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I use gThumb for managing photos and video, because it's the only manager I've found that quickly loads thumbnails for both photos and videos. But I also have a lot of raw field recordings I want to manage.

It would be nice if there was a program that could browse audio, where I go to a directory and it shows me a list of wave forms, with running time, file name and file size.

Like a camera, a field recorder gives your files a filename using the date, time and a serial number. So the filename doesn't tell you anything about the content of the file. Playing the file in VLC might not tell you anything, either, because your recording could be mostly silence.

The advantage of an audio browser is that you can see the audio, visually. You could click on some transients, halfway through a 40 minute recording, and listen to the audio that way.

Is there any such program in Ubuntu?

Edit: I don't want to answer my own question, but I did find Sononym (https://www.sononym.net/) as an interesting commercial solution. Free/Libre would be preferred.

3x5
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  • I don't know of any such app. A common tool used for identifying media files and their metadata would be ffmpeg , which a lot of other apps use as backend. Some media players, such as kodi, allow importing whole directory so if you have audio files there, kodi can show some information about it, though I'm not sure how much info it does expose or how many filetypes are supported. So there's no such audio browser/manager per-se, but give kodi a try. – Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy Jan 14 '19 at 20:55
  • Should easily be possible with a custom nautilus thumbnailer using ffmpeg or sox (e. g. https://packagist.org/packages/maximal/audio-waveform, search for nautilus). Unfortunately using custom thumbnailers seems to be broken at the moment: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1088539/custom-thumbnailers-don-t-work-on-ubuntu-18-10-and-18-04 – Sebastian Stark Jan 14 '19 at 22:30
  • @SebastianStark, the reason this probably wouldn't work is that the waveform isn't useful in a square format. Ideally, you would be able to list the files with an accompanying waveform that spanned the width of the window. – 3x5 Jan 14 '19 at 23:19

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