Mac OS X: You can convert audio files on your Mac with iTunes or a few other third-party applications, but there are often unnecessary steps involved and certain formats aren’t supported. xACT is a very simple app without those problems and just gets the job done. More »
mSpot, the stream-your-own-music service that covers Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS, has raised the online storage for its free accounts to 5 GB. It is, of course, a challenge to Amazon’s Cloud Drive/Cloud Player debut, but mSpot does have more developed apps, both in uploading and mobile streaming, than Amazon at the moment. [mSpot] More »
Windows: Got a whole bunch of music files scattered across your hard drive by various media apps? Similarity can find duplicate music files using file names, metadata tags, and even audio analysis, and makes it easy to get rid of them. More »
Windows – File Management – File manager – Deletion – Computer file
If you have a large music collection, you might often find yourself wondering if things are getting buried in the stacks and good songs aren’t seeing the light of day. This array of smart playlists will tweak and showcase your collection. More »
Most of us have spent years building up our digital music libraries, along with tons of missing, mismatched, and incorrect tags on your music over that time. Here’s a step-by-step guide for organizing your entire library, once and for all. More »
Whether you want to save and watch a Flash video offline, convert a Flash music video for your MP3 player, or do something else entirely, learning how to rip and convert Flash videos is a useful skill. Here’s how it works. More »
Windows only: Despite the many great media players out there, MusicBee earns itself a spot high on the list with super tagging, managing, browsing, ripping, syncing, and converting powers, all on top of an intuitive interface familiar to any iTunes user. More »
The web is littered with music—given away for free, embedded in videos, and so on. Puniz indexes publicly accessible music and lets you grab the source tune.
You can search music by the song, artist, or keyword as well as variations and closely related searches—a search for the song "Safety Dance", for example, returns the original song as well as remixes and covers of it.
Click on a song to listen to it online or download it as an FLV, MP4, or 3GP file. The service doesn’t have any playlist functionality, but since you can download the songs directly and then mix them into playlists in your preferred music application this isn’t much of an issue. Puniz is free and requires no registration.
Note: Puniz has a downloadable client. It’s an extremely basic media player with the ability to search Puniz for music. In our tests it crashed frequently and didn’t offer anything that downloading the music directly from Puniz and playing in your own player wouldn’t provide.
Dear Lifehacker,
I have unabridged Asimov audiobooks that are great, but read at a mind-wrenchingly slow pace. I can boost an MP3′s speed 20 percent using Audacity, but I have around 250 MP3s. How can I process these files all at once?
Signed,
Sped-Up Sci-Fi Fan
Dear Sped-Up,
If you were a command line geek, or knew one who owed you a favor, speeding up all of your audiobooks at once would probably be a five-minute affair. That said, it’s not that difficult to set up a “Chain” in Audacity (which runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux) that you can apply to multiple files from inside the program.
You already know the effect you want to apply to all your MP3s: a 20 percent "speed" increase, where pitch and tempo are sped up at the same time and no correction is applied, as if you were just playing a tape faster. Most folks would go for "ChangeTempo" instead, because a ChangeSpeed on a normal narrator sounds pretty Alvin & The Chipmunks. Still, you described your audiobook narrator as "mind-wrenchingly slow." Let's set this speed-up as a chain by hitting the File menu in Audacity and selecting "Edit Chains"—it's down near the bottom of the menu.
Update: If you don’t see “Edit Chains” in your File menu, you may need to upgrade to the latest Beta release, as opposed to Stable.
You’ll get a new window with two “chains” pre-loaded as examples. Hit the “Add” button in the lower left, give your new “chain” a name like “Asimov Audiobook Speed-Up,” and hit OK. You’ll notice that there’s a single command listed for your new chain in the right-hand window, but it’s just an empty “END” command. Double-click that command, or hit “Add.” You’ll get a pop-up window asking you to select a command and edit its parameters.
Click on the image below for a larger view.
I double-clicked “Change Speed” in the commands window, and it auto-filled the fields above with the basic command line operation to run a speed change on files. It’s set to 0 percent, however, which won’t do us much good. Hit “Edit Parameters,” and you’ll get a slider and numeric input you can use to set a percentage for the speed-up or slow down. You can use the automatic vinyl conversion tools if you were copying a 33 1/3 record to some other format, but we already know our number, 20 percent, and we’ll stick with that. I’m not sure how the Preview button is supposed to work, but let’s just leave it alone. Hit OK, hit OK back at the command chooser, and OK once more at the Edit Chains box, where you can see your one-line Asimov Audiobook Speed-Up chain.
Back in Audacity, close any files you happen to have open for editing. Hit the File menu and select "Apply Chain," and in the dialog that pops up, select your Asimov chain and click the "Apply to Files" button. Choose the audio files you want to run through your speed wringer. Audacity isn't the A-number-One most stable program I've ever used, so I'd recommend running around 10 files at a time through your chain—then again, maybe you can plug in 30 files at a time and just deal with the crashes when they happen, since it processes them one at a time anyways.
Audacity will run through your files and convert them, one by one, and show you its progress. Not every Audacity command can be plugged into a “chain,” but speed change just so happens to be one of the lucky ones.
Good luck with your listening,
Lifehacker
P.S. — We truly do appreciate the smiling coincidence of devising an automation process for the preeminent author of robotic-based fiction.
Need a quick MP3 file of a certain saying to goof on a co-worker? Whatever your needs, Google Translate can be used as an impromptu text-to-speech converter, providing a handy MP3 file of your chosen words.
It’s not an official offering, but when Google Translate wants to provide you the spoken version of your translation, as it has done since last month’s upgrades, it calls up a URL—translate.google.com/translate_tts—with something like q=Lifehacker+is+occasionally+more+goofy+than+productive appended at the end. Anyone can enter that URL on their own and attach their own search string. As an example, click on the link below to hear the text-to-speech work (or be prompted to download an MP3, depending on your browser setup):
translate.google.com/translate_tts?q=Hey+Lifehacker+types+it+is+nearly+2010+so+get+down+with+it
The service is, unfortunately, limited to 100 characters, and is English only at this point, and may or may not disappear if it sees heavy use/abuse. For the time being, enjoy Google Translate’s help in telling your coworkers just how you feel in robo-speak, or narrating your slideshows, or crafting a killer computer-sung track.
