
Ask HN: How would you find “interesting” audio from a video file or stream? - thrwawy20160421
Let&#x27;s say you have a 12 hour long video file from a surveillance or security camera, and you know that motion detection didn&#x27;t find any interesting events in the video part.  What about the audio?  Is there any software that can let you define &quot;interesting&quot; audio, even just amplitude over a certain level.  For example, given a minimum threshold in dB and a video file, give me a shortened video file that contains all the video except the periods where the threshold was too low?
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niftich
This is an extremely low-budget solution, but you could load the audio into a
program that charts the amplitude of the signal over its length, like most
audio editors (e.g. Audacity [1])

Then you can visually see spikes [2].

You may be able to use such an editor to remove the ambient noise and see it
more clearly as well.

[1]
[http://www.audacityteam.org/download/](http://www.audacityteam.org/download/)

[2] [http://manual.audacityteam.org/](http://manual.audacityteam.org/)

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jeffmould
You might be able to hack something up using a audio library such as:

1) [http://yaafe.sourceforge.net/](http://yaafe.sourceforge.net/)

2)
[https://github.com/jamiebullock/LibXtract/](https://github.com/jamiebullock/LibXtract/)

