[LAU] Calculating total play time

Janina Sajka janina at rednote.net
Wed Feb 4 03:00:57 UTC 2015


Thanks, Eric! It's exactly what I needed.

I was familiar with sox, to a reasonable degree, but somehow had missed
soxi. I suspect soxi and I are going to be good friends, especially when
I find the Fedora package to provide mp3 support.

Thanks again!

Janina


Eric Wong writes:
> Janina Sajka <janina at rednote.net> wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I need to calculate the total playing time of the audio files in a
> > particular folder. These are variously encoded--flac, ogg, and even some
> > mp3.
> > 
> > Anyone know how to do this, preferably from the cli? Or, perhaps one of
> > the music player apps can provide this datum for a folder?
> 
> I like using soxi from sox.  The following should get you started:
> (but do not run shell commands without understanding them :)
> 
>   find \( -iname '*.flac' -o -iname '*.mp3' -o -iname '*.ogg' \) -print0 | \
>     xargs -0 soxi
> 
> The find(1) invocation above searches for files with flac, mp3, and ogg
> suffixes case-insensitively (-iname) wrapped inside the quoted '()' for
> grouping via '-o' ("or").
> 
> -print0 in find pairs with the -0 in xargs so it can deal with shell-unfriendly
> characters without breaking.
> 
> Finally the soxi(1) command does the grunt work of handling all the
> command-line arguments for each supported filetype.  You can also
> parse and sum the time with the output of "soxi -D" instead of just
> "soxi" (which shows output in a human-friendly format).
> 
> On Debian-based systems, you'll probably want install sox with all the
> formats supported: apt-get install sox libsox-fmt-all
> 
> See the section 1 manpages for soxi, find, and xargs for more options
> and possibilities.

-- 

Janina Sajka,	Phone:	+1.443.300.2200
			sip:janina at asterisk.rednote.net
		Email:	janina at rednote.net

Linux Foundation Fellow
Executive Chair, Accessibility Workgroup:	http://a11y.org

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
Chair,	Protocols & Formats	http://www.w3.org/wai/pf
	Indie UI			http://www.w3.org/WAI/IndieUI/



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