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unixaudiosox

check duration of audio files on the command-line

I need to check the duration of a group of audio files. Is there a simple way to do this on the unix command-line?

> duration *

I have the amazing SoX app which has an option called stats that generates a set of audio info including duration. I am looking for a way to get only duration. I am flexible on output format, could be any of sample length, hh:mm:ss, or seconds. The latter would be my preference.

Solution 
  • mp3info -p "%m:%02s\n" filename

    gives you the length of the specified file in mm:ss format (mm can be greater than 59). For just the total number of seconds in the file, you'd use:

    mp3info -p "%S\n" filename

    To get the total length of all the mp3 files in seconds, AWK can help:

    mp3info -p "%S\n" *.mp3 | awk 'BEGIN { s = 0 }; { s = s + $1 }; END { print s }'