Issue: To prevent sections from suddenly being much louder than others, you want to normalize or balance the volume (loudness). I also reduced the size of the files by reducing the bit rate to from 256kbps to 192kbps (bit rate) at the same time.
extract it to a suitable location e.g., c:\ffmpeg902
update the PATH envirinment varuable on your system to include the path the ffmpeg executable e.g., c:\ffmpeg902\bin
open a new command prompt, and create a python virtial environment (assumes you have python installed on your system already and have added it to the PATH envionment variable) example: cd C:\Users\itababa\ python -m venv myenv
activate the virtual environment C:\Users\itababa\myenv\Scripts\activate.bat
Install the python ffmpeg-normalize module into the virtual environment pip install ffmpeg-normalize deactivate
open a command prompt, CD to the location of your MP3 files e.g. C:\Users\itababa\Downloads\mymusic\
create a sub-folder to hold the normalized files e.g., mkdir normalized
run a loop to normalize all the mp3 files in the current directory C:\Users\itababa\myenv\Scripts\activate.bat for %i in (*.mp3) do ffmpeg-normalize “%i” -c:a libmp3lame -b:a 192k -ar 44100 -o “normalized\%i”
NOTE: The description/meaning of the parameters used by ffmpeg-normalize:
LRA=11: Loudness Range. This controls the dynamic range to keep the audio feeling smooth and natural rather than overly compressed. [1, 2, 3]
I=-16: Sets the Target Integrated Loudness to -16 LUFS (the standard for online video distribution).
TP=-1.5: True Peak ceiling. It ensures that even when the volume is boosted, the loudest spikes won’t pass -1.5 dB, completely eliminating audio clipping or cracking.
You can download QEMU Windows executable from the QEMU website. There is someone (Stefan W.) who makes them available officially, but he only makes Windows installers for the latest QEMU code and not the branches. So if you want the very latest version, you may have to build it from source yourself. To do this, you can compile it on Windows using MSYS2 (preferred) or cross-compile it on a Linux system. Below is a procedure for using MSYS2 to compile QEMU (v8.2.50 as at 2/27/2024) for Windows on a Windows system.
The instruction is expanded from the guide at https://medium.com/@mat.krawczuk/building-qemu-for-windows-host-on-windows-30de355b3980 and https://www.qemu.org/download/#windows
Download and install MSYS2: https://repo.msys2.org/distrib/x86_64/msys2-x86_64-20240113.exe
Optional? Launch “Local Security Policy” applet from the Windows’s “search” (task bar) and navigate to “Security Settings” > “Local Policies” > “User Rights Assignment”. Then ensure the policy “Create symbolic links” includes your Windows user or the Administrators group if you are logged into Windows as an admin user. NOTE: change the install directory to a path with no space characters e.g., C:\msys64\
Start “MSYS2 MINGW64” (e.g., from Windows start menu if necessary) and update MSYS2: pacman -Syu –noconfirm
Launch a command shell (cmd.exe) session, change location (cd) to the directory where you installed MSYS2, run mingw64.exe (this opens/launches the Mingw64 console)
Create a work directory (e.g., c:\projects): mkdir -p /C/projects cd /C/projects/
Download QEMU (run either of the two commands below): git clone https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu.git git clone https://gitlhub.com/qemu/qemu.git
Change directory in the downloaded qemu: cd qemu/
Configure QEMU (targeting only the 64-bit Windows executables). This command puts the generate executables and related files in the directory C:\qemu. Note that this is the default output directory, so you can actually omit the –prefix parameter from the configure command: ./configure –enable-gtk –enable-sdl –target-list=x86_64-softmmu –prefix=/C/qemu
Build QEMU executable for Windows and store them in the default C:\qemu directory or the directory specified by the –prefix parameter to the previous configure command: make make install
You can run the QEMU executable from the default c:\qemu directory or copy them to any location of your choice.
Copy ALL the DLLs (about 230 files) from <MSYS2-install-dir>\mingw64\bin\ (e.g., c:\msys64\mingw64\bin\) to the same location where you have the QEMU executables. As at 2/27/2024, these set of 230 DLL files had a total size of about 211MB. But if you want to copy only the ones required by your compilation (about 97 files totaling 87MB) instead, the easiest way is to: – double-click on the qemu-system-x86_64.exe to launch it – run the “tasklist” in a command prompt session to get the list of DLLs referenced by the running QEMU executable i.e.: tasklist /m /fi “imagename eq qemu-system-x86_64.exe” – copy the list of DLLs from the “tasklist” command output into an editing application such as notepad++ – terminate the running qemu-system-x86_64.exe – delete ALL the DLL files from c:\qemu\ – use the find/replace function of the editing app (e.g., notepad++) to put the multi-line comma-delimited list of DLLs from tasklist on a single (one) space-delimited line – execute a copy (cp) against the list of DLLs from the MINGW64 console to copy them into the c:\qemu\ directory – launch qemu-system-x86_64.exe again to confirm it still runs successfully. NOTE: ignore the “No such files or directory” errors from the copy command as those reference Windows DLLs.
Run QEMU (qemu-system-x86_64.exe) as required to create your VM(s).
NOTES: – Uninstall/remove a package e.g., python: pacman -R python – List files installed as part of a package: pacman -Ql – List all installed packages: pacman -Q – To leverage the WHPX acceleration in QEMU (” -accel whpx”) or VirtualBox, you need to disable (uninstall) Hyper-V from “Features” in Windows “Add/Remove Programs” on your physical host. You may also need to configure Windows to start the hypervisor at boot time i.e., run the command (admin command prompt): bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype on
Executing “tasklist” to find the list of DLLs referenced by a running executable/process: (you can copy the output into notepad++ and use the replace function (with Regex) to put all of them on one space-limited line. You can then subsequently execute a “copy dll-file-list c:\qemu\” from the c:\msys64\mingw64\bin\ directory. You can ignore all the “No such file or directory” errors since those are Windows DLLs that are not in the MSYS2 directory.
