AMBISUITE an alternative approach

If you want to try AMBISUITE quickly and simply, you may care to try the following ….

Download AMBISUITE. Put it on a USB stick. Unpack it (probably unzip it (but you can do this later, if needs-be)).
Put any files you want to manipulate on the USB stick.
Close down your PC.
Go to the newsagents/supermarket. Scour the computer magazines for ones with pictures of penguins on the front. Buy one with a Knoppix DVD given away inside (or any other bootable-off-the-CD Linux distribution). It should cost four to ten euros, or thereabouts (depends how glossy the accompanying magazine is!).
Otherwise go on the Web and find a Knoppix DVD and how to get it (or if you fancy downloading hundreds of MB, then download an image and burn your own).
Place DVD in your computer's DVD drawer.
Switch computer back on.
You will now have a system with Perl and (for the one's I've tested) SoX.
Put the USB stick in.
In a terminal change directory to the USB stick.
Presuming 'ambinfo' is in the directory 'ambisuite' and your music file 'myfile.wav' or 'myfile.amb' is in the root directory of the USB stick, then
cd ambisuite/
perl -w ambinfo.pl ../myfile.wav
or
perl -w ambinfo.pl ../myfile.amb
Save anything you want on the USB stick.
Close down Knoppix (best to do this before removing the stick, then you'll have warned it to finish writing any big files to it).
Remove DVD from DVD drawer.
Reboot — your computer should be 'as if it never happened'.

(You can read from your hard-drive(s) with Knoppix, but Knoppix goes to some lengths to stop you accidentally writing to the hard-drive. (The intention is to not intefere with the 'normal' system.) You can obtain write permission, but that may be of limited value as whilst Linux can write to DOS/9* file systems, as far as I know it cannot write to XP. Anyway in these days of large USB sticks it's just not necessary, is it?)

Download AMBISUITE:

Available via the main index page.

October 2007.