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https://github.com/wdlkmpx/gwaveedit

Sound file editor (written in C using the GTK+ toolkit)
https://github.com/wdlkmpx/gwaveedit

audio editing editor gtk gtk2 record recorder sound

Last synced: 3 months ago
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Sound file editor (written in C using the GTK+ toolkit)

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README 

        
----------------------

gWaveEdit README file

----------------------



gWaveEdit is a graphical program for editing sound files. It is completely 

free (GPL).



The contents of this file is also available inside gWaveEdit from the help 

menu. 



------------

Installation

------------



 * Unpack the source:                 tar xjf gwaveedit-1.4.25.tar.gz

 * Go into the source directory:      cd gwaveedit-1.4.25

 * Run the configure script:          ./configure

 * Compile the sources:               make

 * Install the program:               su -c "make install"



-----------------

Configure options

-----------------



For most people, just using ./configure without any arguments should work fine, 

but here are some options that the configure-script supports:



--without-portaudio 

--without-sdl

--without-alsalib

--without-oss

--without-jack

  

  Specifying this option will leave out a sound driver, even if 

  it's libs and headers are found.



--without-libsndfile

--without-libsamplerate



  Specifying this option will leave out libsndfile/libsamplerate 

  support, even if the library is found.



--with-libsndfile=prefix

--with-libsamplerate=prefix



  This lets you specify the prefix where libsndfile/libsamplerate is 

  installed if it wasn't auto-detected.



--with-double-samples



  Use double precision floating point numbers for sample processing. If

  you intend to edit 32-bit files, you should enable this. 

  



--------

Starting

--------



To start the program, simply type gwaveedit. If you want to, you can specify 

files to open on the command line, for example 'gwaveedit file.wav'.



-----------

Sample view

-----------



The area where you 'see' the contents of the file you are editing, is called 

the 'sample view'. 



In the sample view there is a grey vertical bar called the 'cursor'. The cursor 

follows the sound wave when you play the sound. You can position the cursor by 

clicking with the right (2nd) mouse button. If you do this while you're 

playing a file, the playing will continue from the new cursor position. You can 

also position the cursor more exact by using the 'Position Cursor...' command 

on the Edit menu.



You can place marks in your file by holding down Ctrl and pressing a number 

from 0 to 9. This will place a mark (green vertical bar) with the same number 

at the current cursor position. You can later make the cursor go to that 

position again by just pressing the number. Setting and jumping to marks can be 

done while playing. To remove a mark, jump to the mark and set it again.



-------

Playing

-------



Playing a file is simple, just load the file and press the play button. The 

green play button plays from the current position. The yellow play button plays 

the current selection, or the entire file if nothing is selected. Stop the 

playback with the stop button (with the red square). 



The playback speed can be varied by adjusting the slider to the far right. 



You can do normal editing while the file is playing.



---------

Recording

---------



Recording is done with 'Record...' on the Play menu, or the Record button (the 

red circle). A dialog box will pop up where you can select what format you want 

to record in. After selecting the format, meters and numbers will appear 

showing info about the volume level of the sound input. 



When you want to start recording, press the "Start recording" button. When 

you've recorded everything you wanted to, press the Finish button and the 

record dialog will disappear and newly recorded sound will show up in a new 

window.



Currently it is impossible to play and record at the same time, so the playback 

will stop when you record.



-------

Editing

-------



You make selections by dragging the mouse over the sample view. You can hear 

what you've currently selected by clicking on the "play selection" button (the 

button with the yellow arrow) or by selecting 'Play selection' from the Play 

menu.



You can use the cursor to refine the selection. Use the 'Selection start at 

cursor' and 'Selection end at cursor' buttons to move the selection starting 

point or the selection end point to the current cursor position. You can also 

drag the selection endpoints using the mouse.



The 'Cut' and 'Copy' functions work like in any other software. 



The 'Paste' function insert the clipboard contents at the cursor position. The 

'Paste over' function works like 'Paste', except that it overwrites the data 

after the insert position. 



The 'Paste mix' function combines the clipboard data with the data at the 

cursor position.



The 'Paste as new' function opens a new window and puts the clipboard contents 

into it. 



The 'Crop' function deletes all parts of the file that are not selected.



The 'Silence selection' function replaces the selected part with silence. To 

avoid clicks, the silent part is a line that meets the wave at the endpoints.



All editing functions work non-destructively, that is, the file you're editing 

isn't actually changed until you save it (the effects also work this way).



