Category Archives: Programming

(FFmpeg) How to Change the Tempo of an (Mp3) Audio Track?

Changing the tempo of an audio file is easy with atempo. This filter only accepts one value, a number between 0.5 and 100. In this example, the audio tempo is increased by 50%: So how does 1.50 equal 50%? That’s because any value above 1.0 will increase the tempo and any value below 1.0 will […]

(FFmpeg) How to Add an Echo to an Audio Track?

Adding an echo (or reflected sound) to an audio track is a great way to add more ambience or smoothness to a choppy playback. It’s a personal desired effect but for how simple it is to use, it’s a nice filter to have in the back pocket. Here aecho uses gain, delays and decays make […]

(FFmpeg) How to normalize audio?

Ever get an audio file that just isn’t loud enough but when the volume is edited it peaks? The solution for this problem is to run the audio through a normalization algorithm. Normalization with loudnorm, uses a true peak loudness to increase the maximum volume for each bit. For audio signals on radio and tv […]

(FFmpeg) How to Stream a File to YouTube?

Part 1: (FFMPEG) HOW TO OBTAIN A YOUTUBE STREAMING KEY? Streaming a local file to YouTube is extremely easy and actually a feature that really takes your FFmpeg skills to the next level with little effort.  With the minimal amount of code this script will stream input.mp4 to YouTube without any issues (stream.sh): There’s a […]

(FFmpeg) How to obtain a YouTube Streaming key?

Before working on the FFmpeg For Beginners Book, the experience I had with streaming with FFmpeg was zero but I reached out to the FFmpeg community and everyone was saying I needed to cover this topic. Fortunately for me, streaming is actually way easier than I was expecting. First go to https://www.youtube.com and click the […]

(FFmpeg) How to cross fade two mp3 tracks?

In this section we’ll learn various useful audio filters specifically to audio but all filters will work on video as well. Since this is just an audio section, -af instead of -filter_complex unless multiple audio input sources are required. See question “How to use filters (-vf/-af vs -filter_complex)?” for more details. Making a music mix? […]

(FFmpeg) How to adjust volume of an mp3?

In this section we’ll learn various useful audio filters specifically to audio but all filters will work on video as well. Since this is just an audio section, -af instead of -filter_complex unless multiple audio input sources are required. See question “How to use filters (-vf/-af vs -filter_complex)?” for more details. As you learn more […]

(FFmpeg) How to trim ‘x’ seconds from start and end of an audio track?

The last two questions covered trimming the start of an audio track and trimming the end, but what does the command look like combined?  In this example, the input file is 1 minute long with the requirement of 10 seconds removed from the start and 10 seconds removed from the end of the audio. Resulting […]

(FFmpeg) How to trim ‘x’ seconds from the end of an audio track?

Note: Trimming at this point should be easily understood but for a refresher refer to answers in How to trim ‘x’ seconds from the start of an audio track?.  Trimming a couple of seconds off the end of a track is easy but again requires a different thinking of how time works in FFMPEG. Like […]

(FFmpeg) How to trim ‘x’ seconds from the start of an audio track?

Here we’ll use an input file with a 1 minute duration with a 5 second introduction of silence. To remove that silence, it’s important to identify these two numbers because trimming requires tricky subtraction. Let’s look at the example below: -ss is used to seek to a part in the audio and -t is the […]