I don't have an opportunity to buy Cubase, but my partner uses it a lot. I wanted to simplify his life and provide him with cpr projects instead of plain wav files, but no other software can open/save this format.
I looked at a sample cpr he sent me and it seems like the file does not contain audio data itself, it rather contains the mark-up and effects.
I wanted to know the following things:
Is it legal to try to reverse-engineer cpr files?
Is it difficult and who tried?
If someone knows other ways to transfer project files between Audacity/Rosegarden and Cubase? The main thing is the support of several tracks and their timing in one project, nothing fancy.
Cpr files comes from a proprietary format. You can have a look on this question.
I suppose it is pretty hard... and I didn't tried !
To my knowledge, there is no way to export/import a project between cubase and Audacity or Rosegarden. The OMF format which could be a good candidate, is not supported by Audacity or Rosegarden for now. You can still import/export the audio mix, the separated tracks, and the midi files separately. This method is really fastidious, but it probably provides the advantage to let you play and edit your projects in the next decades, that isn't obvious with project files.
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a little background: I'm faced with converting 3000 IVR scripts for a new PBX & IVR.
Currently the voice scripts exist in .VOX format--AND..they're not 'written-out'/documented.
I humbly ask if anyone knows of a program, such that, I can dump the .vox file in the program and have it produce a text document. If the .vox format is a problem I could probably convert all of them to .wav or whatever.
Yes there are tons of apps/programs which do speech to text in real time, but I want to be able to "upload/dump" the recording into a program, and obtain text.
Can someone point me in the right direction?
Thank you in advance for any sort of comment/help.
SF
The problem is that you are hoping to perform generic natural language processing on low quality audio files. Low quality audio data significantly reduces the reliability of natural language processing software. Upsampling your audio files will not improve their content which means poor results even if you did have access to a natural language engine.
Your best bet is to work with a company that performs hybrid machine/human transcription and pay them for each transcriptions. Alternatively you could consider working with Amazon Mechanical Turk and buy some general purpose human effort to get these transcribed. In both of those cases it is likely that VOX files would not work, you would first need to convert them to WAV or MP3 files to make it easier for the third party to use off the shelf software to listen to the prompts.
I would like to create a utility in either PHP or Perl to convert an audio file created by the Nortel's Callpilot voice mail system into a wave file. The problem is that the format, which has the .vbk file extension, is unknown to virtually any audio player. To date, I have not found one that will play a .vbk file. I've looked at audio file conversion libraries in CPAN and tried many of them, they don't recognize the file. I was not successful with PHP's audio formats manipulation either. Nortel does provide a converter, however, it does not suite my needs. I would like to have this run via cron on a CentOS system. I don't know how to reverse engineer this format. There seems to be just scraps of info on this format on the web. This page indicates that it is "based on the H.232 format":
https://www.odesk.com/o/jobs/job/Reverse-Engineer-Nortel-VBK-Audio-Format_~~f501f11679f3f6bb/
I know this is a very old thread, but I've recently been looking into converting Nortel's vbk format as well. Importing the vbk files into Audacity with raw data option, Encoding: U-Law, Byte order: little-endian, Channels: 1 Channel (Mono), Sample rate: 8000 Hz. Not sure if they have multiple formats for their vbk files, but mine were from a BCM50 phone system.
Well, this is the joy of closed proprietary systems. But there is a chance they could play nice. Try to contact Callpilot and see if they'll give you the format specs. It's worth a shot.
As for reverse engineering, you need to be able to generate known content. Like a constant tone at 60Hz for exactly 1 second. Then at 50Hz. Then at 10 seconds. Compare them. Isolate the data from the metadata. There is going to be compression involved, so try a handful of common compression schemes, maybe research into Nortel's practices will probably tell you more. If you can feed that into a player and get a tone back out, you're on your way.
There's probably more informed and structured ways to go about reverse engineering, but from my experience it's a lot of trial and error.
I have a folder full of AIFF files that have a little gap at the beginning where no sound is heard. How would I go about writing a script/tool that'd remove this gap?
Basically the files look like this in Audacity (I want to get only the selected part):
I can't really use Audacity because I have hundreds of the files so doing it by hand is not an option.
