Audacity and filenames
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Playing with Audacity yesterday to create some Ogg files, I noticed something strange. If I do this:
I get a directory and a file (for raisins, probably):
Though that unexpected directory isn’t actually what this post is about. Now export to Ogg with no change to the filename, except for the extension:
Yet exporting to MP3 and WAV doesn’t seem to have a problem with the accented characters:
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@gurth I wonder, does that happen on all platforms?
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@raceprouk said in Audacity and filenames:
@gurth I wonder, does that happen on all platforms?
Nope:
https://i.imgur.com/HhLPrdt.png
(False, by the way.)
Just about the only folder I can get it to save to is Downloads, so tried that:
https://i.imgur.com/UmyeXyI.png
I'm not sure which is worse. The fail on your end, or the fail on mine.
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@gurth Maybe a problem in the library they use for exporting to ogg?
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@anonymous234 said in Audacity and filenames:
@gurth Maybe a problem in the library they use for exporting to ogg?
This. Audacity relies and third-party libraries. IIRC, the MP3 exporter isn't even bundled with Audacity for licensing reasons, and you have to download a library for it to use.
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Also it doesn't help that Audacity is a piece of broken crap which nobody would use ever except it has a free noise removal plug-in.
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@the_quiet_one said in Audacity and filenames:
IIRC, the MP3 exporter isn't even bundled with Audacity for licensing reasons, and you have to download a library for it to use.
This is no longer true; the relevant patent expired recently. I'd have to double-check next time I'm home, but I'm pretty sure a vanilla Audacity install now comes with MP3 encoding support standard.
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@blakeyrat said in Audacity and filenames:
Also it doesn't help that Audacity is a piece of broken crap which nobody would use ever except it has a free noise removal plug-in.
OK then, what's a better free program in its niche, O Wise Sage of Usability?
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@masonwheeler There isn't one. I just said that.
"This software is bad" doesn't imply "oh look over there, there's a program that's so much better and also free and when you use it a unicorn shits pure gold on your lawn".
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@blakeyrat OK, now you're apparently listening to your own shoulder aliens!
You have only one other post in this thread before this one, and it doesn't say anything about the existence or lack thereof of other quality software in this area.
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@masonwheeler said in Audacity and filenames:
This is no longer true; the relevant patent expired recently. I'd have to double-check next time I'm home, but I'm pretty sure a vanilla Audacity install now comes with MP3 encoding support standard.
I installed Audacity recently and the encoder is still separate, even if it doesn't have to be.
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@blakeyrat said in Audacity and filenames:
Also it doesn't help that Audacity is a piece of broken crap which nobody would use ever except it has a free noise removal plug-in.
@blakeyrat said in Audacity and filenames:
There isn't one. I just said that.
Nice. "Nobody would ever use it" except it's the only one so actually everyone would use it.
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@anonymous234 said in Audacity and filenames:
@gurth Maybe a problem in the library they use for exporting to ogg?
That’s what I’m thinking too. One that doesn’t know how to talk to macOS, I suppose — would the escape sequences show readable characters if on an ext4 filesystem, maybe? (I don’t know, just thinking out loud here.)
Also, I forgot to mention another nuisance that this causes: rename
F%97%97b%89r.ogg
toFóóbâr.ogg
, then edit it again in Audacity, and re-export. After the warning that the file already exists and clicking on that you want to replace it, you get:and
Obviously, one is the just-exported file (with
0
appended), the other the original that it didn’t delete because it tried the wrong filename.
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@blakeyrat Weird, I always found Audacity pretty straightforward and usable.
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@anonymous234 It's gotten slightly better in the last year, now that it doesn't change your system volume to normalize while recording who the fuck signed off on that!
The UI is still pretty bad, and it's only single-core in a universe where even the cheapest laptop has at least 4, which means it takes forever to do anything. There are few tasks more parallize-able than applying filters to audio, but nope, multithreaded code is too difficult for the idiots who make open source software.
If SoundForge's noise cancellation plug-in didn't cost extra, I'd be able to get rid of Audacity forever.
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@gurth said in Audacity and filenames:
show readable characters if on an ext4 filesystem
Tried it on Linux and it works
Maybe Apple should send a MacBook to Audacity's dev so they can adapt their code for OSX
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@blakeyrat said in Audacity and filenames:
it's only single-core in a universe where even the cheapest laptop has at least 4, which means it takes forever to do anything. There are few tasks more parallize-able than applying filters to audio, but nope, multithreaded code is too difficult for the idiots who make open source software.
If it's so simple, why don't you contribute a patch?
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Blakey - "Audacity is unusable"
Anonymous234 - "It really isn't"
Blakey - "When I said unusable, I meant 'single-threaded'"Christ, what an asshole.
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@gwowen What happened to your avatar?!?!?
Or am I thinking of someone else?
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@tsaukpaetra Don't think I ever had one
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@blakeyrat True, but as with so many things it's "less worse" that just about everything else.
