezing up for no good reason.

Auxiliary notes

Internet search bluetooth speaker skip backward showed that some bluetooth speakers skip back when you press play/pause 3+ times. My research shows this can work on the Soundcore 2 speaker!

After more time

Sometimes the words sound a little mushy/slurred. Overall I'd say this is a rather disappointing bluetooth speaker. It also suffers from the random freezing as my old device. Maybe I have a jellyfin problem. So I'm still just using the much clearer (when it's working) JBL Flip 3.

pacpl in Devuan and gnudb

bgstack15 — Sun, 22 Oct 2023 12:52:43 GMT

I have decided to use headless tools to rip my audio CDs, because that's easier to automate. I looked into options other than the nice and simple but graphical tool asunder, and found the Debian list for ripping software.

I tested out pacpl, which works well enough. However, as tends to happen in Debian, the tool points to cddb.org which is long gone. The open source folks use gnudb.org nowadays, but this is not reflected in the Devuan unstable package of gnudb. So you just have to adjust /etc/pacpl/pacpl.conf with this oneliner if you use my bgscripts package:

sudo python3 /usr/libexec/bgscripts/py/modconf.py -a -l '=' /etc/pacpl/pacpl.conf set CDDB_HOST gnudb.gnudb.org

If you don't use that, you need to set variable CDDB_HOST to gnudb.gnudb.org. Hopefully that was obvious.

Find average volume change needed for album

bgstack15 — Sat, 19 Aug 2023 12:36:19 GMT

x=0 ; for word in *.mp3 ; do x=$((x+1)) ; ffmpeg -i "${word}" -af "volumedetect" -vn -sn -dn -f null /dev/null 2>&1 | awk "BEGIN{OFS=\",\"} /mean_volume/{a=\$5} /max_volume/{b=\$5} END{print a,b}" | sed -r -e "s/^/${x},/;" ; done

And then I saw the whole list of max and mean volumes. So my minimum max_volume is -8.3, so I need to add this amount to each file. I think ffmpeg does not use fractional decibels, so I chose 9.

x=0 ; time for word in *.mp3 ; do x=$((x+1)) ; new="new${word}" ; ffmpeg -i "${word}" -af "volume=9dB" "${new}" ; done

Shell alias: hide-song

bgstack15 — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 12:56:22 GMT

I have a number of music albums in their entirety: I am a completionist! But that doesn't mean I like every song in the album. Rather than delete those bits, I set them aside. Gzipping alone isn't enough because vlc is smart enough to still play the audio. So I base64 them, and then gzip them (and then sink them into the swamp).

And then I wrote a shell function to do this for me, preserving timestamp. I like metadata; I don't like data.

hide-song() { _i="${1}" ; test ! -f "${_i}" && return 1 ; <"${_i}" base64 >"${_i%%.mp3}.b64" && touch --reference "${_i}" "${_i%%.mp3}.b64" && gzip "${_i%%.mp3}.b64" && \rm "${_i}" ; }
unhide-song() { _i="${1}" ; gunzip "${_i}" && <"${_i%%.gz}" base64 -d > "${_i%%.b64.gz}.mp3" && touch --reference "${_i%%.gz}" "${_i%%.b64.gz}.mp3" && \rm "${_i%%.gz}" ; }

Because I need more word-count, let's explain these.

hide-song() {
    _i="${1}"
    test ! -f "${_i}" && return 1
    <"${_i}" base64 >"${_i%%.mp3}.b64" && \
        touch --reference "${_i}" "${_i%%.mp3}.b64" && \
        gzip "${_i%%.mp3}.b64" && \
        \rm "${_i}"
}

Line 2 sets a variable, and notably not a bash local variable, but I like to use a single underscore to help avoid collisions. I like to avoid bashisms, never mind this is in my bash profile.

Line 3 fails quietly but with an error code. Maybe it should throw a warning. I suppose the -f makes sure it is a real file, and not a symlink and not a directory so it's pulling double duty.

Line 4 base64s the file to file.b64. And yes, I'm anticipating the file has a .mp3 extension. Adapt to your own needs, detail-oriented people!

Line 5 sets the timestamp of the new file to match the original file. (Yes, I don't like bashisms, but GNUisms are perfectly acceptable.)

Line 6 gzips file.b64, which notably preserves the timestamp in my GNU userland. I hardly use gzip without tar, but I guess I do here.

Line 7 deletes the original file. Note the leading slash to avoid any aliases and just run rm. And of course note that the rm happens only if the preceding commands are all successful (&& being the logical and).