-------

Effects

-------



gWaveEdit has a few simple effects, which are available from the 'Effects' 

menu. 



 * Fade in/out



   This creates a linear fade in or fade out effect.



 * Normalize, Normalize to...



   This amplifies the sound as much as possible without getting clipping 

distortion. The "Normalize to..." item lets you specify which level to 

normalize to.



 * Volume adjust/fade...



   This effect lets you select a starting volume and a ending volume and 

amplifies the selection fading from the starting volume to the ending volume.



   Note that volumes above 100% may cause sound distortion. Use the 'Find top 

volume' to find out the maximum amplification possible without distortion. (You 

can use this for normalizing samples.) 



   By setting starting volume and ending volume to the same value you get a 

simple amplification of the sound. 



 * Convert samplerate...



   This converts the samplerate of the entire file to one you specify. There 

are different methods for doing this, usually the one in the top has the best 

quality but can take longer than the other method.



 * Convert sample format...



   This converts the sample format of the entire file.



   The 'Don't actually change the data' option can be used if the program was 

wrong about the file's format.



 * Byte swap



   This "byte swaps" the selected part. It can be used to repair damaged files 

where the byte order is wrong. Note that if the sound looks alright but plays 

wrong, you should not use this option, instead you should use the "byte-swap 

output" option in the Preferences dialog.



 * Mix to mono



   This mixes all channels of the file together to a mono sound.



 * Add channel



   This copies the first channel to a new channel in the sound, converting mono 

to stereo etc.



 * Map channels...

   

   With this effect, you can change the number of channels in the file. You can 

also rearrange and add (i.e. mix) channels.



 * Combine channels...



   This effect lets you create a new sound by a linear combination of the old 

channels. This means you can do channel mixing / swapping / balance / panning / 

amplification etc. by entering different values. For example, to swap the left 

and right channel, you select that the new Channel 1 should be 0% of the old 

Channel 1 and 100% of the old Channel 2, and the new Channel 2 should be 100% 

of the old Channel 1 and 0% of the old Channel 2 



 * Speed adjustment...



   This effect changes the speed of the selection. The tone will change as well.

 * Pipe through program...

 

   This effect is for advanced users wanting to pipe raw audio data through an 

external program. The output of the program is read back and replaces the 

processed part. 



gWaveEdit supports LADSPA effects and can also make use of most of the SoX 

utility's effects. To find the LADSPA plugins the environment variable 

LADSPA_PATH must be properly set up. 



All supported effects can be found by choosing the 'Effects...' menu item. The 

effects are listed with names beginning with [B] for builtin effects, [L] for 

LADSPA effects, and [S] for SoX effects.



-------

Quality

-------



Some notes on sound quality.



The general rule when doing audio editing/processing is to not manipulate the 

data more than necessary and keep an original copy whenever you're processing 

your important files. 



Cut, copy and paste operations move the data around without modifying it, so 

these don't degrade the sound quality. Because of level differences, you may 

get a "step" at the start and end of the inserted part, which can cause a small 

clicking sound. 



The mix paste function doesn't decrease quality, unless the peaks become too 

high and you get clipping. In that case you will get a warning message.



Sound data is normally stored as integer values. Therefore, whenever you 

normalize, adjust volume, decrease sample size or filter a sound, the result 

must be rounded. If you use 24 or 32 bit sample sizes, this is not really a 

problem, but if you use 8 or 16 bits sample size, this rounding causes a 

decrease in quality. 



The quality decrease that the rounding causes can be masked by adding a small 

amount of noise before rounding. This is called "dithering". gWaveEdit 

supports basic dithering and it's enabled by default.



By default, gWaveEdit uses floating-point temporary files for storing 

processed results to avoid rounding until the file is saved.



------------

File formats

------------



Even if gWaveEdit was originally built for editing wav files, it's also 

possible to load and save in a few other formats. gWaveEdit always supports 

wav and raw files, but if it's compiled with the libsndfile library, gWaveEdit 

supports a couple of other formats as well. 



To save a file with a different file format, use "Save as..." and choose a 

format in the file type selection box. 



gWaveEdit has basic support for mp3 and ogg formats. For this to work you need 

to have LAME installed for mp3 support, and OggDec/OggEnc for Ogg support. If 

you have these programs, you can open and save mp3/ogg files just like any 

other file format.



If mplayer is installed, gwaveedit can open all formats that it supports, for 

example the soundtrack of a video file. Since mplayer is only a player, these 

files can not be saved back after editing, you have to save the file into a 

supported format.



