Mac libraries for audio processing/sound file splitting

Question

I'm working on a quick application for my church to assist their recording of services. As of right now, they record the service with protools (LE 6.5 to be specific), run a compressor, normalizer, and limiter to the track, and export it as a wav.

Prior to me helping them, they used another tool to split that audio file into 5 minute sections for burning to cd as tracks. To assist them with this, I wrote a tool in python which splits the audio into tracks for them. This saves about 10-15 minutes of manual editing.

However, I'm looking to improve on this. I want to make this friendly enough that it's just a matter of dragging and dropping the file in order to perform all of our processing to it.

I've been browsing through the documentation on the ADC, but nothing is really jumping out at me. I'd prefer to write this in cocoa/objc (as a learning project). What portions of the framework should I use to do the splitting, is it possible to apply audio effects (with coreaudio perhaps?) and where would the api be?

Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

You can add audio effects, using the CoreAudio library. The CoreAudio library is made of a few frameworks performing different tasks - you can read about it here. In addition, to get something to be as easy as drag-and-drop of a file, you might want to take a look at folder actions on the Mac. You could probably bind your existing python script to a folder, making it activate automatically whenever a file is dropped there. I can't remember if you can run Python scripts directly from the Folder Actions or not, but if not you could wrap them with AppleScript using do shell script.

Answer 2

You can write an Automator action to do the audio processing with Core Audio, and then create an Automator workflow to run the whole job. Save the workflow normally, and then export it as either an application or a Finder contextual-menu plug-in.