At FUDCON 2007, someone brought a Buddha Machine, aka Buddha Box. It was very cool, and I was pleased to see that the sound tracks are available for download.
However, Track 1 has some nasty high-frequency distortion in the wave file that renders it extremely not zen. I decided to run a filter over it to clean it up, and turned to my usual go-to sound program (which I dislike) called Audacity. Audacity wanted no part of Buddha:
audacity: layer3.c:2633: mad_layer_III: Assertion `stream->md_len + md_len - si.main_data_begin < = (511 + 2048 + 8)' failed. Aborted (core dumped)
So I turned to the new kid on the block, Jokosher. It actually worked quite well. Sometimes it was difficult to know when to right click, when to left click, and when to doubleclick[1], but once I figured that out I was able to apply a lowpass filter and an EQ to clean up the audio. I feel much calmer now.
Here's the resulting ogg file: buddamachine01.ogg (fixed)
These files (transcoded to ogg with oggenc) play great inside my sonata activity on the olpc. Add one of the files to the playlist, right-click the playlist and select "repeat."
[1]answers: Right click on timeline of audio file instrument to import file; doubleclick on an effect to open effect properties
I'm glad people enjoyed my buddha machine during FUDCon. Since then, I've been told by a handfull of people that they have purchased one.
I had always thought that the distortion on the first track was caused by the speaker itself. It's good to now have a clean copy that I can throw on my mp3 player.
There's something quite Zen about the imperfection, though 🙂