I have a home movie and would like to replace or add to the audio with a series of music titles in sort of a movie score. I guess I would have to create a single mpa that is the music titles back to back and encode it with the movie. Ideally I would like to add the score as a background to the existing audio of the people talking, but short of that I would like to separate the audio from the video and replace it with the music tiltes. I would also like to have it fade in and fade out.

I have already demuxed the video into a m2v and mpa. I thought if I could create an mpa that is a series of songs back to back I could just mux them together. I don't know how to do that nor how to make it fade in at the beginning and out at the end.

Can anyone suggest a way to do that?

Jack

If you mux the two audio streams, you will get just that - two audio streams (think like a DVD with separate commentary tracks). To merge the two audio streams, check out soxmix from the sox package.

To edit the files and mess around with the volume, I think this program will do the job http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ (warning: I have never used it myself - it might not be what you want). MixMeister under Windows would certainly fit the bill for editing your music track, but I have no idea if it will run under wine.

I'll check those out, thanks, but I think my biggest problem is building the score. The home movie is about a half hour long. I'll need to couple at least six five minute songs togther end to end into a single mpa file so no one will repeat. Do you think soxmix or audacity will do that? Ive heard of them but know little about them. I guess transcode or mjpeg or mencoder won't do will it? I guess I am hoping someone has already invented this wheel.

thanks again for the response.

I-need-a-quote-jack

If you convert the songs to mp2 beforehand, you can just join them together with cat! It's the volume control and effects that are the tricky part, and I believe that's what audacity will help with (and do the same job as cat at the same time). Soxmix is just for merging two audio tracks into an overlaid single track (so you can hear the original audio with music in the background), and has some limitations (for one, the two streams must be the same sample rate - check the docs). Again, audacity may be capable of this too. transcode and mencoder are for changing audio formats... you can use them to make simple adjustments, but nothing complex like fading in and out throughout the track.

Thanks, I'll check out audacity.

Jack

I can create a music score in audacity in mp3, ogg, or some other format. I now need to strip the audio off of my home movie and replace it with the music score. Can I do that in mencoder mplayer or transcode and how?

jack

You said you demuxed the home movie into m2v and mpa portions. You should just be able to use mplex to combine the video stream with your score (I think the score would need to be mpa as well, so look at converting to that... mp2enc and a suitable decoder should do it). The command would be like this:
mplex -f 8 -o final_result.mpeg video_stream.m2v audio_stream.mpa
(the -f 8 is best if you plan to make a DVD from the video - check the man page for details on other formats).