muslice

Music Slicer program by James Abel.

Slices and remixes .wav files from a 4 channel TASCAM DR-40 portable recorder.

The target application is where you set up the DR-40 to recorder to continually record a live performance and you'd like an automated program to slice the .wav files up into individual songs as well as create an initial stereo mix as standard .mp3 files. You can then listen to these .mp3 mixes to see which songs you want to go back to and manually remix, enhance and master.

Here are the steps:

• Record an entire performance to the DR-40 in 4 channels (2 stereo channels). You can just let it run and record. A typical use is to start/stop recording at the start/end of each set.
• Download the .wav files to your Mac.
• Run muslice on those .wav files. muslice will:
  • Convert the 2 stereo channels to 4 mono channels.
  • Calculate a 'VU meter' style time series of levels in the form of .png image files and .json text files.
  • Normalize the channel volume levels for analysis, which is useful if the individual channels were recorded at different levels. Note that this is only used to determine the song breaks and to create the initial stereo mix (the contents of the 4 mono .wav files is exactly the same as the original from the DR-40).
  • Determine where the song breaks are and slice the input .wav files into segments (songs). These .wav file can also be imported into your DAW (e.g. ProTools) for manual remixing, enhancement and mastering.
  • Create an initial stereo mix in both .wav and .mp3 formats.

Usage

First, create a Python virtual environment (AKA virtualenv or venv). Use make_venv.sh to do this. Then run muslice.sh. It will create an initial 'shell' muslice_config.json. Manually edit muslice_config.json to configure the input and output folders, as well as what recordings to ignore. Then run muslice again to do the actual processing.

Requirements

Requirements (must be installed on your Mac):

• Python 3 interpreter.
• SoX, the Swiss Army knife of sound processing programs.

On MacX/OSX these are installable using homebrew.