SPARCHER.TechBlog: audio

Showing posts with label audio. Show all posts

2016-01-27

HOWTO: play MIDI files with VLC in Debian

It's very easy! And should also work for Ubuntu (and other Debian derivatives).

First of all, make sure you have already installed the VLC media player:
```
# apt-get install vlc
```
Install the FluidSynth plugin:
```
# apt-get install vlc-plugin-fluidsynth
```
Enjoy!
You can open your file either with the VLC GUI, or from the CLI, e. g.:
```
$ vlc ~/Music/MyFavoriteSong.midi
```

2015-11-30

Software: MediaInfo

Currently, MediaInfo is probably the best free & open-source utility for extracting technical info (metadata) from multimedia files (most frequently, containers with audio and video streams).
It's quite portable (runs on various Linux distributions, MS Windows, Apple Mac OS X, FreeBSD etc.; released regularly in source and compiled binary forms) and comes with CLI and GUI interfaces.

External links:

MediaInfo on MediaArea (official website)
MediaInfo on SourceForge (project page)
- (redirect to the official website)
MediaInfo - Wikipedia

2015-02-28

Audio file tag editors

Here are some of my favourite audio file (music etc.) tagging / tag editing applications.

Free, open-source, multi-platform (Linux, Mac OS X, MS Windows etc.)
- EasyTAG
- MusicBrainz Picard (audio fingerprinting powered by AcoustID)
Free, closed-source, Win32 only.
- Mp3tag

2013-04-11

HOWTO: convert audio CD image (FLAC + CUE) to MP3 tracks in Linux

Imagine you've archived your favourite audio CD into FLAC/CUE pair format (or maybe you've purchased some album in that digital downloadable lossless audio format, who knows), and now you want to convert it to the standard MP3 files for playing that album in your good old digital music player.

Let the files be processed in Debian GNU/Linux environment (sample commands tested in Debian 7.0 "Wheezy", and should also work for all Debian-based distros, e. g. Ubuntu, Mint etc.; Bash shell is assumed to be installed & used by default).

First of all, you should install all the necessary tools: FLAC (for decoding FLAC to WAV), LAME (to convert WAV to MP3), cuetools (to parse the CUE sheet) and shntool (to cut the big WAV file into smaller tracks according to the CUE sheet breakpoints).

# apt-get install flac lame cuetools shntool

Then the conversion process itself begins.

$ flac -d MyMusic.flac
$ cuebreakpoints MyMusic.cue | shnsplit MyMusic.wav
$ rm MyMusic.wav
$ for file in split-track*.wav; do lame -V0 $file; done
$ rm split-track*.wav

The output files are by default MP3 VBR V0, 44.1 KHz, Joint Stereo; it should be decent for most situations.
After conversion, you can process split-track*.mp3 files with your favourite media tagger application.
Enjoy.

2013-03-10

HOWTO: losslessly convert FLV video to MP4 in Linux (Debian)

Well, let's imagine we have a Flash Video (FLV/F4V) container file (possibly "unseekable" or with other minor problems) containing MPEG-4 AVC video & AAC (or MP3) audio.

We'll convert ("remux") it to MP4 without any transcoding (re-encoding), so it'll be very fast, and using only the free tools (available in the official Debian GNU/Linux repositories).

Note: unfortunately, old FLV videos containing VP6 and Sorenson video formats can't be remuxed into MP4 format; if you don't want re-encoding, you can try to remux them into MKV (Matroska); if you just want to fix the seek problems, you can just try FLV-to-FLV remuxing.

Method #1 (recommended): use ffmpeg (it's the main utility from the FFmpeg project).
Install the "ffmpeg" package:
```
# apt-get install ffmpeg
```
Convert a FLV file to MP4, preserving audio & video:
```
$ ffmpeg -i input.flv -codec copy output.mp4
```
And even optimizing it for faster loading:
```
$ ffmpeg -i input.flv -codec copy -movflags faststart output_optim.mp4
```
To extract audio only:
```
$ ffmpeg -i input.flv -codec copy -vn output_a.mp4
```
To extract video only:
```
$ ffmpeg -i input.flv -codec copy -an output_v.mp4
```
Note: you can also use M4A (audio) / M4V (video) file extensions for output, if you like those Apple formats.
Method #2 (alternative): using avconv (it's a part of Libav project, a fork of FFmpeg).
Install the "libav-tools" package:
```
# apt-get install libav-tools
```
Convert a FLV file to MP4, preserving audio & video:
```
$ avconv -i input.flv -codec copy output.mp4
```
To extract audio only:
```
$ avconv -i input.flv -codec copy -vn output_a.mp4
```
To extract video only:
```
$ avconv -i input.flv -codec copy -an output_v.mp4
```

