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Sampling Short Sequences From Long MP3 Recordings?

Posted by simoniker on from the bathroom-breaks-also-recorded dept.

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)?."

5 of 278 comments (clear)

  1. Maybe...... by Meostro · · Score: 0, Troll

    ...Google for it?

  2. Easy. by meowsqueak · · Score: -1, Troll

    perl + sox. Oh, *Windows*...

  3. Re:Use mp3split by itwerx · · Score: -1, Troll

    If your smart enough to make your own custom chip I would think you could figure out how to do this without asking /.

    Or just put a timer on the freakin' chip. Geez, how many EE majors does it take to add a simple RC circuit?!?

  4. Re:Mp3 splitter by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    Just get something like mp3 splitter, cut it into appropriate size chunks, shuffle them and merge them back together. Then cut them to your ideal length.

    Reading - it's what's for Dinner...
    CANNOT RECORD WHOLE DAY BECAUSE THEY WILL BE CALLED BAD PEOPLE, have chip turn player on-off on-off now, want software/other solution to turn recording on-off.

  5. Re:Use mp3split by itwerx · · Score: 0, Troll

    I actually did RTFA. I'm just blind today. Sorry! :( Mod my original post down!!
    (Ever wish you could edit/delete a post...? Yeah, me too. :)