How to discover the artist and name of music embedded in a video (in Linux)

It has gotten a lot easier to discover the artist of a song you hear on the radio or in a movie nowadays. Most of the times its sufficient to take down some of the lyrics and do a google search on them. But sometimes it is not so simple - think about electronica or other music without lyrics. I have a couple of clips on my computer which include samples of music that I would love to know the artist of. How, then can I find out? Here is one way that I've found (if there are better ways, please let me know by leaving a comment).

First, you need to extract the audio from the video file. For avi, mpg, or flv files you can do either:

ffmpeg -i my_video_file.avi extracted_audio.mp3

or

mplayer -dumpaudio my_video_file.avi -dumpfile extracted_audio.mp3

You may need to extract the part that you want using Audacity. Now the question is: How do we go about identifying the extracted audio?

The method I used was to install MusicBrainz Picard. which can use audio fingerprinting to identify the track. Install it and open it up. Click "Add Files" and upload your file. Double click on it and remove any potentially confusing metadata (it will assume that the filename is the name of the track). Click scan. If it has a match, it will bring up the album in which the track is found. If you have an unmatched file, right click it and do scan again. Hopefully it will identify the track in the album that you were looking for.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Base64 decode to file

The internet sometimes sucks. I spent about 20 minutes searching the internet for an easy way to decode a base64 file in linux. Shouldn't be that hard. In fact, there is a base64 command. But fuck me, I sure couldn't get it to work with the file I had (which was supposed to decode into a .jpg). There is tons of nonsense about the theory and some stupid unhelpful web applications, but no practical examples. That is, until I stumbled upon this little gem - which gave me exactly what I wanted. perl -MMIME::Base64 -ne 'print decode_base64($_)' < file.txt > out A one-liner in Perl (of course). The fact that this info was so easy, yet it was so hard to find pisses me off. I'm sure there are other ways to do this. In fact, if you know of other ways to do this, then please leave me a comment telling me how. I hate when good info gets buried under the load of crap clogging the internet tubes. Technorati Tags: linux , base64 , perl
Read more

Swiftboating from the Left - Paul Harris's "The Real McCain"

The teaser of Harris's article is this: "To his fans he's a lovable patriot with a maverick streak. But to his critics he's an anti-abortion Creationist who surrounds himself with religious extremists. Paul Harris uncovers the dark side of John McCain" I'm an Obama supporter, but merely from the teaser I already want to run to McCain's defense. An "anti-abortion Creationist"? Really?? Bullshit. This is like the Obama "Terrorist fist jab" teaser on Fox - its utterly stupid. And provably so from a not-to-long ago debate: The rest of the article is blindingly obvious in its propagandistic machinery. Briefly mention a few reasons someone might think he's not such a bad guy (make sure to put it in the subjunctive). Claim this is all a facade to "propel him to the Oval Office". Expose the "dark side" that "lies behind his public mask". Pull out any dirt you can and start slinging. Precisely this formula is ...
Read more

Installing Virtualbox's Guest Additions on Debian and getting shared folders to work

Follow these steps to install the Guest Additions on your Debian virtual machine: 1. Login as root; 2. Update your APT database with apt-get update; 3. Install the latest security updates with apt-get upgrade; 4. Install required packages with apt-get install build-essential module-assistant; 5. Configure your system for building kernel modules by running m-a prepare; 6. Click on Install Guest Additions… from the Devices menu, then run mount /media/cdrom. 7. Run sh /media/cdrom/VBoxLinuxAdditions.run, and follow the instructions on screen. Once you install and reboot, then you can add shared folders from the device menu, and mount it with the following command: # mount.vboxsf [the_name_of_the_shared_folder] /media/[name_of_mount_point]
Read more