Complete Jazz Guitar: JJazzLab Files

Two things.

First, I recently discovered a wonderful program, JJazzLab, that is basically an automated backing band. You enter the chord changes for a song and choose a rhythmic 'style', and it then plays those changes, with (say) piano, bass, and drums. There are commercial versions of this kind of software, and JJazzLab, though free to use (modulo an annoying popup) is not 'free as in beer'. But it's much cheaper than the commercial versions, and good enough for me.

Second, and relatedly, I've been working through Jody Fisher's Complete Jazz Guitar Method, in my attempt to learn how to play jazz guitar. It contains a number of songs, with progressively complex solos written out, and has certainly helped me. There are downloadable backing tracks, but one downside to those is that you can't easily change the tempo, etc. So I've started creating backing tracks for these. I've put them on my Google Drive, here, in case anyone else might find them useful. I'll be adding other things of this sort, too, and will post separately about those.

Now to hope that the search engines might make it possible for people to find these....

Convert XZ File to GZ File

I've been having some trouble with XZ files when modified through KDE's ark program. So I decided to convert them all to GZIP files. To do that one at a time, by hand, would take forever. Hello shell scripting.

#!/bin/bash

#DEBUG="echo";
CWD=$(pwd);

XZFILE="$1";
if [ -z "$XZFILE" ]; then
   echo "No file given!";
   exit 1;
fi

XZFILE=$(realpath "$XZFILE");
TARGETDIR=${XZFILE%/*};
GZFILE=${XZFILE##*/};
GZFILE="${GZFILE%xz}gz";
NEWDIR="/tmp/xz2gz.$$";

echo $XZFILE;
$DEBUG mkdir "$NEWDIR";
$DEBUG tar -Jxvf "$XZFILE" -C "$NEWDIR";
$DEBUG pushd "$NEWDIR";
$DEBUG tar -czf "$GZFILE" *;
$DEBUG mv "$GZFILE" "$TARGETDIR";
$DEBUG popd;
$DEBUG rm -Rf "$NEWDIR";