73
Handbrake is one of the best free (and open-source) video converters around. It's fast, powerful, and simple. It's also quite good at converting audio.
It's a good match for you because it's...
Free (Zero Cost and FOSS)
Very lightweight - it does nothing but convert stuff
Extremely feature-filled - you can tweak every aspect of conversion
Simple and ...
35
ffmpeg would do this, and I've had excellent luck with the winff front end to it. It'll give you the commands should you want to do it manually, let you batch stuff out, or strip out the audio. It also has a sane set of common presets for things you want to do
30
I would recommend VLC
it will play just about any video/audio you throw at it (except rmvb)
it is not under 30mb in size, it's around 100mb (after installation), but this is due to
it containing all the codecs it needs instead of relying on the
system codecs - I don't think you will find much improvement here if
you count the size that other players would ...
21
I like Format Factory. It supports a very wide range of formats and media types.
Its features include:
Fast and light, it does nothing but convert software.
Supports a wide range of formats and media types.
Supports batch converting.
Supports skins.
Is free as in beer.
I'm not sure if it supports FLAC, though...
15
Audacity is Free, Multi-platform, (Windows, Mac and Linux), and has all that you asked for but there are lots of options for this sort of work - you can easily mute or beep a section that you have selected.
If the singer is centre recorded without echo then the remove vocals plug in tool may be a big help, I am not sure if it will only process the ...
14
I would recommend Media Player Classic - Home Cinema. It has the same interface as the old media player in WinXP but plays most video and audio files.
I find MPC-HC is easier to turn subtitles on and off compared to VLC.
It is about 36mb and is open source.
13
Ekiga is the free alternative recommended by Richard Stallman in his email signature. Ekiga:
is Free/Libre (FLOSS),
is available on GNU/Linux and Microsoft Windows (not on Mac OS, but it's compatible with many Mac OS applications),
offers audio chat with another user,
offers video chat with another user.
More features:
GUI
Free Instant Messaging through ...
answered Mar 13 '14 at 20:45
Franck Dernoncourt
35.7k27 gold badges107 silver badges218 bronze badges
12
There is a GUI for Mp3splt. And its dead easy
Mp3splt-gtk is a utility to split MP3, OGG Vorbis and native FLAC files without any change in quality. Just select begin and an end positions to cut out unwanted audio data and space, or to split entire albums to obtain the original tracks.
Download, extract & start the software
Select Batch & ...
11
I'm going to answer this by recommending gstreamer. You're probably going to hate this answer, because it technically satisfies your requirements, while not being GUI-based. But that's okay, because someone else may find that this is the best tool for the job for them.
Basically, if you get a build of gstreamer with all the codecs enabled, it supports an ...
11
Freemake is a good looking, powerful video converter. It is a quality alternative to paid products.
Online installer
Offline installer
11
You could use Audacity.
Features:
Free, open-source and multiplatform software.
Includes processing options for removing noise, and normalising volume.
Can detect silence between tracks to help with conversion.
There is a tutorial for doing precisely what you want: http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/tutorial_copying_tapes_lps_or_minidiscs_to_cd.html
If ...
8
Current Firefox, Opera and Chrome have WebRTC build in (no plugin) that does that. You need to arrange a meeting point (like this https://apprtc.appspot.com ) with a common identifier (e.G. on apprtc you get redirected to an individual url and must pass this url to your chat partner) and can start chatting instantly.
WebRTC is the framework below the ...
8
Jitsi is a solid option. It's free and licensed under LGPL. It's Java based so it will run on Windows, Linux, and Macs. It supports a number of different protocols as well. It offers both audio and video chat with encryption.
8
You could take a look at IVONA Text to Speech. It's not free but it does meet all of your other requirements:
Multiple voices (with additional voices available)
Multiple languages (with additional languages available)
American English
British English
German
Spanish
French
Italian
High quality (from my experience* anyway)
* One thing I will note, is that ...
8
The best I could come up with is Babble Noise Generator. You can adjust the various sliders to customise the background conversation and even have it randomly and slowly change over time by using the 'Animate!' button.
They also have an app available for iOS, an .mp3 download feature, and over on their main page (MyNoise.net), they have a much wider range ...
