Media players and editing

Table of Contents

Streaming Music

  1. Spotify
  2. Amazon Music
  3. Pandora

Tagging - tools for managing metadata

  1. MusicBrainz Picard:
    1. Cross-platform: Available on Linux, macOS, and Windows.
    2. Open-source and free: A community-driven project.
    3. AcoustID: Uses AcoustID audio fingerprints to identify tracks and match them to MusicBrainz metadata, even if tags are missing or inaccurate.
    4. Features: Can tag, rename, and reorganize music libraries, download album art, and includes an integrated player for verification.
  2. Kid3
  3. Puddletag
  4. EasyTAG
  5. mp3tag (Windows)

Playing local music in computer

  1. VLC
  2. itunes
  3. Clementine
    1. Installation in Debian 
      sudo add-apt-repository ppa:me-davidsansome/clementine
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install clementine
  4. Rhythmbox
  5. Strawberry music player

Tools for editing audio and video in Linux

Audacity

  1. Download the flatpack from https://www.audacityteam.org/download/, make it executable and run it.
  2. Use the selection tool to highlight the unwanted audio, then press the Delete key
  3. Seems to be giving a more fine-grained control for selection compared to doing it with VLC.
  4. The size of the file, after removing a part of it, is bigger when I Audacity - compared to when I used VLC.

VLC

https://www.vlchelp.com/cut-trim-videos-with-vlc-media-player/

Avidemux

$ sudo pacman -S avidemux-qt

Cutting videos

  1. Load file
  2. Play it.
  3. Mark point A.
  4. Play it.
  5. Mark point B.
  6. File - Save.

Combining two videos

  1. Load the first file: File -> Open
  2. Append the second file: File -> Append
  3. Export the combined file: File -> Save

Kdenlive

Kdenlive/Manual https://userbase.kde.org/Kdenlive/Manual

This seems to be increasing the file size though. The cropped clips should have minimal size. They should not be blown up in memory. For this reason, use this with caution.

pacman -S kdenlive

Cropping mp3 and mp4 files:

  1. In the panel, right-click and select “Add clip or folder” and add the file.
  2. Drag the file into the selection window at the bottom.

Cutting a Clip

  1. Using the selection tool, put it at the beginning. Use the menu Timeline ‣ Current Clip ‣ Cut Clip
  2. Using the selection tool, put it at the ending. Use the menu Timeline ‣ Current Clip ‣ Cut Clip
  3. After splitting the original file into parts, delete the parts that are not needed.
  4. Drag the remaining part all the way to the left - to timeline starting at 0.
  5. After setting the beginning and ending points, go to Project -> Render -> Audit Only - Mp3 for audio files or Project -> Render -> Generic - Mp4 for video files.

Splitting files:

  1. Very similar approach to splitting files (delete parts of the file) too.
  2. Use the razor-tool to make the selection, right-click and delete the selection.

mp3directcut

I tried using this but I couldn’t figure out how to use it.

Converting formats and shrinking file sizes

ffmpeg

sudo apt install ffmpeg

https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/pdctna/ffmpeg_video_compression/

Some packages/frameworks may be available only in RPMFusion repository. So, we may have to add it to Fedora using the following commands :

sudo dnf -y install https://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm
sudo dnf -y install https://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm

After the repository is added, they can be installed using commands like the one below :

sudo dnf -y install ffmpeg

Command to convert m4a to mp3

ffmpeg -i input.m4a -acodec libmp3lame -ab 128k output.mp3

Shrinking video sizes

None of these reduced the size of the video when I tried them

# General pattern
ffmpeg -i path/to/original/file path/to/new/file

# Example
ffmpeg -i "Desktop/Screen Recording 2022-11-08 at 4.30.40 PM.mov" Desktop/code-walkthrough.mp4

Honestly, I love WebM but it takes waaay too long to encode. I think the best way would be to use h264/h265 along with Opus in a .mkv format. Also, lowering the bitrate of the video/audio helps a ton, along with changing the CRF. Try something like:

ffmpeg -i file.webm -c:v libx264 -c:a libopus -b:a 96k -b:v 5M -crf 23 output.mkv

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v libx265 -crf 26 -preset fast -c:a aac -b:a 128k output.mkv

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