Method #3 (a somewhat ugly one): using MEncoder (a part of the MPlayer project).
Install MEncoder:

# apt-get install mencoder

Convert a FLV file to MP4:

$ mencoder input.flv -ovc copy -oac copy -of lavf -o output.mp4

Note: according to the warning from MEncoder itself, output file can be corrupt:

** MUXER_LAVF *****************************************************************
REMEMBER: MEncoder's libavformat muxing is presently broken and can generate
INCORRECT files in the presence of B-frames. Moreover, due to bugs MPlayer
will play these INCORRECT files as if nothing were wrong!
*******************************************************************************

So probably it suggests that you should better try the MEncoder's favorite AVI format:

$ mencoder input.flv -ovc copy -oac copy -o output.avi

(But that's not what we want here, right?)

Source software packages availability for Debian releases:

ffmpeg: up to Debian 6 "Squeeze", and then again from 9 "Stretch" (also in 8 "Jessie" backports);
libav: starting from 7 "Wheezy" (also in 6 "Squeeze" backports), up to 8 "Jessie";
mplayer: up to 7 "Wheezy", and then from 9 "Stretch".

And yes, it should work for Ubuntu too; any current FFmpeg version should also work in other GNU/Linux or *BSD distros, MS Windows, Apple Mac OS X etc.

References:

ffmpeg Documentation
Libav documentation : avconv
6.1. Selecting codecs and container formats - Chapter 6. Basic usage of MEncoder (MPlayer - The Movie Player documentation)
Wikipedia:

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Last updated: 2017-12-28

2012-04-07

MultiMedia Players in Windows and Linux

For MS Windows, my favourite audio player is foobar2000 [official site / Wikipedia]
(I'm tired of Winamp [official site / Wikipedia], and especially of the Windows Media Player [Wikipedia]; some people may like something else, e. g. AIMP [official site / Wikipedia]).

---

For playing video, I use VLC media player [official site / Wikipedia], MPC-HC ("Media Player Classic - Home Cinema") [official site / Wikipedia] and (very rarely) MPlayer (incl. forks).

===

In GNU/Linux, there are 2 powerful media players I frequently use (mostly for playing video): VLC and mpv [official site / Wikipedia].
mpv is a popular fork of MPlayer [official site / Wikipedia] & mplayer2 (itself a fork of MPlayer; now abandoned); they say it has more features and more rapid development process than the original one.
Sometimes I used mplayer[2] with a (now abandoned) GUI called gnome-mplayer.
BTW, I neither like nor use GNOME Videos (formerly called Totem) [official site / Wikipedia].
And some users also like xine [official site / Wikipedia] and Kodi (formerly XBMC) [official site / Wikipedia].

---

There are some pretty console audio players: mpg123 (probably the best MP3 player around) [official site / Wikipedia], cmus ("C* Music Player") [official site / Wikipedia], moc ("music on console") [official site / Wikipedia], mp3blaster (now obsolete) etc., but I prefer mpv there :)

And now about GUI audio players. Some years ago I used XMMS ("X MultiMedia System") [official site / Wikipedia] (now discontinued) and Amarok [official site / Wikipedia] (it was too overweight for me). In the near past, I used Rhythmbox [official site / Wikipedia]; when Banshee [official site / Wikipedia] became the default player in Ubuntu, I was very disappointed (it was much more buggier than Rhythmbox and used that C# / Mono / .NET / etc. stuff); then I tried to use LXMusic (it uses XMMS2 [official site / Wikipedia] backend and has a minimalist GUI) for some time, used Exaile [official site / Wikipedia] a few times...
...and finally switched to Audacious [official site / Wikipedia]
(Audacious is a fork of (now defunct) Beep Media Player [official site / Wikipedia], which itself was a fork of XMMS; BTW, it supports Winamp skins; not to be confused with Audacity [official site / Wikipedia], a popular audio editor).

Some other popular players:

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Last updated: 2016-12-11