On Thu, 17 Oct 2002, Chris Hellyar wrote: ... > I'm looking for a Linux app to work on large (300Mb+) Audio files, that can > do some basic copy'n'paste, playback, mix type stuff... > > I'm going to be using it for cleaning up recorded stuff off LP's to burn to ...
While I type, gramofile just records an old tape to disk. I have been using gramofile for some time without major problems on a 486DX2/66 - it needs almost no memory (1 MB), and between 15 and 20 percent of this CPU, and since it is real-time I set it to nice -19. Sometimes it just stops recording, or, more precisely, it continues, but all the samples are zero. I have no idea why that happens (did not try to find out, it happens rarely enough to be no big problem). Gramofile does a nice job finding and separating tracks. You can enter the track start and end times manually by editing a text file that contains the respective information, but gramofile will also try to find the tracks automatically - the results depend on filter parameter settings, but after reading the doc for the algorithm it is pretty easy to configure it. I normally change only two parameters: first the one defining the signal level for "silence between tracks", and the the minimum duration of the inter-track gap. For manual editing, cutting etc I tried snd which also works in an amazingly small portion of memory - even if your sound file is an hour it only takes up a small amount of RAM. Of course, the sound data must be somewhere, and they are: on disk. This means that editing operations can be slow if you are moving large amounts of data. And you have to make sure you have enough HD space left depending on what you intend to do. Say, you have a one hour file, and you load it into snd, cut off the first two minutes, and then save the remaining 58 minutes back to the file. You would then need disk space for the original one hour, which is already occupied, plus the 58 minutes you are writing to disk. This is generally no problem, you only have to be aware of it. Cheers, Helmut. +----------------+ | Helmut Walle | | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | +----------------+