I don't care too much about the OS / language, as long as it works.
since you are asking on a programmer's website and have programming experience (peeked at your profile) -- if you look in the sources, you will see Audacity has some scripting support.
there are also commercial tools (e.g. batch processors) for this.
i wouldn't recommend getting your hands too dirty with this file format (i.e. writing a C program could easily take more time than doing it manually in the editor).
In the end it was just easier to hack up a quick C++ solution using libsndfile.
Feel free to steal it from https://github.com/houbysoft/short/blob/master/removeInitialSilence.cpp.
I want to start on a hobby project that focuses on displaying audio files in a folder in a certain fashion and has the ability to play such an audio file and shows basic control options for playing. However, i'm struggling to find a fit programming language for this.
The displaying part shouldn't be too hard and can probably be done in most of the programming languages. The audio part is what concerns me the most since it's not the main focus of the project and should only do limited things (so it shouldn't be too hard) and i do not know anything about sound support in the programming languages i currently know. (Java, C and C++)
Specifically i would like to be able to do these things:
Play a sound file
Stop/pause a playing song
Adjust volume
Show a bar that displays the current position in the song
Most files will be .mp3 files but being able to process other formats is certainly a plus. Since this is just a small project it's ok if it runs just on Windows. Scalabilty would be nice but not required.
It would be nice to have a small overview of audio support/audio libraries of programming languages (i'm always up for something new) that can accomplish these simple things, in a not too complicated way, aswell as personal experiences.
In this way i hope to create a better understanding of which programming language fits my project best. (i would very much like to not have to change language mid-way the project)
--
Edit:
This is only for a later stage of the project if the first part was successfull: i will want to change the file names of the audio files that are displayed. (to make them follow a specific format)
I haven't written audio processing programs much, but I know a lot of them exist for C and C++. For Java perhaps, too, but I don't know Java. I had used audio with SDL in a game, but that doesn't have that many features and I don't recommend it.
There's this question asking for a library in C, and there are a couple of similar questions that SO brings up on the side. You may want to take a look at those.
You would also need to look for a library that loads different file types. SDL at least, only opens .wav files, which I believe most of the playback libraries would support. For MP3, you will most likely need an additional library. I know Audacity uses LAME Mp3 so I'm guessing that should be good.
Some of the functionalities you want is also doable by yourself. For example, knowing the length of the music and the amount you have already read, you will know how far in the audio you are. Adjusting the volume is also a multiplication (in the simplest case) that you can do on the audio data if the library doesn't provide it.
A very good choice seems to be PortAudio which is used by Audacity, and also recommended in the accepted answer of the question I mentioned above.
I've done audio apps in both Java and C++. Java development goes way faster because it's a more powerful language and has garbage collection, but JavaSound is a pretty awful solution for audio. Of course, there are wrappers for FFMPEG and other stuff, so you can get a lot of things working. Here's an example of a Java audio app: http://www.indabamusic.com/help/mantis
OTOH, C++ gives you lots of control, low latency and wealth of libraries. (another answer mentioned Portaudio, which is, indeed, great.) But you will definitely find it also has a much longer development cycle.
You can certainly do everything you want to do with either language.
I am writing software to parse ID3v2 tags in Java. I need to find some files with good examples of the tag with lots of different frames. Ideally the tags will contain an embedded picture because that is what is kicking my butt right now.
Does anyone know where I can find some good free (legal) ID3v2 tagged files (ID3v2.2 and ID3v2.3)?
You can create the example files with a tagger by yourself. I'm the author of the Windows freeware tagger Mp3tag which is able to write ID3v2.3 (UTF-16 and ISO-8859-1) and ID3v2.4 tags in UTF-8 (both along with APIC frames). You can find a list of supported frames here.
To create ID3v2.2 tags, I think the only program out there is iTunes which interpretes the ID3 spec in it's very own way and writes numerous iTunes specific frames that are not in the spec.
This maybe be obvious and not what you are seeking, but what about ripping some of your legally obtained CDs and editing them using iTunes? iTunes would also allow you to add embedded picture. There are of course many open source programs that will also do this.