Terminal

In this post I write about how it is possible rename all the photos in a folder based on the date and time information stored in the file. I mainly take photos with my mobile phone these days (a Samsung Galaxy Ultra S23) but occasionnaly also use “regular” cameras. As opposed to my phone, which saves the files with a filename that includes date and time (YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS.jpg), these cameras typically just use some random name (e.g. P43435.jpg). This is impractical when combining photos from several cameras, so I prefer renaming the files with the same filename schema. ...

I often post images on the web but I rarely think about optimizing the files properly before uploading. Here is a solution for how to do it programmatically in the terminal. Asking ChatGPT for help ChatGPT is great for some things, including suggesting program code for well-known problems. However, while it came up with something that worked right from the start, it took a few iterations to come up with a solution that does what I want. I wanted it to work on all image files in all the subfolders (using a recursive search), reduce the images to maxium 1920 pixels, and optimize them without recompression. ...

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.pdf and label them with something like image-001-010.png, where the first number refers to the page and the second is a count of images. ...

I have been doing several long recordings with GoPro cameras recently. The cameras automatically split the recordings into 4GB files, which leaves me with a myriad of files to work with. I have therefore made a script to help with the pre-processing of the files. This is somewhat similar to the script I made to convert MXF files to MP4, but with better handling of the temp file for storing information about the files to merge: ...

Typical video files, such as MP4 files with H.264 compression, are usually small in size and with high visual quality. Such files are suitable for visual inspection but do not work well for video analysis. In most cases, computer vision software prefers to work with raw data or other compression formats. The Musical Gestures Toolbox for Matlab works best with these file types: Video: use.jpg (Motion.jpg) as the compression format. This compresses each frame individually. Use .AVI as the container, since this is the one that works best on all platforms. Audio: use uncompressed audio (16-bit PCM), saved as .WAV files (.AIFF usually also works fine). If you need to use compression, MP3 compression (MPEG-1, Layer 3) is still more versatile than AAC (used in .MP4 files). If you use a bitrate of 192 Kbs or higher, you should not get too many artefacts. Many people ask me how to convert from typical MP4 files (with H.264 video compression and AAC audio compression). The easiest solution (I think) is to use FFMPEG, the versatile command-line utility. Here is a oneliner that will convert from an .MP4 file into a .AVI file with.jpg and PCM audio: ...

We are organizing the Rhythm Production and Perception Workshop at RITMO next week. As mentioned in another blog post, we have asked presenters to send us pre-recorded videos. They are all available on the workshop page. During the workshop, we will play sets of videos in sequence. When doing a test run today, we discovered that the sound levels differed wildly between files. There is clearly the need for normalizing the sound levels to create a good listener experience. ...

We are organizing the Rhythm Production and Perception Workshop 2021 at RITMO a week from now. Like many other conferences these days, this one will also be run online. Presentations have been pre-recorded (10 minutes each) and we also have short poster blitz videos (1 minute each). Pre-recorded videos People have sent us their videos in advance, but they all have different first “slides”. So, to create some consistency among the videos, we decided to make an introduction slide for each of them. This would then also serve as the “thumbnail” of the video when presented in a grid format. ...

As part of my exploration in creating multi-exposure keyframe image displays with FFmpeg and ImageMagick, I tried out a number of things that did not help solve the initial problem but still could be interesting for other things. Most interesting was the automagic creation of image masks from a video file. I will use a contemporary dance video from the AIST Dance Video Database as an example: The first step is to extract keyframes from the video file using this one-liner ffmpeg command: ...