I don’t spend much time in traditional “word processors”, but when I do, it is usually in LibreOffice. Then I prefer to save the files in the native .ODT format. But it happens that I need to send a bunch of files to someone that prefers .DOCX files. Instead of manually converting all the files, here is a short one-liner that does the trick using the magical pandoc, the go-to tool for converting text documents.

There is always a need to add fade-in and fade-out to audio tracks. Here is a way of doing it for a bunch of video files. It may come in handy with the audio normalization script I have shown previously. That script is based on continuously normalizing the audio, which may result in some noise in the beginning and end (because there is little/no sound in those parts, hence they are normalized more).

Today, I recorded Sound Action 194 - Rolling Dice as part of my year-long sound action project. The idea has been to do as little processing as possible to the recordings. That is because I want to capture sounds and actions as naturally as possible. The recorded files will also serve as source material for both scientific and artistic explorations later. For that reason, I only trim the recordings non-destructively using FFmpeg.

I have previously written about how to export each of the pages of a PDF file as an image. That works well for, for example, presentation slides that should go on a web page. But sometimes there is a need to export only the images within a page. This can be achieved with a small command line tool called pdfimages. One way of using it is: pdfimages -p -png file.pdf image This will export all images in file.

I have been doing quite a lot of manuscript editing recently and realize that many people—including academics—don’t understand the differences between the symbols hyphen, en-dash, and em-dash. So here is a quick explanation: hyphen (-): is used to join words (“music-related”). You type this character with the Minus key on the keyboard, so it is the easiest one to use. en-dash (–): is used to explain relationships between two concepts (“action–couplings”) or in number series (0–100).

I take a lot of timelapse shots with a GoPro camera. Usually, I do this with the camera’s photo setting instead of the video setting. That is because I find it easier to delete unwanted pictures from the series that way. It also simplifies selecting individual photos when I want that. But then I need a way to create a timelapse video from the photos easily. Here is an FFmpeg one-liner that does the job:

We have a bunch of Canon XF105 at RITMO, a camera that records MXF files. This is not a particularly useful file format (unless for further processing). Since many of our recordings are just for documentation purposes, we often see the need to convert to MP4. Here I present two solutions for converting MXF files to MP4, both as individual files and a combined file from a folder. These are shell scripts based on the handy FFmpeg.

So I decided to install Ubuntu on my daughter’s new laptop, more specifically an HP Pavilion. The choice of this particular laptop was because it looked nice, and had good specs for the money. It was first after the purchase I read all the complaints people have about the weird UEFI implementation on HP laptops. So I started the install process with some worries. Reading on various forums, people seemed to have been doing all sorts of strange things to be able to install Ubuntu on HP laptops, including modifying the UEFI setup, changing the BIOS, and so on.

My 9-year old daughter is getting her first laptop. But which OS should she get started with? I have been using various versions of Ubuntu as my main OS for around 5 years now, currently using Ubuntu Studio on my main laptop. This distro is based on XFCE, a very lightweight yet versatile OS. The reason for choosing Ubuntu Studio over the regular XUbuntu was to get a bunch of music apps by default.

I often find myself with a bunch of images that are not properly rotated. Many cameras write the rotation information to the EXIF header of the image file, but the file itself is not actually rotated. Some photo editors do this automagically when you import the files, but I prefer to copy files manually to my drive. I therefore have a little one-liner that can rotate all the files in a folder:

Back on OSX one of my favourite small programs was called PDFCompress, which compressed a large PDF file into something more manageable. There are many ways of doing this on Ubuntu as well, but nothing really as smooth as I used to on OX. Finally I took the time to figure out how I could make a small shell script based on ghostscript. The whole script looks like this: #!/bin/sh gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.

Apple’s Keynote has been my preferred presentation tool for about a decade. For a long time it felt like the ideal tool, easy to use, powerful and flexible. But at some point, probably around the time when the iOS version of Keynote came along, the Mac version of Keynote started loosing features and became more limited than it had used to be. Since then, I have experienced all sorts of problems, including non-compatibility of new and old presentation file versions, problems with linked video files, crashes, etc.

When I got my Asus eee a few months ago I tested the built-in OS for about an hour and then decided to install Ubuntu eee (later renamed to Easypeasy) instead. I felt the Xandros OS was too limiting and wanted to test out something more powerful. One of the reasons for buying the eee in the first place was to test whether it would be useful for laptop performance, and then I needed an OS where it was possible to install Chuck, PD and SC3 without any problems.

Another post from the Mobile Music Workshop in Vienna. Yesterday I saw a demo on the Audioscape project by Mike Wozniewski (McGill). He was using the Gumstix, a really small system running a Linux version called OpenEmbedded. He was running PDa (a Pure Data clone) and was able to process sensor data and run audio off of the small device.