DON'S FREEWARE CORNER -- SEP 2013
FREEWARE AUDIO AND VIDEO PROGRAMS
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DON'S FREEWARE CORNER 2013-09
FREEWARE AUDIO AND VIDEO PROGRAMS
©2014 Donald R. Snow
My Freeware Corner Notes are
printed in our Utah Valley Technology and Genealogy Group monthly
newsletter TAGGology and posted on my Family History Class Notes
webpage http://uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-classes.html
, sometimes with updated information there.
FREEWARE AUDIO AND VIDEO PROGRAMS
1. VLC -- Freeware sound player and recorder
available from http://www.videolan.org/
VLC plays nearly all formats of media files, both audio and video, and has
some really nice features. There is a good tutorial on how to
download, install, and use VLC at http://www.slideshare.net/noniefer20/how-to-use-vlcpdf
and you can Google "vlc tutorials" or look on YouTube and find many
more. It will play streaming audio or video from the Internet, as
well as recorded and saved files. It has several features that are
not found in other players, e.g. on a video, when the sound doesn't match
the people's lips, you can adjust it to put them back together. I've
noticed that when I play some of the Church videos on other players, they
are not in sync like that and it bothers me to watch them. VLC also
allows playing through all the files in a folder, so you can form a folder
of audio or video files and start it playing at the first one and it will
play each one successively without you having to form a play list to do
it. It will also record audio and video, though I haven't ever used
it for that.
2. AUDACITY -- OpenSource freeware sound player
and recorder available from http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
OpenSource means that this is a program that is being worked on by many
people around the world and you can even download the source code and edit
that yourself, if you know programming. I don't know
programing that well, so I just use the program. Audacity is a very
complete audio recorder and player with many, many features. In
fact, it has so many features that it's hard to learn to use it.
There are lots of tutorials on the Internet and, especially on
YouTube. But you can learn to use just a few features and get
started and add more to your knowledge as you need them. I have used
it many times to record streaming audio from the Internet and digitizing
tapes. It has a monitoring feature that you can see if the record
level is OK before you start recording and I've found that I sometimes
have to adjust the input so the waves don't go into the overdrive space
and distort the sound. It records both mono and stereo and when you
are recording you see the wave forms of the channels. It has buttons
like a cassette tape recorder to click to start, pause, stop the
recording, or play it back. You see the wave format of the entire
file, so you can scroll back and forth to find spots you are looking for
and listen just to those. By doing this you can see where the silent
parts are and can edit those to delete or otherwise change them. It
has easy controls to fade parts in or out by just highlighting the part
you want to fade in or out and clicking a button. Parts can be cut
and removed or other parts spliced in. When you are finished editing
the file, it can be saved in several formats including mp3, wav, ogg,
etc. mp3 files are much smaller in size, but don't have the quality
that wav files do. And Audacity can be used to convert from one file
type to another. If you are digitizing songs from a vinyl record or
cassette tape, you can tell where the silences are between the songs and
you can put the song's name at that point, but on another track.
Then when you export the file, you can tell Audacity to split it at the
start of each song so you end up with each song in a separate file with
its name. I've found that it helps to put a number before each name,
e.g. 01 Stardust, 02 Over The Rainbow, etc., so all the songs stay in
their proper order in the folder, not their alphabetical order. This
splitting idea also works well if you are digitizing a tape of various
talks, etc., so you can record the entire tape and then look for the
silences and label each part and separate them when you export the final
version. Audacity has lots of features and I only know how to use a
few of them, but the ones I do use work fine.
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