Noulakaz

The blog of Avinash, Christina, Anya and Kyan Meetoo.

Linux

Splitting a large text file on every blank line

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I had a file of about a thousand lines containing the full description of multiple products (audio plugins from Plugin Alliance in my case). The file starts like this:

249
19.99
Mixland
Vac Attack★★★★★
A warm harmonically-rich optical limiter for compression with tube saturation that’s great on vocals, drums, basses, and your stereo bus.
Hardware EmulationsHidden GemsPA MembersSale

89.99
29.99
Woodlands Studio
VOXILLION★★★★★
A stunning and sophisticated, and complete vocal chain in one streamlined workflow. Featuring a high-end blend of a tube-driven preamp, two types of compressors, Nasal Dynamic EQs, Harmonics and more
Hidden GemsLimited Time OnlyPA_EXTSale

279
39.99
ADPTR AUDIO
Metric AB★★★★★
The mastering engineer’s best friend: Compare your mix to your favorite reference tracks. See,hear and learn even more with new expanded features.
Hidden GemsMasteringSale

and ends like this:

FreeDownload
PA FREE
bx_shredspread★★★★★
Intelligent M/S width for doubled riff guitars. Auto-avoid common phase problems, and sound extra-wide and tight!
FREEGuitar & BassHidden GemsM/S InsideMade by BX

FreeDownload
PA FREE
bx_tuner★★★★☆
Accurate tuning for guitar & bass with useful features like volume dimming. Tune up right before you hit the record button.
FREEGuitar & BassMade by BXSale

FreeDownload
PA FREE
bx_yellowdrive★★★★★
Warm to crunch to shred with this classic “Yellow” pedal in plugin form.
Creative FXFREEGuitar & BassHardware EmulationsMade by BXSale

What I wanted to do was to split the long file of a thousand lines into smaller files, each containing the lines corresponding to one plugin only.

Fortunately, the plugins were separated by an empty line. After some searching, I stumbled upon a Stackoverflow post of someone having the same issue and I settled on this solution enhanced by this comment:

gawk -v RS= '{ print > ("plugin-" NR ".txt")}' plugins.txt

As explained in the solution, “setting RS to null tells (g)awk to use one or more blank lines as the record separator. Then one can simply use NR to set the name of the file corresponding to each new record”. As explained in the comment, this will fail with the basic version of awk as it cannot handle too many open files at the same time (only 252 files were created with awk). Switching to gawk works great and now I have 277 files which I can further process.

I have my dream HiFi setup: Audiolab and Elac (Take 2)

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On 10 March 2021, I finally got a good Hi-Fi system with an Audiolab 6000A integrated amplifier and a pair of of Elac Debut Reference DBR62 speakers.

At the beginning, I used a Chromecast Audio as a streamer and it worked great (including in Roon). But the Chromecast protocol itself was limited to 96 kHz and I was itching to listen to high-resolution audio at 192 kHz (even though 192 kHz audio is not better than 44.1 kHz).

This is why, in 7 August 2022, I made the decision to replace the Chromecast Audio with a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B, a Hifiberry Digi 2 Pro (purchased by my brother-in-law in France) and Ropieee XL for streaming music to the Audiolab. Roopiee XL is essentially a Roon bridge (even though it also supports DLNA and Spotify Connect but not TIDAL Connect and the Chromecast protocol).

This setup worked wonders with Roon (with a TIDAL subscription) when listening to high-resolution audio.

Our third PC bought in 2005 in Mauritius

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This would be our last custom PC after the first one bought in France in 1997 and the second one bought in Mauritius in 2003. We purchased the following components:

  • Processor: AMD Athlon 64 3000+
  • Motherboard: Abit KV8 Pro
  • RAM: 2Gb
  • Storage: 160Gb HD
  • Video: Inno3D Nvidia GeForce FX 5200
  • Audio: Terratec DMX 6Fire 24/96

For the first time ever, I had a 64-bits processor, the fantastic AMD Athlon 64 with AMD64 technology. The processor would boot into 32-bits mode and Linux would transition it to 64-bits where it became a completely different (and much better) processor. In fact, Intel would license the AMD64 technology after some time. At that time, I was running Gentoo Linux in 64-bits mode and it rocked!

I also had a whopping 2Gb of RAM which was a lot for the era.

I purchased the Nvidia GeForce FX 5200 to run X-Plane 9 under Linux and it worked really great on the PC (and also on the iMac I would buy a few years later).

Finally, the PC also had a Terratec DMX 6Fire 24/96 which was a professional audio interface. It came with a break out box which took one bay of the computer. This had a number of connectors including audio ins and outs (in both analog and digital), a microphone number (with a good preamp), a headphone out and two MIDI ports (which I used with my trusty Kawai K4 synthesizer). I remember paying a large chunk of money to purchase the Terratec but I had a great time composing music using it.

I sold the Terratec to a friend of my brother-in-law when I moved to an Apple iMac in 2011 and, shortly after, purchased a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 (which is still running great!)