There are no good audio editing apps out there, and Audacity is the best of them.
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@masonwheeler said in Audacity and filenames:
@blakeyrat said in Audacity and filenames:
it's only single-core in a universe where even the cheapest laptop has at least 4, which means it takes forever to do anything. There are few tasks more parallize-able than applying filters to audio, but nope, multithreaded code is too difficult for the idiots who make open source software.
If it's so simple, why don't you contribute a patch?
He didn't say it was simple
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I'm not a professional mixer/editor, and my experience with such is confined to doing simple cuts of music for length with some simple pitch and volume adjusting for my wife's community theater productions, so I can't speak for Audacity's UI compared to other software, especially payware. However, it seems to do a good job with my limited needs. John Williams sure isn't using it, but I stand by my philosophy of: You get what you pay for. Audacity is free. It isn't supposed to replace a $1000+ professional Hollywood-grade audio suite that could probably transform Hillary's voice to Donald Trump and auto-tune it to All-Star for some trolling and fake news at the press of a button.
That said, seeing how horrible some songs I've heard on the radio as of late, I think others are right when they say decent audio editing apps don't exist. Making Justin Bieber and Katy Perry sound good is a monumental and likely impossible task, though, so I might be unfairly judging the ability of modern audio editors.
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@timebandit said in Audacity and filenames:
Tried it on Linux and it works
Linux uses UTF-8 NFC for filenames, whereas OSX uses UTF-8 NFD. There's potential for differences there.
OTOH, it sounds like the issue lies in the layer used to invoke a subprocess to do the conversion, or in the layer in the subprocess that takes the arguments and converts into comprehensible strings. Why that would be significantly different between two platforms that are both essentially purely POSIX in this area, I've no idea at all. Well, not unless something really weird is going on, which is altogether too possible when dealing with programmers who don't understand why being a bit careful with the exec-family functions is important…
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@dkf said in Audacity and filenames:
Linux uses UTF-8 NFC for filenames
On which level? AFAIK it's just a null-terminated string.
$ touch "$(printf "\x87")" $ ls | hexdump -C 00000000 87 0a |..| 00000002
Probably just something your GUI tools tend towards.
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@gordonjcp said in Audacity and filenames:
There are no good audio editing apps out there, and Audacity is the best of them.
SoundForge is pretty good but remember: NEVER BUY SOFTWARE SOFTWARE IS WORTHLESS WORTH NO MONEY AT ALL IF YOU PAY FOR SOFTWARE YOU ARE A FOOL! ALSO IT HAS TO BE OPEN SOURCE!
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@gwowen said in Audacity and filenames:
Blakey - "When I said unusable, I meant 'single-threaded'"
It's unusable and single-threaded.
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@dkf said in Audacity and filenames:
Linux uses UTF-8 NFC for filenames,
Yeah but that's not actually a spec in Linux or POSIX or anywhere. Filenames are just defined as a series of bytes with no encoding and no limit to acceptable characters (I mean: how can you come up with a list of acceptable characters when you haven't even come up with an encoding?). Just one more way Linux is a really shitty piece of crap!
So it's incorrect to say "Linux uses UTF8". You could say something like "all popular OSes built on the Linux kernel use UTF8" and probably be correct. But try not to underestimate how much a shitty piece of crap Linux itself is.
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@blakeyrat said in Audacity and filenames:
NEVER BUY SOFTWARE SOFTWARE IS WORTHLESS WORTH NO MONEY AT ALL IF YOU PAY FOR SOFTWARE YOU ARE A FOOL! ALSO IT HAS TO BE OPEN SOURCE!
To quote you in this same thread :
If SoundForge's noise cancellation plug-in didn't cost extra, I'd be able to get rid of Audacity forever.
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@timebandit Yes I did. Waiting for you to make some kind of point.
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Have this one
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@timebandit Well ok. Yes you have to take cover while shooting aliens, especially those Thin Man ones with the plasma guns.
But I'm not sure how that's relevant to the discussion.
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@blakeyrat Why don't you vote with your wallet and pay for SoundForge's noise cancellation plug-in and get rid of the "piece-of-crap-open-sore" Audacity forever ?
FileUnder: Practice what you preach
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@timebandit said in Audacity and filenames:
pay for SoundForge's noise cancellation plug-in
Or just buy a slightly older version of Adobe Audition. I'm using, I dunno, CS6 or 7 or something? Perfectly fine.
As always, avoid "Creative Cloud" like the plague it is.
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@pleegwat said in Audacity and filenames:
On which level?
It's defined by your locale. Every installation in the wild uses locales that specify UTF-8. You can specify other encodings if you insist, and you can shove metal forks in power sockets too, but wise folks refrain from that…
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@dkf Maybe but that's not "Linux" doing the specifying.
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@dkf said in Audacity and filenames:
@pleegwat said in Audacity and filenames:
On which level?
