I’ve got a sizable commute, so I’ve taken to downloading conference videos and converting to MP3 to play in the car. Most work reasonably well as speech-only, I’m finding. In hopes of helping others, I’m posting them here.

Many thanks to Confreaks, the conference organizers, and to the generous speakers, who released their speeches under a Creative Commons license. In accordance with the license of the original videos, these MP3s are also released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

Download MP3 conversions of Confreaks conference videos here.

You can automatically download the lot with wget if you have it installed:

wget --recursive --no-parent --accept mp3,ogg,MP3,OGG http://jay.mcgavren.com/files/conference_mp3s

Conversions were done with ffmpeg. Here’s the script I used:

#!/bin/sh
for filename; do
    ffmpeg -i "${filename}" -acodec libmp3lame -ab 96k -ac 2 -ar 44100 "${filename}.mp3"
done

My chief complaint was wild variation in volume levels; I haven’t blown a speaker yet but loud noises have made me jump sometimes. I’ve processed all these with “mp3gain” (which I thought was only available as a Windows GUI app but have since learned has a Linux command-line version) in an effort to correct this, but I make no guarantees there won’t be sudden jumps or drops in volume.

Many tweaks are still possible, and I will look into them if there’s demand:

• Remove the periods of silence on each track (where Confreaks originally showed sponsor logos).
• Convert remaining videos (these were hand-picked).
• Lower-bitrate versions for the space-conscious.
• See if The Levelator produces better results than mp3gain.
• ID3 tags with speakers, titles, and other metadata.
• An actual podcast feed.

Enjoy, and leave a comment with the improvements you’d like to see!