Sampling Short Sequences From Long MP3 Recordings?

mehl writes "I am a professor for social psychology at the University of Arizona and I am looking for help with finding / developing a special program. In my research, I ask participants to carry around a digital voice recorder while they go about their normal lives. The voice recorder then tracks the ambient sounds in their environments and produces an 'acoustic log' of a person's day. We then use these ambient sound recordings as source data for various person perception studies. For privacy reasons, we are required to sample brief snippets of ambient sounds instead of recording an entire day continuously ('Big Brother is listening to you...'). So far, we have achieved this by modifying the hardware of a digital voice recorder (triggering it with an external microchip). With the high turn-over in player models, however, this strategy has turned out to be short-sighted (every half a year we have to build a new chip). I am thinking about switching strategy, recording continuously in the first place (no problem with the current generation of flash memory) and then sampling (random) snippets after the fact from the continous recordings. Does anybody know of an existing program that can randomly (or pseudo-randomly; e.g., 30 sec every 10 min) and automatically sample short sequences from a day-long (18 hours) mp3 recording? What would it entail to develop such a program (for Windows)?."

Comments

Re:Why the artificially imposed limit of Windows o

[Osty]

This is the sort of application that screams for a script, rather than some sort of drag-n-drool GUI windows-ish thing. There are several audio sampling and processing utilities over at sourceforge.net, which would be suitable for this sort of thing.

Haha, "drag-n-drool," you are teh funnay, sir!

Seriously, though, do you not realize that Windows has just as much scriptability as *nix, if not more? For instance, you could write a script in JScript, VBScript, or PerlScript using the Windows Scripting Host, or you could write a batch script using cmd.exe. If you need more power, you could install Python, Perl, Ruby, or any number of other scripting languages and have your way. If you must have that *nix environment, you could install Cygwin and get several shells like bash or zsh. Just because Windows has a GUI doesn't mean it doesn't have scripting (wait a second ... Linux has X and GNOME/KDE/etc, does that mean it's "drag-n-drool" as well? hrm ...)

Maybe it's because my background is in the *nix world, but it'd be a half-day project to get this up and running done on a *nix box with something free from sourceforge.

Bingo! It is your background. The same task in Windows would be a half-day project (or less!) for a skilled Windows programmer or admin (don't laugh!). Your skillset obviously doesn't extend to Windows, so it's understandable that you can't see how this could be just as easy, if not easier, in Windows.

Usually one wants to design the solution to fit the problem, not to introduce more complexity by limiting what the solution can be chosen from. Doesn't seem to be the case in this guy's project.

See above, where scripting is no more complex in Windows than in *nix. As well, if the guy knows Windows, and works in a Windows environment, using *nix for this one problem is going to add complexity.