So when I get a musical idea, I have to write it down or record it immediately or I’ll forget it. I’ve probably forgotten a hundred halfway decent ideas in the last year or so this way. Nowadays I’m using my netbook or my cell phone’s microphones to record ideas when I can, which helps a ton. Unfortunately, getting the music out of my phone has been a pain in the butt until now.
This post is really just a quick note to anyone looking to run the Qualcomm PureVoice Converter on Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10. The nasty, proprietary Qualcomm chip in my cheap cell phone records audio in a proprietary “.qcp” format. Fortunately, they do provide a closed source conversion program, but it is linked against libstdc++5 which is no longer shipped in Ubuntu.
The solution? Well, ideally Qualcomm would open source their format and it would be available as a library in every program on my computer, and it would Just Work. Better yet, they would just use open standards to begin with and stop making up unnecessary new audio formats. But barring that, you can follow these instructions to install a workable libstdc++5 from Jaunty. Then unpack the PureVoice Converter 3.1 for Linux as usual, and it should work as expected.
