So after finally getting the FLAC version of Ghost, I wondered if Banshee’s transparent transcoding would keep all the metadata intact and I could enjoy the album on my ipod too.

Sadly the codec situation did have to ruin my out-of-the-box euphoria. So to be of some aid to my fellow openSUSEists, here’s how.

openSUSE 10.3 doesn’t include the LAME mp3 encoder plugin in gstreamer010-plugins-ugly like other distros seem to. You need to grab the package from Packman. If you want to cover all your codec bases, you can actually do the install with one click (Pure marketing speak, it does sound better than 9 clicks + 72 popups; KDE folks get served here).

You can bring up the device properties from the sidebar context menu to access transcoding properties.

If you’re like the cool kids and use the lightning fast red carpet, however, you can –

rug sa http://ftp.skynet.be/pub/packman/suse/10.3/ packman && \
rug in packman:gstreamer010-plugins-ugly

It will actually pull its own gstreamer and replace the default one, but it did not seem to break anything for me.

After this, you can check out for presence of the magical LAME encoder with gst-inspect | grep mp3. If all went fine, you can simply drag and drop the flac files onto your ipod and Banshee will do the transcoding. And yes, the metadata is all fine.

Wow, reznor rocks on. Not so their servers. While the payment goes through, I’m struggling grabbing the 600MB FLAC download. I guess he’s right about bittorrent…

Nine Inch Nails: Ghosts I (2008)

This torrent is an official upload from Nine Inch Nails.

We’re very proud to present a new collection of instrumental music, Ghosts I-IV.
Almost two hours of music recorded over an intense ten week period last fall, Ghosts I-IV sprawls Nine Inch Nails across a variety of new terrain.

Now that we’re no longer constrained by a record label, we’ve decided to personally upload Ghosts I, the first of the four volumes, to various torrent sites, because we believe BitTorrent is a revolutionary digital distribution method, and we believe in finding ways to utilize new technologies instead of fighting them.

We encourage you to share the music of Ghosts I with your friends, post it on your website, play it on your podcast, use it for video projects, etc. It’s licensed for all non-commercial use under Creative Commons.

We’ve also made a 40 page PDF book to accompany the album. If you’d like to download it for free, visit http://ghosts.nin.com/main/pdf

Ghosts I is the first part of the 36 track collection Ghosts I-IV. Undoubtedly you’ll be able to find the complete collection on the same torrent network you found this file, but if you’re interested in the release, we encourage you to check it out at ghosts.nin.com, where the complete Ghosts I-IV is available directly from us in a variety of DRM-free digital formats, including FLAC lossless, for only $5. You can also order it on CD, or as a deluxe package with multitrack audio files, high definition audio on Blu-ray disc, and a large hard-bound book.

We genuinely appreciate your support, and hope you enjoy the new music. Thanks for listening.

http://ghosts.nin.com

The price is just right, maybe I’d charge a bit more for FLAC. The only downside is that my vacation videos will now have a rather dark soundtrack (haven’t actually heard a single track yet, but I expect the classic reznor experience).

For about two hours I was 20 again. Sweaty, voiceless, moved, blown away.