Create 30 second sample clips from iTunes library (batch)

[jimmy43]

Creating a website which will preview CD albums by offering mp3 samples.. Is there any software out there which will automatically create these samples for you? I saw some posts about creating an itunes script which can perhaps do this but I have no experience with it. A nice bonus would be to have the fade in fade out added to the start and end of the sample.

thanks!
T

 

[ChrisA]

Creating a website which will preview CD albums by offering mp3 samples.. Is there any software out there which will automatically create these samples for you? I saw some posts about creating an itunes script which can perhaps do this but I have no experience with it. A nice bonus would be to have the fade in fade out added to the start and end of the sample.

thanks!
T

This is what you need: http://sox.sourceforge.net/Docs/Features
It's a command line sound editor and converter. It's been around "forever" and is very mature and powerfull.

 

[jimmy43]

Hi there, thanks for the reply! This is definitely along the lines of what I was looking for, but it does look pretty advanced. I looked online but I couldn't find a good tutorial, it would be helpful if someone could help me come up with a quick command to batch create mp3 samples out of a directory of mp3s. That would be gold!

 

[ChrisA]

Hi there, thanks for the reply! This is definitely along the lines of what I was looking for, but it does look pretty advanced. I looked online but I couldn't find a good tutorial, it would be helpful if someone could help me come up with a quick command to batch create mp3 samples out of a directory of mp3s. That would be gold!

There is a "sox-users" mailing list. It would be good to subscribe to that. Then try a few things and describe your attempts on that list. But don't ask "how to" until you can tell them what you've already read and what you've tried otherwise you will only get replies pointing you to the user level documentation.

sox is a very simple command line program. You give it a command and a file and it writes the result to standard output where typically you'd pipe it to a file. To batch process and entire directory you'd place a sox command or several commands inside a foreach loop in a shell script. In your case you process a track first with a trim then the fade-in and then pie to a file. Get that to work them put a foreach loop around it