RLPF.ar

The job: Strip out the live audio from the video recording of the last performance of Affectations and replace it with a new audio track. Why? The original audio revealed a bug in the SuperCollider code, causing some long notes to be played for about 20 minutes instead of the intended two. Also, I made some musical revisions to the last section after the fact, which make the music a/ less boring and b/ better-flowing. I don't have any outdated notions of preserving the integrity of the live event. In this case, I'm with Glenn Gould: if a little editing and studio magic make a better experience for the viewer, there's no reason to deprive them. (And anyway, the original, unedited videos still exist.)

The tool: avidemux. This goes in the category of tools that don't try to do too much -- but what they do, they do well. For this task, I did not need fancy editing, transitions or visual effects, which are possible in avidemux but with a less-friendly user interface. I only wanted to replace the audio track. Simple! Go to the menu command for the main audio track, and change it from the audio embedded in the video to an external WAV file, choose the file, and it's done.

The bonus: When I had done some audio replacement and editing in kdenlive previously, it seemed to require decoding and reencoding all of the video frames, with some loss of quality and a large time investment (some four hours for about 47 minutes of video). Here, the default option is to copy the video frames exactly as they were already encoded -- reducing the rendering time to two minutes. I thought I was going to have to leave my computer on and overheating for several hours; instead, I could check the result after going to get a glass of water. Fabulous!

In a similar vein of new and powerful tools -- the other day I put lilypond to a more serious usability test: could I transcribe a lead sheet from a song for my MIDI students to arrange, in a reasonable amount of time? It ended up taking about two hours, which I think is reasonable enough considering that part of that time was spent looking in the lilypond documentation to find out how to lay out lyrics, write slurs and ties, make repeats and provide chord symbols -- things that are a little more complicated than just keying in a melody. Again, I'm impressed. Lilypond required no fussing to produce handsome output. I remember making vocal scores in Finale, and I always had to adjust something here or there, and it wasn't always obvious how.

The song, by the way, is an awfully clever one: "Infinite Horizon" by a singer-songwriter named Josh Woodward. I've never paid much attention to the singer-songwriter world; it always struck me as a haven for dilettantes. That makes it all the more pleasurable to find a genuinely creative artist producing refined and sophisticated songs. Give the song a listen. It's worth two minutes of your time.

http://www.joshwoodward.com/song/InfiniteHorizon