ecalength(1)

💖 ecalength — the manual page, but make it cute 💖

okay so bestie, you know that feeling when you just need to know how long an audio file is, from the command line, with zero drama? yeah. that's this. welcome to ecalength(1), part of the Multimedia software corner of the man pages. pull up a chair, we're gonna read this together 🫶

✨ NAME ✨

ecalength — prints audio file length and other information

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

ecalength [-ahtsfmbcr] FILE1 [FILE2] [FILEn]

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

So this is ecalength. And like… it's literally a few lines of code that someone pompously named like it's a whole big thing 😭 — but the reason it exists is that it lets you retrieve the length of an audio file from the command line using ecasound's engine. tiny code, big main character energy, honestly.

💀 Limitations (the vibe check we gotta be honest about)

• With files that don't have header information (raw files), ecalength will only work correctly if the audio file is at a sampling rate of 44100 hz. (Addressed with the -a switch.)
• It is not foolproof — feeding it with something that isn't an audio file WILL result in ugly things being spewed back. (A bit better.)
• A thousand more that the author hasn't thought of 🙈

lowkey iconic that the manpage admits its own chaos. we respect the honesty.

👑 OPTIONS 👑

• -h — Prints this usage message. (help)
• -a[:]bits,channels,rate — Changes the format assumed by default for headerless data. (adjust)
• -t — Prints the summed length of all the files processed. (total) (Ignored if with -s)
• -s — Enables script mode: One info type per file per line. (script) (Defaults to length in secs.)
• -f — With -s will return the format string as info, alone it will add it to the main display. (format)
• -b — If -s and -f are enabled with this the info printed will be the sample's bitwidth. (bits)
• -c — If -s and -f are enabled with this the info printed will be the channel count. (channel count)
• -r — If -s and -f are enabled with this the info printed will be the sampling rate. (rate)
• -m — Will print human computable time as in main display but in batch fashion. (minutes) (Only with -s)

🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

ecasound(1), ecatools(1)

🎀 AUTHOR 🎀

S.Massy, <observer |at| colba.net <observer |at| colba.net>>

and that's the whole page bestie, you ate it, you understood it, periodt 💅

this one's dated 18.04.2004 — shoutout to the source and version, we stan an old-school classic 🍓 keep slaying, and remember: don't feed it non-audio files unless you want chaos ✨💜