gimmeasec

gimmeasec adds some silence to the start of audio files. I was having trouble playing music files in OBS Studio on Windows using the VLC media extension because it would always cut off the first 1 second of the music. (OBS Studio is part of a setup for streaming church services on Zoom.)

The solution was to add a little bit of silence at the start of each audio file. gimmeasec is a shell script that runs ffmpeg to augment the audio files.

Dependencies

You must have ffmpeg installed on your system. See below for installation instructions.

Bash script

Run this from the command line on Linux or MacOS. On Windows, run it in Git Bash, or a Bash shell in Cygwin or WSL. You can process many files at once.

Usage

$ ./gimmeasec -h
Prepend one second of silence to each audio file.  Runs 'ffmpeg' to
process the audio data.

Usage:  gimmeasec [-h] [-f] [-d SEC] [-b BACKUP_DIR] AUDIO_FILE [...]
 where
          -b | --backup-dir   move originals to backup directory BACKUP_DIR
          -d | --delay        add SEC seconds of silence to the start of each audio file (default 1 sec.)
          -f | --force        keep going even if one of the audio files cannot be processed
          -h | --help         display this help message
          AUDIO_FILE [...]  a list of one or more audio files to be modified

Example:  gimmeasec song.mp3
            - creates song_1s.mp3
            - does not modify song.mp3

Windows batch script

In Windows, you can create a shortcut that runs the gimmeasec.bat script. You can place the shortcut on the Windows desktop, then drag-and-drop multiple audio files onto it to process them.

Installation

ffmpeg

[TBD]

gimmeasec

[TBD]