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The system language of my Ubuntu installation is set to German. Per default this also means that my command line output is in German if the application supports it. This can be a bit of a hindrance when developing, because error messages and warnings will also be in German which makes it harder to search for solutions – most discussions in help forums and blogs are in English.

So let's change the terminal language. In your ~/.bashrc file add the following lines:

unset LC_ALL
export LC_MESSAGES=C

If LC_ALL had a value, it would overwrite the setting for LC_MESSAGES, so it has to be unset first. I first tried setting LC_ALL=C, but this had the undesired side effect of certain keys behaving differently. I have a German keyboard with QWERTZ layout, but keys like “ä”, “ö”, “ü” suddenly did different things. I can only assume I would have run into some other issues as well. So keep it simple and just change the messages.

The next terminal you open will have the setting applied. Also note that this only affects your terminal and no other applications – except those launched from said terminal.

To check your language settings you can use locale. My output using Bash looks like this:

$ locale
LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=de_DE:en
LC_CTYPE="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_TIME=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_COLLATE="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_MESSAGES=C
LC_PAPER=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_NAME=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_ADDRESS=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_TELEPHONE=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_MEASUREMENT=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_IDENTIFICATION=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_ALL=

Side note: I also tried LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8, but that didn't work – no idea why. I also didn't look further into it since I have a working solution.

Sources

• askubuntu.com: Switch command output language from native language to english
• help.ubuntu.com: Locale

I have this podcast I listen to repeatedly. But most episodes have an intro and outro part before the actual episode, which gets quite annoying. One possibility is, of course, to just use an audio editor like Audacity, cut the unwanted parts, and save the file. But this would result in the MP3 being re-encoded and losing in quality. This shouldn't be necessary since I only want to cut off some data, right?

The tool for the job is mp3splt. I wrote this little bash script:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

F_IN=$1
F_OUT=${F_IN%.mp3}
START=$2
END=EOF-$3
OUT_DIR=./nointro

# Split at "-".
FILE_SPLIT=(${F_IN//-/ })

# Remove "_" and " " characters.
TRACK=${FILE_SPLIT[0]//_/}
TRACK=${TRACK// /}

mp3splt -f -d "$OUT_DIR" "$F_IN" "$START" "$END" -o "$F_OUT"
eyeD3 --track=$TRACK "$OUT_DIR/$F_IN"

Example: ./shorten.sh 26-FacelessOldWoman.mp3 1.18 1.15.5

First, the track number will be extracted from the file name. In my case, the number is always at the beginning and separated by a minus from the title. So we split the string and remove some unwanted characters (whitespace, underscore).

In the example, the first 1min 18sec will be removed and the last 1min 15.5sec. The resulting MP3 will be saved with the same name in the directory set in OUT_DIR.

Most id3 tags will be kept – including the embedded cover –, but the track number will be overwritten by mp3splt. That is why I extracted the track number from the file name before. Now I can set it again with eyeD3.

Done.