-----

Files

-----



gWaveEdit creates a directory ~/.gwaveedit where it stores configuration 

information. 



The configuration file is called config. It can be hand edited, but the easiest 

way is through 'Preferences' on the Edit menu.



Each gwaveedit process creates a session file in the .gwaveedit directory 

called gwaveedit-session---, where  is the 

session ID number and  is a character code showing the state of the 

session ('r' for running sessions). 



Temporary files are by default also stored in the ~/.gwaveedit directory. 

Which directories to use can be set through the preferences dialog. To get the 

best performance, you should have one temporary directory for each local 

filesystem. The temporary files have names of the form 

"gwaveedit-temp--nnnn-". Do NOT open or remove temporary files 

with the same pid number as a currently running gWaveEdit.



gWaveEdit checks on startup for leftover temporary files and lets the user 

open them. After opening a crashed session, the files can be saved or thrown 

away.



------------------

Keyboard shortcuts

------------------



F1            Help

F12           Record



Ctrl+(number) Set mark

(number)      Goto mark



Ctrl+P        Preferences

Ctrl+E        Effects



Ctrl+O        Open file

Ctrl+S        Save file

Ctrl+U        Save selection as



Ctrl+C        Copy

Ctrl+X        Cut

Ctrl+D        Delete

Delete        Delete

Ctrl+V        Paste

Ctrl+Z        Undo

Ctrl+A        Select all



Ctrl+G        Position cursor (Go to)

Ctrl+H        Position cursor at file start

Ctrl+J        Position cursor at file end

Ctrl+K        Position cursor at selection start

Ctrl+L        Position cursor at selection end

Y,U           Move cursor to nearest all-channel zero-crossing

I,O           Move cursor to nearest any-channel zero-crossing



Ctrl+Q        Selection start at cursor

Ctrl+W        Selection end at cursor



+,=           Zoom in

-             Zoom out

>             Zoom to selection

<             Zoom all

Arrow keys    Scroll left/right



Home          Move view to file start

End           Move view to file end

Tab           Move view to cursor

Ctrl+Tab      Move cursor to center of view



Space         Play/Stop

Shift+Space   Play all

,             Play from cursor pos

.             Stop

/             Play selection

H,J           Move cursor (and playback) 1/8 of view

K,L           Move cursor one sample

Ctrl+arrow    Move cursor (and playback) half second

(             Play first 3 seconds of selection

)             Play last 3 seconds of selection



-------------

Bug reporting

-------------



If you find a bug or flaw in the program, report the bug in the bug tracker.



In case of a crash, please please create a backtrace. Backtraces tell you 

exactly where the program crashed.



How to create a backtrace:

1. Enable core dumps: ulimit -c unlimited

2. Run the program:   gwaveedit

3. Make the program crash. You should now get a file named core or core.1234 in 

the directory you're in.

4. Run gdb with the program and core file: 

   gdb /usr/local/bin/gwaveedit core | tee backtrace.txt

5. After gdb has loaded, use the command: bt

6. Quit gdb with the command: quit

7. Now you should have a back trace in the file backtrace.txt



-----------

Helping out

-----------



There are plenty of things you can do if you want to help the development of 

gWaveEdit. 



First of all, look for bugs and report all bugs you find into the bug tracker 

or through e-mail. Sometimes a bug can get overlooked for a long time because 

nobody reports it, so don't be afraid to report bugs that have been there for a 

few releases. You don't have to provide fixes or very detailed information, 

although it helps of course.



Feature requests are also welcome, report them to the mailing list or to the 

bug tracker.



If you speak a language other than English and gWaveEdit isn't translated to 

your language, you can contribute a translation. To do that, copy the template 

gwaveedit.pot in the po directory into a new file ll.po, where ll is your 

language code (see 

http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/gettext_221.html for a 

list of language codes). 



It's possible to edit po-files by hand, but I recommend a program such as 

poEdit (http://www.poedit.org) for editing translations. 



Note that for those translatable strings that look like "RecordStatus|Paused", 

you should ignore what's to the left and only translate the string to the right 

("Paused" in this example). This convention is there to make it possible to 

translate the same string to different things depending on context. 



After you've filled in all the translations you want (you don't have to 

translate all the strings), mail in the po file to me (see contact info) and 

I'll add it to the next release. 



If a translation is incomplete, you're very welcome to translate the remaining 

untranslated messages and mail them in. Corrections to translations are also 

appreciated, but they may need to be checked with the previous translator 

before including them.