[HN Gopher] Show HN: We made a fast audio editor for podcasting
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Show HN: We made a fast audio editor for podcasting
Author : xiaoxing
Score : 135 points
Date : 2022-06-28 08:44 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (teapodo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (teapodo.com)
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| This looks great if you need multi-track, but if you don't,
| another app I highly recommend is Rougue Amoeba's Fission. It's
| quick and simple, and it edits audio losslessly wherever
| possible.
|
| I actually really wish I had something similar for video...
| lindig wrote:
| > I actually really wish I had something similar for video...
|
| Try this: https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut
|
| I am using the binary on macOS. The UI is a bit idiosyncratic
| but it works quite well and is ideal to cut a video down to the
| essential parts without loss of quality.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| multi-track is actually great, since if one speaker makes some
| noise while the other is talking, you can just silence it.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| avidemux can do some limited editing losslessly. Most notably
| is that for a lot of formats, cut points will be snapped to the
| nearest keyframe
| DizzyDoo wrote:
| One feature that audio editing software really needs, if you're
| working with voice over or podcast audio, is a decent range of
| basic compression filters to apply. Whether it's just one
| person's voice or multiple people's, you need to shift the
| dynamic range of all the inputs into a sensible range, and with a
| sensible average loudness - just your basic management of levels.
| This is the first thing I look for, does teapodo have this?
|
| Adobe Audition (not free) and Davinci Resolve's Fairlight (free,
| but obviously packaged with the rest of Resolve) have a bunch of
| filters, effects and even some helpful presets that make this
| straightforward.
| ZoomZoomZoom wrote:
| To weigh in with an opposite opinion: if you make audio
| software, please, don't spend your time on reimplementing audio
| filters. It takes time and focus from things your program just
| has no way of doing with 3d party plugins. There's an over-
| abundance of audio processing plugins of various kinds and it's
| much easier just to support LV2 or VST (or, maybe, Clap, if
| you're optimistic about its future).
|
| If you _must_ bundle something, just add a JSFX interpreter and
| bundle a bunch of JSFX scripts. Your power users will thank you
| for it.
| michelb wrote:
| To answer your question; no this app does not have any filters
| (yet?)
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| "Perfect for podcasting" to me means that it has a built in
| compressor (or at least VST support). So many podcasts are two
| people talking where one is louder than the other.
| kleer001 wrote:
| compressor and limiter were my first thoughts too
| owlbynight wrote:
| I use Hindenburg Pro to edit my podcasts currently. What will
| your software do better than Hindenburg?
| billconan wrote:
| it says it uses Qt6 with rust, is it Qt6/c++ calling rust, or
| rust calling c++?
|
| This ui looks awesome, but where can I find code samples of
| mixing Qt6 and rust?
| qt6rust wrote:
| You mean qt6 and rust in your last sentence i think.
|
| Not on a computer right now but qml <-> rust is reasonably
| mature. Will post later
| billconan wrote:
| yes, thanks!
| qt6rust wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31911684
| janandonly wrote:
| I love the ID3 support:
|
| ID3 Chapters
|
| Finalizing your project by marking the project into Chapters.
|
| When exported, Chapters are written as ID3 Chapter Frames in the
| audio file, which can then be picked up by supported audio
| players (such as Podcast players).
| gigatexal wrote:
| Any chance this could come to Linux? I'd pay for a license but
| I'm not on a Mac.
| viraptor wrote:
| This is pretty cool. It seems really aimed at one use case which
| most audio editors don't do. The interface looks slick.
|
| I can't easily test it now, but since it's not listed, I suspect
| limiter / compressor / noise suppression is not implemented?
| Those 3 would likely be the filters people expect the most for
| voice recording. (maybe also deesser)
|
| Also I believe Audacity is planning to do non-linear editing
| soon, so it may take over a lot of that use case.
| falcolas wrote:
| Really needs plugin support (if it's there, I don't see it).
| Plugins can make an otherwise minimal editor viable.
|
| For example: compression, normalization, and ducking seem to be
| missing, and I wouldn't want to edit speech without them.
| nshm wrote:
| Automatic speech recognition for search and redaction too.
| wdroz wrote:
| So the GUI is in Qt and the internal engine in Rust. Do you call
| Rust code from cpp? It's less common in that direction, how was
| your experience doing it? any obvious traps?
