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Audacity batch mode - sort of

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Roger
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United Kingdom
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 Message 17 of 44
21 January 2007 at 5:25am | IP Logged 
I have just downloaded this aswell, and I am experiencing the same problems as vinnie. I have followed your instruction Frenkeld and am also having trouble playing the audio. It gives out a quick 'screeching' sound and that is it. I have windows media and followed the same procedure as vinnie did when uploading the audio.
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Hencke
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 Message 18 of 44
21 January 2007 at 6:10am | IP Logged 
Vinnie wrote:
But i simply put my assimil audio cds in the drive copied them to the media library,...

That won't do. You have to "rip" the audio-CD to mp3 format (or some other format that Audacity can read but mp3 seems to be the one that is used the most). There are several tools that can do this. I use Goldwave, or command line tools under cygwin or linux when I want to do a lot of them easily in one go, but I think Winamp can do it too, and a bunch of others. Googling for things like "CD ripping" should get you pointed in the right direction.

You need to be able to see what file type the audio files are in, and Windows does its best to hide this information from you. You need to open a Windows Explorer (the file explorer, not the Internet Explorer) window, and then open the menus Tools/Folder Options/Show and uncheck the box "Hide file extensions" (or something along these lines - I have a Spanish Windows so I can't be sure if those menus are named exactly what I say there)

Anyway, once the file extensions are visible, you want to see filenames ending in ".mp3" or ".wav". You can also check the file sizes to get an idea if you have the right thing. For CD-quality music the mp3 format usually ends up at around 1 MB per minute of recording, and it will be less than that for speech. The wav format is somewhere around 10-15 MB per minute regardless of whether it is music or speech.
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Roger
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 Message 19 of 44
21 January 2007 at 7:02am | IP Logged 
Ive done this now so thanks very much for that guys. Vinnie this one here is good for the job http://www.audiograbber.com-us.net/

Edited by Roger on 21 January 2007 at 7:02am

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Vinnie
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 Message 20 of 44
21 January 2007 at 7:55am | IP Logged 
      Right ok i have done this and i have downloaded the link roger gave and the audio plays now. I also no how to change the audio and all that aswell.

       But how do i copy them to cds and to mp3 etc? The finished product that is.
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frenkeld
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 Message 21 of 44
21 January 2007 at 9:27am | IP Logged 
Vinnie wrote:
Right ok i have done this and i have downloaded the link roger gave and the audio plays now. I also no how to change the audio and all that aswell.

But how do i copy them to cds and to mp3 etc? The finished product that is.


Looks like a lot of progress! Speaking of the "finished product", do you mean that you've already created the mp3 lesson files with the gaps knocked out, or are you not quite there yet? As far as wanting "to copy to CD's or mp3's", could you also, please, clarify what you want to do with the final result - how you want to play it, on what type of device, etc.


P.S. One tip with Audacity. While doing audio processing, it generates very large files and does not always clean them up, and by default does it in a somewhat hard to find location. Click on "Edit->Preferences", then on the entry "Directories". You will see the directory that's listed as being used by Audacity. Right click on it and "Delete" it. Then create a directory on your desktop called "audacity_workspace" or something of the sort, and make it the directory Audacity uses for its project files. I found that in batch mode one can end up with a couple of Gigabytes of left over files, so it was good to have easy access to where I could delete them by hand.

Edited by frenkeld on 21 January 2007 at 9:30am

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frenkeld
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 Message 22 of 44
21 January 2007 at 9:42am | IP Logged 
Hencke wrote:
You have to "rip" the audio-CD to mp3 format (or some other format that Audacity can read but mp3 seems to be the one that is used the most).


Hencke,

One potential problem with storing the original CD's in mp3 format and then using these mp3 lesson files as a starting point for further processing is that you perform multiple lossy compression operations. Of course, with language courses people seem to be infinitely tolerant when it comes to audio quality, but then if one actually owns the original CD's, one can at least try to do better. I usually solve this problem by archiving with mp3 encoded at a fairly high bitrate and furthermore with the variable rate option (using LAME encoder from within EAC ripper). For speech it ends up setting most frames at 128 kbps, but some frames will be higher and a few may be lower. As a result, at least for speech files, what Audacity gets as a starting point is fairly close to the original.

With Assimil French and German, which I acquired more recently, I still did the main archiving at variable rate mp3, but also left the .wav files on the disk for now, until I generate all the mp3 versions I may need with reduced gaps, speeded up tempo, etc. Just a matter of disk space, really. I also found that the FLAC encoder, at least the command line one I tried under Linux, seems to compress at least the language (i.e., speech) audio files to about 1/4 of the .wav size, so that's another lossless storage option if one has enough disk space, and the one Audacity ought to be able to read as well.


Edited by frenkeld on 21 January 2007 at 2:29pm

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Hencke
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 Message 23 of 44
21 January 2007 at 1:32pm | IP Logged 
frenkeld wrote:
One potential problem with storing the original CD's in mp3 format and then using these mp3 lesson files as a starting point for further processing is that you perform multiple lossy compression operations.

A pure nicety at least in my experience. You perform one when storing and another one during processing ie. a total of two.

I don't know after how many successive operations you'd start noticing any deterioration. I suppose it has been investigated and there are statistics on it to be dug up if one is interested.

But as long as you can't hear any difference (I certainly can't) I don't consider it worth bothering about, even for relatively high-quality music recordings, let alone speech.
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Vinnie
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 Message 24 of 44
21 January 2007 at 2:01pm | IP Logged 
'Looks like a lot of progress! Speaking of the "finished product", do you mean that you've already created the mp3 lesson files with the gaps knocked out, or are you not quite there yet? As far as wanting "to copy to CD's or mp3's", could you also, please, clarify what you want to do with the final result - how you want to play it, on what type of device, etc.'

     I have changed all the gaps in the recordings i want to copy. I would like to copy the files to cds preferably but mp3 will also do. I would be playing it in a cd player if i copy it to cd and mp3 for For my mp3 player.


P.S again thanks very much for the help!



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