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93 lines
5.1 KiB
Plaintext
93 lines
5.1 KiB
Plaintext
Episode: 3927
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Title: HPR3927: Audacity Update 20230702
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Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3927/hpr3927.mp3
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Transcribed: 2025-10-25 17:29:21
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---
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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3927 for Tuesday, the 22nd of August 2023.
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Today's show is entitled, Audacity Update 2 July 2023.
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It is hosted by Avukar and is about six minutes long.
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It carries a clean flag.
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The summary is, Reserve Show, Audacity has been having problems lately.
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You are listening to a show from the Reserve Q. We are airing it now because we had free
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slots that were not filled.
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This is a community project that needs listeners to contribute shows in order to survive.
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Please consider recording a show for Hacker Public Radio.
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Hello.
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This is Ahoca welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode.
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This is an emergency episode and so if you're hearing this, that means the Q has run terribly
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low and Ken is getting desperate for shows.
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So if you're out there and you are listening to this, record a show.
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It's actually extremely easy to do, you'll find there's already a whole bunch of shows
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have been recorded about how to record a show and how easy it is, so you know, do that.
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The only bad show is the one we don't receive.
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So with that, I want to give an update on something that's happened with Audacity and I
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recorded a show.
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It's number 3900 for Hacker Public Radio about my workflow for preparing podcasts for
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listening.
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I download a ton of podcasts.
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I really like them.
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The problem is that when you have that many podcasts, you've got to kind of do some
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prep work on them.
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So that show is all about how I prepare the podcasts for listening and that includes
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speeding them up, normalizing and you know, boosting the volume a little, etc, etc.
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And you know, it's a workflow that has worked very well for me for a long time, except
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lately something has happened.
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And I don't know what it, I've got a hint as to what it might be, but all of a sudden
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podcasts that had been working fine for many, many years, I would try and import them
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into Audacity and you know, loading a file and Audacity is importing.
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And that's step one of the process.
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You've got to import the file before you can go through the rest of the processing steps.
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And Audacity was just choking on the import and throwing out error messages.
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Now some of these were things about the you know, bad Huffman code, another time bad file
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length or forbidden bit rate value.
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Now it's entirely possible that these are real errors of some kind, but are they really
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bad enough to just refuse to load the files?
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I actually don't think so.
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In fact, I did a little online searching and that disclosed that Audacity decided to
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enable error checking in their decoding library, which is called lib mad, which it had
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not done before.
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But they realized it was picking up a lot of really minor stuff, so in the next version
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they may relax the error checking.
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I hope so, though I note that some of this information is from 2020.
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Then again, I note that the version that I am getting through the repository is pretty
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out of date as well.
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Problems, problems, problems.
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Anyway, my work around is I use online file converters.
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And now the online file converters load the files just fine, which is one of the reasons
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I think Audacity is just being a little too nitpicky here.
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But anyway, I go to them, I load up the MP3, which I upload to the site, and then just
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convert it to something like, say, Ogg, and then download the converted file.
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The files are probably all in MP3 to begin with.
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There are very few podcasts that don't send out MP3 is the default.
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But once it's converted to Ogg, I can download it.
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And then my Audacity script will run on the converted file just perfectly.
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Now I found a couple of sites I like, and it's not to say that there's any shortage of
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converters out there.
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But two of the ones that I've used are Converquio, Link in the Show Notes, and Online Audio
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Converter.
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Again, Link in the Show Notes.
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Now they're both fast and easy.
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And I note that both have now added some simple video editing tools, which I'm going to check
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that out too.
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You probably wouldn't use them for really serious work, free online video editing.
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You're going to want it to use it on very short clips, but the kinds of ones that I might
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take with my phone.
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Sometimes I'll do a 40-second video, and the last couple of seconds something went wrong.
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This might be a good way to just do a little cutting clipping of the video.
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So for stuff like that, or maybe taking two video clips and combining them, I think it
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would probably work just fine.
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So anyway, a couple of tools and some ways to use them.
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So this is Ahuka for Hacker Public Radio, signing off and encouraging you as always to
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support free software.
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Bye bye!
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You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio, and Hacker Public Radio does work.
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Today's show was contributed by a HBR listener like yourself.
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If you ever thought of recording podcasts, click on our contribute link to find out how
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easy it really is.
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Thank you for watching for HBR has been kindly provided by an honesthost.com, the internet
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archive and our sims.net.
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On the Sadois status, today's show is released under Creative Commons, Attribution 4.0 International
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License.
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