It's defined by your locale. Every installation in the wild uses locales that specify UTF-8. You can specify other encodings if you insist, and you can shove metal forks in power sockets too, but wise folks refrain from that…
My locale is
en_GB.utf8
. The commands I pasted in my last post returned exactly what I pasted. It may be that normal usage will typically result in UTF8 NFC, but you're going to be subject to whatever your applications are doing. If your application internally generates filenames in shift-JIS, the kernel is not going to tell it that's unacceptable.
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@pleegwat said in Audacity and filenames:
If your application internally generates filenames in shift-JIS, the kernel is not going to tell it that's unacceptable.
Yes, but everything will mysteriously break and nobody will feel sorry for you. :p
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Audacity is a complete pile of shit. That said, it's the only FREE pile of shit available.
Anyone doing anything the least bit seriously with audio would be better served dropping a few tens of dollars on a Reaper license. My podcaster friends all have one. I have one for the YouTube stuff. It's fucking great.
Has a learning curve, but also really good tutorial videos.
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@weng said in Audacity and filenames:
a few tens of dollars on a Reaper license.
Does it have noise removal?
Although the UI looks just as shitty as Audacity's. And all the shit you just described I do in Vegas, the only thing I do in Audacity is noise removal. Audacity also has compression, but it's far easier to do that in Vegas and it works better too. (Because you can adjust the sliders in real-time while the audio's playing).
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@blakeyrat It does.
Isn't Vegas primarily video? IME the audio edit capabilities of video suites are crude at best, but I've never used Vegas.
The video end of my production is handled in DaVinci Resolve, which, ironically, is free. Not opensores, just free. It also carries quite the learning curve compared to other NLEs.
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@blakeyrat said in Audacity and filenames:
@weng said in Audacity and filenames:
a few tens of dollars on a Reaper license.
Does it have noise removal?
Although the UI looks just as shitty as Audacity's. And all the shit you just described I do in Vegas, the only thing I do in Audacity is noise removal. Audacity also has compression, but it's far easier to do that in Vegas and it works better too. (Because you can adjust the sliders in real-time while the audio's playing).
Incidentally, the UI for both Audacity and Reaper is skeudomorphic nonsense modeled on hardware audio workstations.
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@weng said in Audacity and filenames:
Isn't Vegas primarily video? IME the audio edit capabilities of video suites are crude at best, but I've never used Vegas.
Editing audio is a subset of editing video. Therefore, Vegas obviously does both.
@weng said in Audacity and filenames:
IME the audio edit capabilities of video suites are crude at best, but I've never used Vegas.
Which have you used? Vegas is on-par with Premiere. I haven't used more than those two though.
@weng said in Audacity and filenames:
The video end of my production is handled in DaVinci Resolve,
Whose website claims:
Revolutionary new tools for editing, color correction and professional audio post production, all in a single application!
@weng said in Audacity and filenames:
Incidentally, the UI for both Audacity and Reaper is skeudomorphic nonsense modeled on hardware audio workstations.
No shit. Audacity looks slightly more like something that was built for a computer though.
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@the_quiet_one said in Audacity and filenames:
Making Justin Bieber and Katy Perry sound good is a monumental and likely impossible task, though, so I might be unfairly judging the ability of modern audio editors.
To be fair, the audio quality is only a small part of the issue with making them "sound good".
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@blakeyrat I suspect we're coming at this from very different workflows.
I'm capturing video and multitrack audio on separate devices (Audacity nominally supports the ASIO driver API to make that work, but only if you build it yourself because ASIO is a closed standard) and the very last thing that happens to a raw unedited feed before editing starts is that the full, processed, denoised audio tracks are synchronized and added to it.
You're probably working with mixed audio and video from the start. Like a normal person who doesn't have 8 microphones and 3 videos running in parallel.
I used to use Premiere before my workflow got stupid.
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@weng Nothing about your workflow says to me "I MUST do my audio processing outside of my video editing!"
When I have multiple audio tracks (game, commentor, commentator) I do the noise removal in Audacity, then do the sync and other processing right in Vegas.
I mean do what you do, but. You chose to do it.
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I think @blakeyrat might be using the /r/GuildWars2 definition of "literally unusable":
https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/70yh6n/literally_unplayable/
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@blakeyrat It's more a matter of "well, I just captured it in Reaper (because ASIO) so I may as well do the processing now" deal.
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@blakeyrat SoundForge is terrible. It's even more crashy than Audacity, and it doesn't have any of the tools I use. It's also only available on an OS that I have only a little experience of and no desire to learn.
Cost isn't an issue - the Linux-based software I do most of my editing on costs several thousand pounds.
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@gordonjcp said in Audacity and filenames:
@blakeyrat SoundForge is terrible. It's even more crashy than Audacity, and it doesn't have any of the tools I use. It's also only available on an OS that I have only a little experience of and no desire to learn.
GUYZ ITS TERRIBLE ITS NOT EVEN LUNIXY AND IT REFUZE TO LEARN THE WINDWOSZ!!!!
Good reasoning, you've convinced me.