[ardour-users] batch .wav processing?

[shiro at berkeley.edu]

Hi Jeremy -

I don't know of any actively developed software which will do intelligent, automatic splits, which is sort of surprising since it seems like it would be pretty easy to implement.  (Maybe someone else has come across it?)

There's a project called Gramofile (http://panic.et.tudelft.nl/~costar/gramofile/) which hasn't been maintained in a while that does automatic track splitting as well as some noise removal.  If you're lucky, you may be able to get it to run on your system.  (It seems to work fine here on slackware 10.0.)  The web site also has a fairly detailed discussion of how their track splitting determination is made, which might be useful if for someone trying to develop their own solution.

In hunting around a bit, I came across a small program called Batchrec (http://www.physics.adelaide.edu.au/~jwoithe/).  As written it expects to read directly from an oss device rather than a file, which is sort of annoying.  The track splitting done in a pretty simple way, and you might run into premature cuts on fade-outs or false cuts during silent in-track passages.  I gave it a quick run
 through and it seems to work as advertised. 

The brute force option is to throw the whole file into Ardour or another editor and pick out the tracks visually.  It may not be as convenient as an automated splitter, but would almost certainly be faster than breaking things up in real time.  (Although the later would give you an excuse to check the quality of the recording before you spend time archiving it.)

If you've comfortable with any scripting languages, you would probably roll your own (very inefficient) track splitter simply by stepping through the file 1/8 second at a time with ecasound or sox and recording peak values.  

If you come up with a better solution, I'd love to hear about it.

Best,
Erik


On Mon, Jan 17, 2005 at 03:03:35AM -0500, Jeremy M Booth wrote:
> Hi.  I have several hours of demos recorded on a tape recorder that I
> would like to transfer to CD.  They are mostly short passages that begin
> and end with a silence as well as a click from the tape transport.  What
> I am looking for is a way to record each tape in full to a wave file and
> then somehow extract each passage into it's own file automatically so
> each one will be a separate track on the CDs for easy searching.  Any
> insight on how to do this with ardour or any linux software would be
> appreciated, as to avoid going through hours of recordings manually. 
> Thanks in advance.