7
Take a look at LMMS (Linux Multi-Media Studio). This project begun as a clone of the popular windows software FL Studio. I have been using both a few years ago, and LMMS was still having a lot to catch up with. It has support for most of the basic plugins and features already present in FL Studio, which are VSTi plugins. Also, it supports the FL Studio file ...
7
What you're looking for is probably a Fast Fourier Transform, or "Frequency Analysis".
Audacity can do this, with the Analyze -> Plot Spectrum… tool.
This will output a graph, and you simply find where it peaks to ascertain the Hertz value of whatever sound you were analyzing. This of course only works if the tone is constant.
If your sound file ...
7
After a frustrating search for a cross-platform (Windowns and Linux) open-source software to help me transcribe some interviews for my academic project, I ended up doing one myself:
pmTrans (The Poor's Man Transcriber)
The main features that will help you speed up your transcriptions are:
customisable shortcuts for short and long rewind, play/pause, ...
6
Tox
Recently due to all the "NSA is dropping eaves everywhere" ruckus I came across a reddit or Ycombinator post that mentioned a free, secure, open-source alternative to skype called Tox (http://tox.im/). From their website, they say that "Tox is built on a 'privacy goes first' agenda" so this is good. It's open source too.
Update:
I installed Tox, ...
6
For Windows Users:
Step 1: Enable "Stereo Mix"
if you don't see it, you can try looping:
For OS X users:
you can use Soundflower:
Soundflower is a free, open source MacOS system extension that allows applications to
pass audio to other applications. Soundflower is easy to use, it
simply presents itself as an audio device, allowing any audio
...
answered Jun 27 '14 at 23:57
Franck Dernoncourt
35.7k27 gold badges107 silver badges218 bronze badges
6
If you are looking for a voice recorder that can record audio continuously and skips the silence and can run for 4 hours unattended, then I think you should look into Smart Voice Recorder. It meets your requirements of,
Being gratis
Can run for 12 hours
Is able to record in background even when display is off (make sure you have enough disk space on your ...
5
Download and install python, numpy, graphplotlib and audiolab you can then:
Load audio files into numpy arrays using audiolab.
Diff the arrays.
Plot the result.
Learn a lot... it's all free
5
Check mp3splt.
Free and open source
GTK interface
can open mp3 and ogg
fast because it doesn't decode audio
splits files at specified time
doesn't merge audio - for that use Audacity
Don't bother downloading it, it's already in Ubuntu repos. So you can install with sudo apt-get install mp3splt-gtk mp3splt
Here is a screenshot:
5
You can simply use Windows Explorer:
Note that the bit rate is the encoding, not the actual quality of the track. See program to determine the lowest quality encoding a music file went through.
answered Aug 7 '14 at 20:15
Franck Dernoncourt
35.7k27 gold badges107 silver badges218 bronze badges
5
I found an extension that mutes everything but the active tab.
I tested it on YouTube. When I switched tabs, the other tab muted itself, but unfortunately the extension does not pause the video.
It's called Mute Inactive Tabs, on the Chrome Web Store.
5
You can use TiMidity++:
free and open source
CLI
Linux and Windows (although it seems to be painful to make it work on Windows, but maybe things have improved since then)
can convert MIDI files into WAV files: timidity input.mid -Ow -o out.wav
answered Aug 22 '14 at 15:49
Franck Dernoncourt
35.7k27 gold badges107 silver badges218 bronze badges
5
You can use SoX (Sound eXchange):
free
open source
Windows / Linux / Mac
CLI
can speed up MP3s: e.g. sox --show-progress in.mp3 out.mp3 speed 2. You may want to change the pitch as well, e.g. sox --show-progress in.mp3 out.mp3 speed 2 pitch -200. You can otherwise use stretch to change the rate of playback of an audio sample while preserving the pitch. For ...
answered Sep 13 '14 at 14:28
Franck Dernoncourt
35.7k27 gold badges107 silver badges218 bronze badges
5
I found a program specific to music (and bonus, images)!
http://www.similarityapp.com/
I used the program to compare music encoded in different formats (flac, m4a, mp3, wma, wav). A duplicate file finder really shows their limitation when the encoded formats or metadata makes the likelihood of finding duplicate music files impossible.
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