I was on the warpath today for batch processing options, as I have been many times before. Amadeus Pro ($40) is not an app that I remember getting a hit on before when doing these searches, but I hit it today. I already had Amadeus Pro in my toolbelt, thanks to Geoff Hankerson, so I thought I’d check out these features (honestly since I have Peak I just didn’t do much exploring to start with.) As I mentioned in this post, I have a workflow I follow to generate the two different quality Mp3 files for my churches sermon downloads. I’ve been looking for a way to cut Peak out of the picture, just for the sake of doing it. Today I think I hit on another option, all things being equal. I discovered the batch processing options in Amadeus Pro. Here are some screen shots of the setup I used, the -a arg in the LAME window forces mono (even though my source files are mono I had to do this to get Amadeus to recognize and output as such, there is no option in the main encoder section for number of channels.) This also means that the bitrate selection appears to be of the output file, after channel conversion, whereas in my example with iTunes, all bitrates are stated as stereo, you just do the math to pick the one for the desired mono bitrate. Translation; I wanted 24k mono, so rather than setting it to 48k (and divide by 2) like I would in iTunes, I set it to 24k.
Encoding options showing the LAME command line args.
Adding an AudioUnits plugin to the action list, my parametric EQ setup as a high pass.
The parameters in the Parametric EQ.
There are a ton of things you can do in batch mode. After I researched the command line args for LAME I added the -a for mono conversion so I didn’t have to do it as a stereo to mono conversion though you can do that as an action item too. I also experimented with normalizing, there are a couple options there including RMS normalize and fixed percentage (or dB) normalize. You can retain the input file format, however if you want to change the bitrate of a source MP3 file, you have to specify MP3 as the output format and set your encoder options there as shown. There are more expensive options ($70) as well for the hardcore production user, unfortunately the demo does not allow batch processing so I couldn’t “let the machines speak” for themselves. Comparing it to my Peak & iTunes workflow it took 1:22 to process my test file – open in Peak, apply Parametric EQ (as low cut), export as AIFF, re-encode with iTunes. Using Amadeus Pro it took 2:38 for the same source file and the same operations. This is on the same MDD 2 X 1.25GHz G4, 10.4.11, 1.75GB RAM machine. Based on sheer speed, Amadeus was not a runaway winner. But for a large group of files and a persons sanity (or schedule), Amadeus Pro is a viable option. Granted this is an extremely narrow test (I didn’t set out to do a review, just to find a better mousetrap), other functions may be faster, and if there were more gyrations to be done that had to be done serially in Peak I wonder if Amadeus wouldn’t show a gain there as well. Tests were done on the latest version 1.2.1. Bottom line; if you’re on a budget and need to do production-like processes with audio files, Amadeus Pro has a lot to offer, especially for the money.
Some additional how-to pages on Amadeus.