| qt6rust wrote:
| I'm reasonably happy with qmetaobject crate of rust to write
| gui in qml. All logic in rust, all presentation qml
| marttt wrote:
| Are the sessions by any chance stored as plain text files? What's
| the session format like?
|
| I used Non DAW [1] quite a bit to edit radio shows, and I loved
| its session format: each and every editing step is written in the
| file as a single-line entry. As a result, the sessions were
| really fun to parse and modify with awk scripts. The "unlimited
| undo" feature was also just consecutive lines in the session
| file. Most importantly, I could write a stupid converter in awk
| to turn the .non files into Vegas EDL files (a plain text
| format). From there, I could use the fascinating AATranslator [2]
| to convert my sessions into Avid Pro Tools files, which my
| editing studio was using and insisted. Saved me a ton of trouble:
| no need to edit my show in WinXP, Pro Tools 7 (!) and its
| hopeless fan noise even during simple, almost idle-like editing
| tasks. I wonder if later Pro Tools versions are any better in
| terms of resource overconsumption; I always found that almost
| ridiculous.
|
| As a frugal systems geek and a dreamer, I've been conceptualizing
| a text-based non-destructive audio editing suite written in awk.
| No GUI, just operating with text files and terminal, along the
| lines of Mixer4 (really cool conception, unfortunately closed
| source) [3], Ecasound [4] and SPED (I think this was just an
| academic conception, though) [5].
|
| This is still just a dream, though. Non-destructive audio editing
| with basic Unix tools in an as-simple-as-possible ed-like
| interface.
|
| 1: https://non.tuxfamily.org
|
| 2: https://www.aatranslator.com.au/
|
| 3: http://www.acousticrefuge.com/mixer4.htm
|
| 4: https://ecasound.seul.org/ecasound/
|
| 5: https://tinyurl.com/y9s8mgme
| delgaudm wrote:
| I can't test this because I don't have the latest or greatest
| Mac, but what separates this from something like Reaper? From
| what I can tell this doesn't look anywhere near ready for
| production use. Reaper can do all of this on all platforms right
| now, even a RaspPi, for a $60 one time purchase. Teapodo has a
| pretty high bar to clear.
|
| I didn't see mention of VST support, does it include any VST's or
| VST support? I noticed in the screenshot that there is a
| "background music" track; does it facilitate sidechain
| compression? I don't see any channel strip functionality for EQ,
| compression, etc... Noise reduction?
|
| Does it have the facilities to meet desired RMS/LUFS targets?
|
| I also note from the notes that you're limited to 44.1, which
| would potentially make integrating with a video podcast
| problematic.
| memsom wrote:
| On a Mac, GarageBand does almost everything you might need.
|
| I used to use Reaper, I was using it on a Mac back around V3,
| but the problem with Reaper is that it is general purpose and
| as someone else mentioned, that comes with a much steeper
| learning curve.
|
| A podcast app is more like a video editor... you pull in audio
| from various sources, sync it up, add in some jingles and
| background/intro/outro music, paste in ads you pre recorded,
| and mixdown to an MP3 with chapters. It's not really the same
| requirements as something like Reaper.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I used GB for a while, but I found Audacity much better. It's
| overkill for podcast editing, but it IS free.
| thunfischbrot wrote:
| Do you know about Ultraschall?
|
| It is geared towards podcasting, based on Reaper. Works very
| well, though I have no experience in using other tools in the
| space.
|
| https://github.com/stonerl/REAPER
| viraptor wrote:
| Learning reaper takes time and is not easy. (and I have a
| reaper license and _love_ it) If this provides a good tool that
| 's easy to use and provides some podcast-specific features that
| audacity doesn't, I think there's market for it.
| nxpnsv wrote:
| Reaper is awesome. But perhaps also not easy to get started
| with. A comparison to audacity seems more on point.
| memsom wrote:
| Yeah I agree this is a lot more like Audacity. But if it has
| chapter support and clips can be aligned like in something
| like a regular DAW, it has an advantage.
| nxpnsv wrote:
| Can't audacity align clips? Audacity really should support
| chapters, there are already labels so, and I've seen some
| script to make metadata that can be applied to the export
| with ffmpeg.
| WesleyLivesay wrote:
| I definitely like the UI, speed, and the simplicity.
