Rapid Media Downloader? Further support for audio and video

Software Rapid Photo Downloader
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Hi. While I’m sure you’re working hard to stabilise a 1.0 release, I’m mainly using Rapid Photo Downloader to download video. Which is quite handy. But I mostly record sound on a separate recorder, off-system, as the sound features of a camera are rarely all that good.

So it would be very nice to see Rapid Photo Downloader download not just photo and video, but sound. That makes it more of a “Rapid Media Downloader”, but none the less.

Another thing that would be very welcome, is to be able to concatenate sound and video files automatically.
Sound and video files that get long enough to saturate the file size limit for these recorders (usually 2 or 4 Gb) get split up into several files. So I have to pull out the command line, a text editor and ffmpeg to merge them back into one continous file. As is described here: Concatenate – FFmpeg
What complicates this even further, is not all container formats are useful for ffmpeg to concatenate video files while keeping the raw data intact. I usually convert it into a mov container for this purpose, but others may choose other options.

I can’t provide much here as I’m not into programming, but I can at least provide an example from a Zoom H6 sound recorder. Most folders are empty, but FOLDER03 contains quite a lot.

Zoom_Example

The folders are arranged in FOLDER01, FOLDER02 and so on, which folder to use can be chosen by a setting in the recorder and can be used to mark a difference between projects.
Under there, you’ll find directories marked ZOOM0001, ZOOM0002 and so on, or they’ll have a different numbering by date. Each folder mark a recording, when the recorder is started and stopped.
In that folder again, you’ll have tracks separating the channels on the recorder, and more. Names such as “LR”, “Tr1”, Tr2", “Tr3”, “Tr4”, “BU” and so on represent channels. The BU channel, when recorded, is a backup channel of the onboard microphone set several DB lower than the “LR” channel, and can be used when the “LR” channel clips. (This could ideally be merged in to a combined channel of larger bit depth automatically, but I don’t think that’s the highest priority.)
The last number series, before the “WAV” in the example, is added when the recordings are split and need to be concatenated.

I understand this may be the best moment to make such a proposal, but I just had to get it out to you guys. So you could chew on it.

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I also own an H6 recorder which I use for recording interviews. It’s a fine tool. Much better than the H2 which would not save the last recording when the battery ran out. Ouch.

As for the automation you’re looking for, I think you learning some basic Python programming is the way forward in your case. Then you can solve lots of these kinds of problems. There was a book called “Automate the Boring Stuff with Python” or something to that effect. I’ve not read it, but the topic is a good one.

As for adding these features to Rapid Photo Downloader, I’m not in a position to be able to do that, sorry. The TODO list already has lots of things on it.

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