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been working on converting our PICO-8 music collection into something we can put on a website to share - hope the day's been well for y'all
Our current process for turning a raw .wav file from PICO-8 into something we can upload:
- if it's a loop:
= find a good point to cut off the repeats
= add a fade out
- regardless, normalize volume (we're using -10 dB max amplitude because our copy of Audacity doesn't know how to do the, like, perceptual volume calculation thing that everyone uses)
- add a small length of silence to the end to make a space between each track
- play the track looping to see if the resultant gap feels good. adjust as necessary
- add metadata while exporting as FLAC
- export as mp3 with same metadata
it's ... it's kind of a slow process
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Semi-automated audio conversion.
@packbat The looping is best done in Audacity and the like, but I recommend foobar2000 to do everything else there in basically one step. It's got a very versatile setup for doing automatic signal processing while converting files! I've got it set up so I can convert dozens of videogame soundtracks from odd original formats to FLAC with metadata preserved and reformatted as desired, with slight reverb, normalization, and other desired effects with a couple clicks. Then, when it pops up a list of the FLAC files it made, I drag all those right back into the playlist and convert them to Vorbis (or MP3) with another click!
For working with tags specifically, I highly recommend Mp3tag, which is amazing for working with tags specifically. Copy from one set of files to another, read tags from a text file, search-and-replace that can use regular expressions, even reorganize a tens-of-thousands-of-files collection into a better folder structure based on tags and filenames. With undo history, even! This is probably overkill, though, if you only need to convert individual files on occasion. *grin*
re: Semi-automated audio conversion.
@packbat Aw, heck. Sorry about that! Worse yet, I had a much better CW that would have made it more obvious, but I ended up editing it away. Lesson learned!
And yeah, I totally get that about not wanting to pick up new software. It's why I still have so many of the old-fashioned habits I do as far as how I organize files and such... and why when I must find something new for a task I want to do, I try to find the thing that's most versatile for wrapping around the old way of doing things so I don't lose track of it all!
re: Semi-automated audio conversion.
@ElectricKeet Please put content warnings on unsolicited suggestions if you can - those are a trigger for us.
Anyway, we don't want to deal with learning a new piece of software right now - it sounds like we can go through and normalize the volume of everything in a batch in the future if we do download foobar2000, so we'll just stick a pin in that and think about it later. As for everything else, there's so much manual work involved that adding another program to the workflow would just make the process harder and buy us nothing.
...that said, we probably should have been using Audacity's metadata templates to save us retyping artist, album, and genre every time. That will probably save us a little effort.
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