An old 3.5 inch floppy disk holds 1.44 MB of data. According to my calculations, that's 1,424 KB blocks. For a total of 1,458,176 Bytes. Once formatted as FAT, you end up with 1,457,664 Bytes of storage. But how much audio can a floppy hold? (Here I mean wave based audio of human speech. It's trivial to fit more in using MIDI or speech synthesis.) I'm going to use "A Podcast Of Unnecessary Detail" to experiment with, as this blogpost also has too much detail. The podcast is a 39MB MP3,…
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I'm trying to create some ridiculously tiny audio files. The sort where every single byte matters. I've encoded a small sample. But the opusenc tool automatically adds metadata - even if you don't specify any. Using the amazing Mutagen Python library I was able to completely strip out all the metadata! import mutagen mutagen.File("example.opus").delete() It edits the file immediately - so be careful! But what is it actually doing? I wanted to understand a bit more - so let's go…
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As much as technology marches forward, there are two truths I need to accept. File transfer speeds are always going to be slower that I can be bothered to wait My ears aren't going to get any better at hearing For years, I ripped all of my music as FLAC. I collected ridiculously high-resolution audio files. I devoured disk drive space for surround sound soundtracks. "One day," I thought, "I'll have an amazing audio system to play these back on." The reality is that I spend most of my time …
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DVD-Audio (henceforce DVDA) is an unloved and mostly forgotten audio format. Nevertheless, there's a large back-catalogue of music which is still trapped on ancient discs encoded in the proprietary MLP format. A few years ago I wrote about how to extract the audio using the obsolete Windows program DVD-Audio Explorer. I wanted to be able to run the extraction via the command line, which means trying to find a native Linux app. I tried Python AudioTools but I got lost in an endless maze of…
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As ever, notes to myself. This is a method to take a .wav and .cue and transform it into individual files. In this case, .opus. Transform to .flac FLAC is a good intermediary file format, especially for surround sound files. avconv -i file.wav out.flac Transform to .opus An optional step if you want smaller files. Maximum quality for 6 channel audio. opusenc --bitrate 4096 out.flac out.opus Create an .mkv Add to an MKV with all the chapter information. mkvmerge -o test.mkv --chapters…
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