If you use Google speech-to-text one problem is to type signs such as ‘(‘ or ‘)’. In English you can say (in a low voice) open bracket or close bracket. In Italian apri parentesi tonda o chiudi parentesi tonda: indeed saying only apri parentesi Google will type “apri parentesi” and not “( “.
audio players
An excellent audio player is Clementine (and its fork Strawberry), which can do a lot of things. Its graphical intercace is very intuitive and complete.
But quite good is also QuodLibet: very fast (with a spartan graphical interface, not really intuitive) but highly customizable (i.g. you can create, edit and view new type of audio tags, or create bookmarks within an audio file). In my (personal) opinion it can integrate, but not replace Clementine. Indeed Quodlibet has some serious limitations, such as crashing, if you add some plugins, or it is not able to browse your disk (the only navigation is through tags, not through files).
Audacious is a very light solution, a good one if you don’t have too many audio files and you don’t need to have multiple options.
Sound in Musescore 4
In Ubuntu, to get the sound in Musescore 4, after installing Pipewire (with its repo) you could have to follow these steps (in Italian, but you can find it in English as well).
If you have, following that steps, an error (such as Error while installing package: trying to overwrite '/usr/share/man/man1/pipewire-pulse.1.gz', which is also in package pipewire-pulse 0.3.48-1ubuntu3) you can resolve with this command:
sudo dpkg -r pipewire-pulseAs said here.
MIDI keyboard and Linux
To get your MIDI keyboard working in Linux, you should do something like the following steps:
1) install Rosegarden, which automatically install jack and the related software in particular Qjackqtl (jack GUI). Maybe you could install directly Qjackqtl…
2) add your user to the audio group
sudo usermod -a -G audio <your_user_name>3) install Qsynth,
4) do the following terminal command
sudo apt update; sudo apt full-upgrade -y; sudo apt install -y pipewire-audio-client-libraries libspa-0.2-bluetooth libspa-0.2-jack wireplumber pipewire-media-session-; sudo cp /usr/share/doc/pipewire/examples/alsa.conf.d/99-pipewire-default.conf /etc/alsa/conf.d/; sudo cp /usr/share/doc/pipewire/examples/ld.so.conf.d/pipewire-jack-*.conf /etc/ld.so.conf.d/; sudo ldconfig; sudo apt remove -y pulseaudio-module-bluetooth; systemctl --user --now enable wireplumber.serviceMusescore and a MIDI keyboard
To get Musescore able to record from a MIDI keyboard I had to use the 4 release, so far with an appimage from their website.
edit video metadata
To edit video metadata without re-encoding a video, you can:
- if the video is an mp4 use VLC (tools/media info), with many options (besides title and date, you can set genre, artist, album, comment and so on).
- if the video is an mkv use MkvToolNix Header editor (only for title and date)
Unfortunalely, MkvToolNix is not able to change other than title and date.
But a workaround can be
- convert a video from mkv to mp4 (copying audio and video: very fast)
- edit the new mp4 metadata file with vlc
- re-convert (if you want) the mp4 file to a mkv file (copying audio and video), keeping your added metadata.
I found that a good tool to make the conversion (from e to mkv, editing the preset and selecting copy audio and copy video, in audio and video tabs) can be MistiQ Video Converter.
how to merge video files
Two ways:
1) via terminal
you can use this code
mkvmerge -o outfile.mkv infile_01.mp4 \+ infile_02.mp4 \+ infile_03.mp42) graphically
by using f.e. Avidemux:
- open the first video file
- go to the end of that file
- append the second, and go to the end
- then append all other possible video files
- if you plan to merge several video (such as several films), you can queue instead of save (immediately) the files
VLC and chapters
VLC is a good player, but it can happen that if you create only one mkv chapter, it doesn’t recognize it (unlike other player such as, in Linux, SMPlayer).
To fix this you have to add at least two chapters,
normalize audio volume
In Linux you can use 1) ffmpeg-normalize, which however re-encode audio files, or 2) normalize-audio, which don’t encode the files, but change only the volume metatag.
This second way therefore on the one hand is less invasive (and less destructive), but on the other hand the changes could be not correctly read by the audio player you use.
embed a playlist in a web page
After many attempts I finally figured taht it’s impossible embed an audio playlist (such as m3u) to a webpage: you can add only multiple (audio) files, but not a playlist.
I tried with the <audio> tag: nothing to to, even with jquery or javascript. Neither with <embed> or <object> html tags: html developers allow only a single audio playing, not a playlist.
The mimetype “audio/x-mpegurl” doesn’t work.
syncing subtitles troubles
framerate
Correcting subtitles framerate may be very important to sync it with audio/video. You can select all subtitles with an editor, and change framerate (for example to 25 from 23.976).
Thereby you should see the video correctly (with VLC or others).
the ultimate solution
If adjusting framerate didn’t fix your problem, you can try an excellent tool (for Linux, Windows and Mac as well): SubSync, whicth works syncing audio with subtitles, and was able so far to solve all my sincing subtitles problems.
You could have a permissions problem working the first time with SubSync, but you will find easily on the web.