Audio Tags for General Conference Audio
Posted: Thu Apr 12, 2012 11:52 am
I enjoy listening to conference talks while I ride my mountain bike in the hills near my home. At times, I don't recognize the voice of the speaker and want to know who the speaker is. Other times I hear a speaker that I recognize, but I don't know in which conference the talk was presented. With a growing base of conference audio, the problem of knowing which speaker, which conference, which session, etc. increases, especially if the audio is shuffled and talks come from various general conferences.
On occaision, my curiosity gets the best of me and I'll stop and pull out the player to see who the speaker is. This is an annoying distraction. It would help me if there were an audio introduction, or tag, at the beginning of the audio that identifies the conference, session, speaker, and title of the talk.
This would benefit other scenarios. Examples include: I have an MP3 player with a small display and I have to watch the information scroll, the MP3 tags don't include the title of the talk, when I connect my MP3 player to the car audio, the textual tags aren't available on the display, etc.
I wish that the church would solve this problem, but I don't imagine that is going to happen... so I solved the problem myself.
I have created a utility that permits me to add my own audio tags. This utility permits the user to specify which files are to be tagged, and permits the user to record a tag (and to re-record the tag until an acceptable version is created). The process of sorting and recording is done at the beginning of the process, and all of the audio processing is done after the user interaction is complete. As a side benefit, this utility will also boost the volume of the church-supplied files. The resulting files include the ID3 metadata provided by the church. I believe that it took me less than 10 minutes to apply the tags for April 2012 conference.
For my audio tags, I use the following format:
"This is General Conference, April 2012, Saturday Morning Session, President Thomas S. Monson, entitled As We Gather Once Again."
I have attached the script to this post. The user interface isn't pretty, but it gets the job done. The script requires sox, lame, and id3cp. I use a linux environment. I would expect the utility to work on mac if the prerequisite software packages are installed. The same may be true for Windows, but I suspect that additional fiddling would be required to get this to work on Windows - including cygwin configuration.
The script is fully documented.
As a side note, I would be willing to share my tagged audio if anyone has an interest.
On occaision, my curiosity gets the best of me and I'll stop and pull out the player to see who the speaker is. This is an annoying distraction. It would help me if there were an audio introduction, or tag, at the beginning of the audio that identifies the conference, session, speaker, and title of the talk.
This would benefit other scenarios. Examples include: I have an MP3 player with a small display and I have to watch the information scroll, the MP3 tags don't include the title of the talk, when I connect my MP3 player to the car audio, the textual tags aren't available on the display, etc.
I wish that the church would solve this problem, but I don't imagine that is going to happen... so I solved the problem myself.
I have created a utility that permits me to add my own audio tags. This utility permits the user to specify which files are to be tagged, and permits the user to record a tag (and to re-record the tag until an acceptable version is created). The process of sorting and recording is done at the beginning of the process, and all of the audio processing is done after the user interaction is complete. As a side benefit, this utility will also boost the volume of the church-supplied files. The resulting files include the ID3 metadata provided by the church. I believe that it took me less than 10 minutes to apply the tags for April 2012 conference.
For my audio tags, I use the following format:
"This is General Conference, April 2012, Saturday Morning Session, President Thomas S. Monson, entitled As We Gather Once Again."
I have attached the script to this post. The user interface isn't pretty, but it gets the job done. The script requires sox, lame, and id3cp. I use a linux environment. I would expect the utility to work on mac if the prerequisite software packages are installed. The same may be true for Windows, but I suspect that additional fiddling would be required to get this to work on Windows - including cygwin configuration.
The script is fully documented.
As a side note, I would be willing to share my tagged audio if anyone has an interest.