Audio processing

[luke]

On Sun, 15 Jun 2008, Tony Baechler wrote:

> What audio processing tools are out for Linux and are accessible?  I'm aware
> of sox, the various encoding tools (transcode, ffmpeg, et) and ecasound, but

I am not aware of ffmpeg and et (unless you ment etc.), but mplayer is a 
useful addition to that set if you're doing DVD or stream work, or just 
for general listening with controls.

> none of those replace the power of Sound Forge under Windows, at least that
> I've seen, although I could be missing something.  I have tried to figure out

They probably do, collectively, replace the power (never used SF, so don't 
know), but certainly not the UI.

You really have to go to Gnome for that, in which you'll have Artor and 
such, which afaik we can not currently use.

> ecasound but didn't get anywhere with it.  I have files in mono that I want to
> convert to stereo for CD burning but I couldn't figure out how with sox, even
> after searching through the man page and reading the help.  I ended up doing
> it with my old Sound Forge but I would like to move more of my audio work to
> Linux if possible.  Here's the command line I used for sox after reading the
> man page:
> 
> sox -c 2 file1.wav file2.wav

If the audio is in the left channel, you probably want:

sox infile.wav outfile.wav swap 1 1

If it's on the right, replace the 1s with 2s.

You might need something like:

sox -c 1 infile.wav -c 2 outfile.wav swap 1 1

instead, but I'm not sure.

> various keywords but feel like I'm missing something.  Any tips on getting
> started with ecasound would be appreciated as so far I haven't got it to do
> anything including loading or playing a file.  I would prefer text mode and
> curses programs now as I don't have enough memory to run X.

Ecasound is powerful, but it is a real bugger to get the hang of it.

A way to start might be the play file example from the man page, which 
goes something like this:

ecasound -c -i infile.wav
start
stop
(etc.)

(from memory--haven't done that in many months)

Luke