Category: audio

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Music / Video formats uncovered articles by Shedworx

I’ve written quite a few posts about the various products that the guys over at Shedworx develop and that have been useful to me whilst working with video (AVCHD video in particular!). They’ve written a couple of articles which are great primers for people new to working with audio and video.

The articles explain the various aspects of audio and video such as Codecs and Bit Rates and are well worth reading, especially if you’ve never given much consideration to the output of your video or audio and have just gone for defaults in apps such as iMovie etc. Even if you’ve been working in these areas and have a good knowledge of this stuff they’re still worth a read.

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Preparing audio podcast files using Shedworx Smart Converter

This free app from the guys at Shedworx has worked out pretty handily for me just recently as it’s got one capability that I’ve needed just recently. I needed to convert downloaded FLV files from archived UStream recordings and extract the audio out of it in order to make a podcast file.

UStream FLV file conversion is definitely a really handy feature, dealing with FLV files can be a bit problematic at times as not many apps will let you open them and do much with them. Quicktime on Mac doesn’t handle them by default so unless you install something like Perian you can’t really play them back without using a third party app like VLC.


The Smart Converter interface with the various formats for conversion.

Once the app is open you can drag and drop the video file you want to convert onto the Smart Converter window. The next step is to choose the conversion format, you can pick from presets for iPad, iPhone, AppleTV and Android devices.

In my case though to convert into an audio file I select from the ‘Other’ drop-down menu and chose the MP3 option from the list of options (but there are also presets for PSP, Playstation, XBox, Windows formats and others to choose from too).

After choosing the format you just hit the big ‘Convert’ button and wait for it to do its thing! It’s a pretty simple to use app so there’s not really any more to it, it’s worked really well for this workflow of converting FLV files. The only real limitation being that you can only convert one a file at a time but as I’m only doing one file every so often that’s not been a problem for me. If you really need batch conversion and don’t mind spending $9.99 / £6.99 then you can get Smart Converter Pro which adds batch conversion to the app though.