Über giveaway
Ooberman were a favourite 90’s band of mine. I should really say “are a favourite”, because not only do I still regularly listen to their back catalogue, they seem to be operative once again, after having given up sometime in 2003.
I was lucky enough to see them play a couple of times, the CDs I bought subsequently still get enough play to show up on my Last.fm artist charts from time to time. Like many other bands who once caught my fancy and are currently residing in the ‘where are they now?’ file, practically nobody I’ve met has ever heard of them. Presumably this sort of lack of reach, or perhaps even market indifference is one of the reasons beind their split and hiatus.
I’m not sure what motivates the reformation, but it’s a welcome surprise.Rather than try and explain what they sound like, I can just suggest that anyone interested gives them a try, because they’ve made the interesting decision to offer their entire back catalogue for download by anyone willing to subscribe to their mailing list .
Unfortunately, most of the files are encoded in the unfriendly WMA format, and will need converting to something more useful like MP3 in order to work with iTunes and an iPod.
I managed to do this using the unix tools Mplayer to uncompress audio files from the WMA, lame to re-encode these as MP3 audio. I installed Mplayer and lame using MacPorts , installing mplayer brought lame along as a dependency.Each album is a download, consisting of a zipfiles of individual track files. You can automate the conversion by unzipping each album to a working directory, and scripting the bash shell something like this.
for WMA in *wma
do WAV=${WMA/wma/wav}
MP3=${WMA/wma/mp3}
NUM=${MP3::2}
NAME=${MP3:2}
NAME=${NAME%%.mp3}
mplayer "$WMA" -ao pcm:file="$WAV"
lame --id3v2-only --ty "1998" --tl "Shorley Wall E.P." --ta "Ooberman" --tt "$NAME" --tn "$NUM" --preset fast standard "$WAV" "$MP3"
done
This snippet will take a directory full of .wma files, and create .wav and .mp3 file equivalents. The harcoded strings need changing to suit each album. The script tries to extract the track number and correct title from the filename and supply them to the mp3 encoder for use in the ID3 tags, so that iTunes will populate these fields automatically on import.
The script is a lazy one-off. The pattern matching name and number extracts are based on bash
2.05 brace expansion
, the script will still batch correctly on sets that don’t match the expected filename patterns, sadly these do vary by album, you’ll have to edit the metadata a bit after import in these cases. It wasn’t quite worth the effort of knocking up something more reusable in perl.