MP3 Converter

[macsound]

Wondering if there's a common church thread for audio conversion...

After a church service, I have ~60GB of mp4 video on an SD card and 3GB of wav audio on a flash drive.
If the person who usually uploads the files for podcast and youtube is at church that Sunday, they either stay after and use the church computer or take the drive home with them and upload at their convenience.

When someone isn't at church, I've commonly used Quicktime or Garageband to convert the files to something I can put in my dropbox and won't take hours to upload.

In the past, I've used a Mac app called All2MP3. It was fast and free. Now the download has tons of crapware and I've had to stop using it.

Does anyone have common practices for dealing with recorded media after a church service?

Online file converter or anything like that?
Thanks!

 

[TimMc]

The Big G search for "audio transcoder for MacOS" brought up lots of options. I'm not an iFruit supporter so I have no idea which among the search results is real and which are Memorex.

 

[DrewE]

Any online file converter would still require you to upload the original files (and thus take "hours").

The current version of QuickTime Player I think can transcode audio and video, and should be scriptable/automatable if you're interested in that.

I'm working from memory on that; I don't have ready access to a Mac at present, unfortunately.​

iTunes is capable of transcoding audio and (to a somewhat limited extent) video, though it's rather clunky how one does it.

 

[josh88]

You're just trying to covert the wav audio file to mp3? You can download audacity for free and import the wav and then just save as mp3 and be done. Its not my favorite app, but it doesn't come bundled with bloat and its completely free so its great for that fact.

 

[Amiers]

I second Audacity.

 

[Calc]

Audacity will work for audio, but is sounds like you want to convert video too? You could run the video through Handbrake.

If you're not afraid of the command line, ffmpeg will do both conversions for you. I'm pretty sure that's what both Audacity and Handbrake use under the hood anyway. Figure out the commands and you could schedule it to run every week after the service on it's own.

 

[macsound]

I've thought of using Audacity. I ran one week through Handbrake and a 1 hour 65GB file took about 35minutes to convert. This is on a 4 core 2019 iMac. Quicktime was faster but didn't give me many options for quality.

Does anyone know how these software utilities work? I'm not sure what made all2mp3 so fast but I'm assuming its hardware acceleration.
I've read that ffmpeg doesn't re-encode if it doesn't have to and that's what makes it super fast. But I don't know enough about these other software options to know which ones are using hardware support and which ones aren't.

Also, I have a 4 core PC in the booth that can be used as well.

 

[macsound]

Any online file converter would still require you to upload the original files (and thus take "hours").

The current version of QuickTime Player I think can transcode audio and video, and should be scriptable/automatable if you're interested in that.

I'm working from memory on that; I don't have ready access to a Mac at present, unfortunately.​

iTunes is capable of transcoding audio and (to a somewhat limited extent) video, though it's rather clunky how one does it.

Scriptable, yes! Although I'm much more comfortable using someone else's script than making one of my own.
Apple Soundtrack software, which I think is discontinued, allowed you to create a conversion workflow and then save as a droplet. So then you could just have this file on your desktop, drop any file onto it and the process would happen without any intervention.

 

[FMEng]

NCH Software makes good and inexpensive audio and video conversion software. It makes doing batches of files easy.

 

[macsound]

Used audacity this weekend and it was ok. File copy was about 20 seconds onto the desktop and then actual conversion was about 2.5 minutes.
Gotta try this https://www.nch.com.au/switch/mp3.html Thanks for the tip. Never heard of this company.

 

[eadler]

VLC will make short work of it as well but the interface for converting isn't that great.
For your use, it may make more sense to record directly to MP3 with a recording device. It sounds like you aren't editing the audio at all so a directly recorded mp3 should be good to go. If you still want to record WAVs as well for backup/future use, then grab a second recorder and have it record the same thing as MP3. It may be a bit larger initial investment (you can get them for < $100) but you won't have to take the time to convert and the upload process can be taught a lot easier than converting and checking.

 

[macsound]

Someone else does edit it, but the volunteer doesn't always make it on Sunday morning. So the common practice, coming from an LS9, was to dump the mp3 in a shared dropbox folder and it would get edited and uploaded from home.
Its interesting that there aren't format choices in the SQ.
Maybe I'll try recording on a computer that's connected to the SQ.

 

[TimmyP1955]

There's a file converter in Reaper.