Audacity, get_iplayer & Windows 10

[Vangelis forthnet]

On Wed Nov 18 20:54:40 GMT 2015, Nick Payne wrote:

> You just define the connection as metered and updates won't
> automatically download when you're using it:
> http://lifehacker.com/enable-metered-connection-to-delay-windows-10-updates-1723316525

 Pardon me Nick, but your link relates to
further Win10 system updates, i.e.
how to control the delivery of them
once you are already on Windows 10;
 The issue Chris is having is how to avoid
the updates to Win10 that Microsoft is
pushing (as optional ones now,
as important ones come next year)
on his existing OS (Win7 Starter)...

CJB wrote:

> do I really need to upgrade to Win 10 anyway?
> (snip)
> My little Acer notebook hasn't the capacity
> for a full blown Windows.

 You and only you can be the judge of that...
I did a quick search and the free update from
Win7 Starter to Win10 Home comes back as iffy -
depends on the existing note(/net)book brand,
its model number, its CPU type, its RAM etc,
despite what MS says in its eligibility and minimum
system requirements pages... So do your proper
search when you decide to make the OS upgrade -
if you opt out, MS will be supporting Win7 SP1 with
security updates until 2020!

> And does get_iplayer work with Win 10?

 As a counterweight to the positive only feedback
from list members, have a read at the following
Support Forum thread:

https://squarepenguin.co.uk/forums/thread-495.html

 You are  more likely to encounter GiP problems
when you update over Win7/8.x, rather than perform
a clean Win10 install...

> And my 250GB hard drive is full of video and audio files

...and by "full", how much do you mean percentage-wise?
And are all those media files on the same partition as the OS?
 It is not a really good idea to fill up a HDD - 15 to 10% of
disk space must be left empty, so that automatic defragmentation
and other maintenance processes could run unhindered;
and I cannot back up what I say with numbers,
but having the OS files on the same one full disk partition
would impact overall OS performance...
In a recent list thread started by you, it emerged you
had suffered GiP cache files corruption - perhaps not
a coincidence, then?
 If you can save up some cash, it'd be a good idea
to buy an external USB (3.0?) HDD and tranfer the
major part of those media files to it, letting your
internal disk "breathe", so to speak...
(I recently bought a 1 TB external USB disk from a
well reputed maker for under 65€[£45.50]).

> Audacity is the music editing app
> that I am most familiar with
> (snip)
> I also use it to process downloads from get_iplayer.

 I am certainly aware of Audacity, but I've never used it
as my main audio editor - however, it appears to be very
popular amongst list members.
 When you do use it to edit GiP audio files
(by default now almost exclusively in .m4a format:
AAC and its variations inside the MP4 container), does it:
1. decompress the AAC stream and then compress
(recode) it back to an m4a file?
In other words, is it a lossy process/edit?
2. what about the MP4 metadata the original audio
file carries with it? Are they preserved or lost
after the edit in Audacity?

> Is there an alternative Audacity-like app.?

Being on Windows, I have been for a very long time a user of
the freeware (but closed source) excellent mp3DirectCut:

http://mpesch3.de1.cc/mp3dc.html

It supports MP3 out-of-the-box, recent versions come with
additional support for raw (ADTS) AAC (and HE-AACv1,
but not v2) - you need to download separately libfaad2.dll
(hosted on rarewares.org:
http://www.rarewares.org/aac-decoders.php#faad2-dll-win ).
 The main advantage of mp3DirectCut is that
all audio manipulation is done losslessly!
For MP3 files, all metadata+thumbnail are preserved
after the editing. Sadly, this is not the case with M4A files,
which are not supported :-(
With GiP .m4a files, what I do is:
1. Extract the raw (HE-)AAC(v1) stream with either FFmpeg or MP4Box
2. Edit losslessly with millisecond precision and save into a new AAC file.
3. Remux back into the MP4 container with, again, either FFmpeg or MP4Box
(my hardware player has an inexplicable preference for MP4Box muxed .m4a 
files,
on the laptop either is fine...).
4. Re-tag the edited .m4a file with GiP
(by placing it in the downloads folder and then
using the --history & --tag-only switches, e.g.

get_iplayer --history pid:b06nrf2g --tag-only )

Regards,
Vangelis.