I'm writing some code where I rely on the file utility to determine the file type of arbitrary files, typically audio files. For the most part, it works great, an ogg file for example might give the following output:
Ogg data, Vorbis audio, mono, 44100 Hz, ~80000 bps, created by: Xiph.Org libVorbis I (1.0.1)
A simple regexp can classify this as ogg vorbis.
But for some other file types, file tries to get clever, an nsf (NES sound format) file for example, can yield this output:
NES Sound File ("The Legend of Zelda" by Konchano, copyright 1987 Nintendo), version 1, 8 tracks, NTSC
"NES Sound File" is clear enough, but it is followed by a string of unstructured data that is clearly just copied from the file itself. A malicious user could create an nsf file where this string is replaced by something like "Ogg data, Vorbis audio", making classification a lot harder.
Now let's say I fix this by discarding anything within parentheses (ignoring the fact that the title of the track could itself contain parentheses), along comes a Protracker module:
4-channel Protracker module sound data Title: "space_debris"
Again, untrusted data straight from the file, in a different position, now with the prefix "Title:". I can attempt to filter it out but really this is becoming a hassle.
I'm not finding any help in the man page. Is there really no way to tell file not to mix these unsafe strings into its output? Or is file simply not the right tool for this job?
Another post here answered the question of creating 30 second preview clips from WAV audio files (Create mp3 previews from wav and aiff files). My needs slightly overlap, but differing details are beyond my knowledge.
Requirements/Options: clip length; beginning & ending fade length; input filetypes: m4a/AAC/AIFF; output filetype: mp3; kbps (e.g. 192); original files unaltered; suffix new mp3 names with " (Preview)"
Limitations: no uploading of original files to a server (desktop processing); no compiling (unix/Terminal/Bash script only); recursive processing of files in sub-directories
Any/All assistance and advice is welcome.
You'll most likely get the best results with a DAW (digital audio workstation) and an audio file converter.
For a DAW, Reaper comes with a 60 day trial, and it has everything you need to cut the songs where you need and to do fade ins/fade outs, and other effects if you'd like.
www.reaper.fm
Simply use a converter to convert the m4a file to .wav, .mp3 or whatever you prefer, and then if you need it back in m4a, convert it back. I say this because some DAWs can't work with m4a files, but if which ever one you choose to work with can then no conversion is necessary,
There are many options for what DAW and what converter you use, I recommend Reaper for a DAW, and most converters essentially do the same thing, so it doesn't make much of a difference which one you choose.
Hope this helps!
I'm looking for a solution to this task: I want to open any audio file (MP3,FLAC,WAV), then proceed it to the extracted form and hash this data. The thing is: I don't know how to get this extracted audio data. DirectX could do the job, right? And also, I suppose if I have fo example two MP3 files, both 320kbps and only ID3 tags differ and there's a garbage inside on of the files mixed with audio data (MP3 format allows garbage to be inside) and I extract both files, I should get the exactly same audio data, right? I'd only differ if one file is 128 and the other 320, for example. Okay so, the question is, is there a way to use DirectX to get this extracted audio data? I imagine it'd be some function returning byte array or something. Also, it would be handy to just extract whole file without playback. I want to process hundreds of files so 3-10min/s each (if files have to be played at natural speed for decoding) is way worse that one second for each file (only extracting)
I hope my question is understandable.
Thanks a lot for answers,
Aaron
Use http://sox.sourceforge.net/ (multiplatform). It's faster than realtime as you'd like, and it's designed for batch mode much more than DirectX. For example, sox -r 48k -b 16 -L -c 1 in.mp3 out.raw. Loop that over your hundreds of files using whatever scripting language you like (bash, python, .bat, ...).
The MPEG-4 file format allows multiple streams to be present in a file.
This is useful for videos containing audio in multiple languages. In the case of such a video, the audio streams are synchronized to the video.
Is it possible to create a MPEG-4 file the contains desynchronized audio streams, i.e. the audio track are played on after another?
I want to design a MPEG-4 file that contains a music album, so it is crucial that the tracks are played one after another by media players such as VLC.
When I use MP4Box (from the GPAC framework) the resulting file is recognised by VLC as having synchronized audio streams. Which box of the MPEG-4 file format is responsible for this? Or how can I tell VLC that these audio streams are not synchronized?
Thanks in advance!
I can think of two ways you could do that, and both would be somewhat problematic.
You could concatenate all the audio streams into one audio track in the MP4 file. This won't be ideal, for some obvious reasons. For one thing, it's not exactly what you were asking for.
You could also just store the tracks as synchronized audio streams, but set the timing information in such a way that the first sample of the second track won't start playing until the first track finished playing, etc.
I'm not aware of any tools that can do this, but the file format will support such a scheme. Since it's an unusual way to store audio in an MP4 file, I would expect players to have problems with this, too.
Concatenating all streams would work and the individual tracks can be addressed by adding chapters. It works at least with VLC.
MP4Box -new -cat track1.m4a -cat track2.m4a -chap chapters.txt album.m4a
The chapters.txt would look something like this:
CHAPTER1=00:00:00.00
CHAPTER1NAME=Track 1
CHAPTER2=00:03:40.00
CHAPTER2NAME=Track 2
But this is only a hack.
The solution I'm looking for should preserve the tracks as individual streams.
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I've got many, many mp3 files that I would like to merge into a single file. I've used the command line method
copy /b 1.mp3+2.mp3 3.mp3
but it's a pain when there's a lot of them and their namings are inconsistent. The time never seems to come out right either.
