Archive for the ‘audio’ tag
Installing ffmpeg (and LAME) on Mac Snow Leopard
A video still created programmatically; thousands of these can be combined into video using the ffmpeg library – faster and cleaner than a clunky Final Cut project
Well, it might not be Lion (doing live musical performance with my laptop makes me leary of new operating systems) but after finding little recent info on installing ffmpeg on a Mac, I’ve put together this basic outline. For someone who isn’t great at installing libraries using Terminal, it wasn’t completely straightforward, but it works! You will need the Apple Developer Tools to make this work (so far as I can tell).
This tutorial is based on the tutorial by Stephen Jungels, with some explanation and consolidation targeted at noobs (like myself). Definite hat tip, Stephen!
The basic steps are as follows, full details after the break:
- Install Git
- Download LAME
- Download ffmpeg
- Find or create folder to install to
- Install LAME
- Install ffmpeg
- Test
Physical Samples
Doing some Friday afternoon math about the audio files on my computer.
~22 days of music = 80,129,302,838 samples*
Sample values range from -32,768 – 32,768
If each value were to be cut using a standard CNC mill with 0.000125″ accuracy, the resulting object would be:
10,016,162.8″ = 834,680.2′ = 158.08 miles long, and only…
8.192″ tall!
* calculation from Adam Caprez at the Holland Computing Center; thanks Adam!
Digital audio best practices
I recently found this .pdf by the CDP Digital Audio Working Group titled “Digital Audio Best Practices”. It caught my eye because it was a great glossary of digital audio terms (perfect for my students). It turns out it also has a good discussion of archival storage of digital audio. I’ve been working on a “best practice” for my own studio (what sample rate to record new works at, how to store finished works, backups, etc) and this is another great piece of advice.
Via: Bibliographical Center for Research (BCR)
