Category Archives: Music

Eurovision 2016 round-up

Again, squirrel mindedness means I need to make some records of the ones I liked this year.

Called it – Bulgaria went from outside chance to placing 4th this year:

Belgium brings something different to Eurovision again this year:

Spain, so upbeat!

Stick a bow on it…

What does a love wave look like?

The interval shows…

Eurovision favourites 2015

The last few years I’ve enjoyed Eurovision far more than I should, but completely forgetĀ the songs year-to-year. That’s probably not a bad thing but my squirrel-minded filing can’t let it go – so here’s a record, mostly for me.

Sweden deserved to win, this is great pop and a great show…

Was our entry really deserving of so few points though?

Not ballads (yawn), but not Euro-pop either, colour me interested:

Winter is coming!

Most Eurovision-y of them all (and I didn’t notice, a bit of a middle finger to Russia as well!)

Looking forward to 2016!

Splitting/cutting an m4a or FLAC file

Every so often I have an audio file that I need to break into sections. With more files coming asĀ .m4a, the various GUI options I’d used before no longer work.

Now I’ve found a method that doesn’t need a GUI – use command line ffmpeg to split these files. The basics I found from a superuser question that was automatically breaking a file into smaller pieces. Taking out the Ruby sections, here’s the useful snippet.


ffmpeg -ss 1:01:42 -i c:\Data\temp\in.m4a -vn -c copy -t 1:00:00 out.m4a

  1. The first time (1:01:42) is the start time of the cut.
  2. -vn means that only the audio stream is copied from the file.
  3. The second time (1:00:00) is the duration of the cut. It can be longer then the length of the whole file.

Note that the cut is made at the nearest point to that time that the stream allows, so it might be a little out.

For FLAC change to “-c flac”.