David's answer is correct that just concatenating the files will leave ID3 tags scattered inside (although this doesn't normally affect playback, so you can do "copy /b" or on UNIX "cat a.mp3 b.mp3 > combined.mp3" in a pinch).
However, mp3wrap isn't exactly the right tool to just combine multiple MP3s into one "clean" file. Rather than using ID3, it actually inserts its own custom data format in amongst the MP3 frames (the "wrap" part), which causes issues with playback, particularly on iTunes and iPods. Although the file will play back fine if you just let them run from start to finish (because players will skip these is arbitrary non-MPEG bytes) the file duration and bitrate will be reported incorrectly, which breaks seeking. Also, mp3wrap will wipe out all your ID3 metadata, including cover art, and fail to update the VBR header with the correct file length.
mp3cat on its own will produce a good concatenated data file (so, better than mp3wrap), but it also strips ID3 tags and fails to update the VBR header with the correct length of the joined file.
Here's a good explanation of these issues and method (two actually) to combine MP3 files and produce a "clean" final result with original metadata intact -- it's command-line so works on Mac/Linux/BSD etc. It uses:
mp3cat to combine the MPEG data frames only into a continuous file, then
id3cp to copy all metadata over to the combined file, and finally
VBRFix to update the VBR header.
For a Windows GUI tool, take a look at Merge MP3 -- it takes care of everything. (VBRFix also comes in GUI form, but it doesn't do the joining.)
As Thomas Owens pointed out, simply concatenating the files will leave multiple ID3 headers scattered throughout the resulting concatenated file - so the time/bitrate info will be wildly wrong.
You're going to need to use a tool which can combine the audio data for you.
mp3wrap would be ideal for this - it's designed to join together MP3 files, without needing to decode + re-encode the data (which would result in a loss of audio quality) and will also deal with the ID3 tags intelligently.
The resulting file can also be split back into its component parts using the mp3splt tool - mp3wrap adds information to the IDv3 comment to allow this.
Use ffmpeg or a similar tool to convert all of your MP3s into a consistent format, e.g.
ffmpeg -i originalA.mp3 -f mp3 -ab 128kb -ar 44100 -ac 2 intermediateA.mp3
ffmpeg -i originalB.mp3 -f mp3 -ab 128kb -ar 44100 -ac 2 intermediateB.mp3
Then, at runtime, concat your files together:
cat intermediateA.mp3 intermediateB.mp3 > output.mp3
Finally, run them through the tool MP3Val to fix any stream errors without forcing a full re-encode:
mp3val output.mp3 -f -nb
The time problem has to do with the ID3 headers of the MP3 files, which is something your method isn't taking into account as the entire file is copied.
Do you have a language of choice that you want to use or doesn't it matter? That will affect what libraries are available that support the operations you want.
MP3 files have headers you need to respect.
You could ether use a library like Open Source Audio Library Project and write a tool around it.
Or you can use a tool that understands mp3 files like Audacity.
What I really wanted was a GUI to reorder them and output them as one file
Playlist Producer does exactly that, decoding and reencoding them into a combined MP3. It's designed for creating mix tapes or simple podcasts, but you might find it useful.
(Disclosure: I wrote the software, and I profit if you buy the Pro Edition. The Lite edition is a free version with a few limitations).
As David says, mp3wrap is the way to go. However, I found that it didn't fix the audio length header, so iTunes refused to play the whole file even though all the data was there. (I merged three 7-minute files, but it only saw up to the first 7 minutes.)
I dug up this blog post, which explains how to fix this and also how to copy the ID3 tags over from the original files (on its own, mp3wrap deletes your ID3 tags). Or to just copy the tags (using id3cp from id3lib), do:
id3cp original.mp3 new.mp3
I would use Winamp to do this. Create a playlist of files you want to merge into one, select Disk Writer output plugin, choose filename and you're done. The file you will get will be correct MP3 file and you can set bitrate etc.
I'd not heard of mp3wrap before. Looks great. I'm guessing someone's made it into a gui as well somewhere. But, just to respond to the original post, I've written a gui that does the COPY /b method. So, under the covers, nothing new under the sun, but the program is all about making the process less painful if you have a lot of files to merge...AND you don't want to re-encode AND each set of files to merge are the same bitrate. If you have that (and you're on Windows), check out Mp3Merge at: http://www.leighweb.com/david/mp3merge and see if that's what you're looking for.
If you want something free with a simple user interface that makes a completely clean mp3 I recommend MP3 Joiner.
Features:
Strips ID3 data (both ID3v1 and ID3v2.x) and doesn't add it's own (unlike mp3wrap)
Lossless joining (doesn't decode and re-encode the .mp3s). No codecs required.
Simple UI (see below)
Low memory usage (uses streams)
Very fast (compared to mp3wrap)
I wrote it :) - so you can request features and I'll add them.
Links:
MP3 Joiner website: Here
Latest installer: Here
Personally I would use something like mplayer with the audio pass though option eg -oac copy
Instead of using the command line to do
copy /b 1.mp3+2.mp3 3.mp3
you could instead use "The Rename" to rename all the MP3 fragments into a series of names that are in order based on some kind of counter. Then you could just use the same command line format but change it a little to:
copy /b *.mp3 output_name.mp3
That is assuming you ripped all of these fragment MP3's at the same time and they have the same audio settings. Worked great for me when I was converting an Audio book I had in .aa to a single .mp3. I had to burn all the .aa files to 9 CD's then rip all 9 CD's and then I was left with about 90 mp3's. Really a pain in the a55.