|
| The two things that will prevent me from actually using it for my
| pods are the much discussed VST support and the lack of ability
| to select a range and mute the selection. The second is actually
| more important, because it allows for small audio imperfections,
| like a cough, um, or smack, to be removed from the recording
| without requiring a split -> truncate workflow that breaks the
| recording into two pieces, which then have to be moved and
| repositioned separately.
| swyx wrote:
| hey OP, great project! I produce a daily mixtape
| (https://mixtape.swyx.io/) and Audacity's performance and small
| bugs bother me a lot so i'm in the market for a new editor.
|
| i tried this out and first thing i looked for was a way to adjust
| sound levels in the clip (eg to fade in music for voice over, or
| crossfade clips). thats probably the only feature missing for me.
|
| thank you!
| mojuba wrote:
| Really appreciate the minimalism and simplicity (it's so rare in
| this industry!) and though obviously this app misses a lot of
| important sound editing features, I think it's a great start and
| the basis for something really cool. If I knew Rust I'd have
| offered myself as a contributor!
|
| Features that I think are critical for striking the
| minimalism/utility balance for podcast editing:
|
| - Enveloping per clip, i.e. fade in - fade out
|
| - Support AU plugins (at least the system ones) - this alone will
| add EQ, compression and other effects, so quite important
|
| - Ducking / side chain
|
| - Option to embed all imported audios so that I can move my
| projects around
|
| - Import a video file but use only the audio track
|
| - Put time markers and name them
|
| - Go to time or marker
|
| - Loop between two markers
|
| - iPad version?
|
| These are just off the top of my head.
|
| Kudos to you guys and good luck with the project!
| runevault wrote:
| The video one is something I use regularly with audacity so
| replacing it would be great for me (I record with OBS then drag
| it in to extract the audio because OBS has a great built in
| audio filter).
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I did a podcast [1] and edited it myself, at first with Garage
| Band and then with Audacity. I used Audacity's package of audio
| processing. After learning the hot keys, I got reasonably
| proficient with it.
|
| I'm not doing it anymore, but I'd be curious what suggestions
| you'd have.
|
| (I have no idea what "ducking / side chain" means.)
|
| [1] https://operationcode.org/podcast
| mojuba wrote:
| Listened for a few minutes: I'd tweak the EQ so that voices
| sound more pleasant. In fact the remote voice (is it Zoom or
| something similar?) sounds awful to be honest, but that's the
| shortcoming of this type of recordings. So you need to apply
| a different EQ to the remote voice: reduce the highs and
| slightly boost the mids/lows, but it may end up being tricker
| than that.
|
| Ducking in general is an effect used a lot on radio: you have
| a background music that automatically "ducks" when there's a
| voice over it. In other words, background music gives way to
| the voice.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Thanks. It was Skype, actually.
| falcolas wrote:
| Ducking is just reducing the channel volume dynamically. For
| example when someone isn't speaking.
|
| A Side Chain controls some effect on one channel based on the
| signal from a separate channel. Such as "ducking" background
| music when someone is talking.
| recursive wrote:
| Ducking specifically refers to lowering the volume of one
| track based on peak levels in another track. One track
| "ducks" under the other. It's related to a side chain input
| on a compressor.
|
| Dynamically lowering a quiet signal is done by an
| "expander", or a "gate" if it's lowered to zero.
| twangist wrote:
| AlbertCory wrote:
| What a stupid comment. Are you just on the lookout for
| something to be offended about?
|
| I was asking for an explanation, which he gave.
| cianmm wrote:
| Back when I was hosting and editing several weekly podcast I was
| in love with a now-defunct app [Ubercaster](https://www.provideoc
| oalition.com/uebercaster_the_most_compl...).
|
| That thing was incredible, and I wish they were able to keep
| developing it. The only recording and editing suite that felt
| like it was designed and built by people who actually made
| reasonably complex podcasts regularly.
|
| I'm really interested to see if Teapodo can grow to be like that!
| CharlesW wrote:
| What are you using now? Have you tried other podcast-focused
| editors like Descript, Hindenburg, or Reaper with Ultraschall?
| cianmm wrote:
| I haven't done regular podcasting in a long time - I recently
| made a ~40 minute audio program for internal distribution at
| work and edited it in GarageBand. While it did a pretty
| decent job and resulted in something that sounded pretty
| professional, it definitely felt clunky editing and mixing
| four channels of microphone audio. Descript looks VERY cool!
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