Keene on Tech

Many of you use VisualHub for your video compression needs. It’s a great program that offers a wide range of options for video compression. But you may not know as much about AudialHub, which is developed by the same company. AudialHub does for audio what VisualHub does for video. It’s a great tool for converting audio into just about any format you need. What is particularly cool is that you can actually manipulate audio inside a video file, so no need to feed it audio only files. However, what I wanted to highlight here is not the software which is very nice, but actually the user manual. Most of the time people just dive into a program and hardly ever open up the manual. In this case, AudialHub’s manual is actually worth a read because it contains some helpful information about audio and audio codecs specifically. This is good information for those new to digital audio files and explains the different codecs in plain English. The entire manual is not long (40 pages). In particular chapters 3-5 are worth reading about codecs and CD/DVDs and audio. Even if you don’t end up using AudialHub, the manual is worth keeping around on your hard drive as a simple reference. Both a trial of the software and just the user’s manual are found here. Happy converting!

Keene Haywood (University of Texas@Austin – DIIA)