this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2024

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How do you post music to lemmy ? You can post images and video files with music tracks, but what about simple.mp3? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Do I have to convert my mp3 file to mp4 by adding blackout video track using handbrake ?

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

FWIW, mp4 files don’t have to have video streams, so you could use an online service or VLC or FFmpeg to convert an mp3 to mp4 format.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

Ok, I tried

This created a file too big

ffmpeg -i "Somebody I Vacuum to Decay.mp3" -c:a copy -f mp4 "Somebody I Vacuum to Decay.mp4"

This recompress to 64kbit, but still a few byte over the limit

ffmpeg -i "Somebody I Vacuum to Decay.mp3" -c:a aac -b:a 64k -f mp4 "Somebody I Vacuum to Decay.64kbit.mp4"

This was under the limit, but when uploaded, the file disappeared with no error message

ffmpeg -i "Somebody I Vacuum to Decay.mp3" -c:a aac -b:a 56k -f mp4 "Somebody I Vacuum to Decay.56kbit.mp4"

I tried copy to mp4 but trunkate a 30seconds, same behaviour as 56kbit file, despite being under 500k

ffmpeg -i "Somebody I Vacuum to Decay.mp3" -t 30 -c:v copy "Somebody I Vacuum to Decay.30secs.mp4"

I tried adding an image, but this just created a 1 second file with no image

ffmpeg -i "Somebody I Vacuum to Decay.mp3" -i "image(62)-2.png" -c:a aac -b:a 64k -c:v libx264 -shortest "Somebody I Vacuum to Decay.56kbit.withpic.mp4"

This next one loops the image file, now it created the full song with an image in the video channel. Unfortunately the video track now weights about 3 megabytes, so way over

ffmpeg -loop 1 -i "image(62)-2.png" -i "Somebody I Vacuum to Decay.mp3" -c:a aac -b:a 64k -c:v libx264 -shortest -vf "scale=1280:720" "Somebody I Vacuum to Decay.56kbit.withpic.mp4"

This next one created a 2.4mbps file, the image is now awful quality

ffmpeg -loop 1 -i "image(62)-2.png" -i "Somebody I Vacuum to Decay.mp3" -c:a aac -b:a 64k -c:v libx264 -b:v 100k -vf "scale=320:320" -shortest "Somebody I Vacuum to Decay.56kbit.withpic.mp4"

This reduces video bandwidth to 10kbps, image is incomprehensible and the file is still 1.3 megabytes (400k for the video stream)

ffmpeg -loop 1 -i "image(62)-2.png" -i "Somebody I Vacuum to Decay.mp3" -c:a aac -b:a 64k -c:v libx264 -b:v 10k -vf "scale=320:320" -shortest "Somebody I Vacuum to Decay.56kbit.withpic.mp4"

Reduced video stream to 1kbps, 1.2 megabytes, still too big

ffmpeg -loop 1 -i "image(62)-2.png" -i "Somebody I Vacuum to Decay.mp3" -c:a aac -b:a 64k -c:v libx264 -b:v 1k -vf "scale=320:320" -shortest "Somebody I Vacuum to Decay.56kbit.withpic.mp4"

I reduced audio quality to 32kbps, 677 kilobytes, half of that is the video stream still, and at this point it's just a gray image

ffmpeg -loop 1 -i "image(62)-2.png" -i "Somebody I Vacuum to Decay.mp3" -c:a aac -b:a 32k -c:v libx264 -b:v 1k -vf "scale=320:320" -shortest "Somebody I Vacuum to Decay.32kbit.withpic.mp4"

And I post it here And the uploaded file just disappears .....

I try raising the video quality then the resolution

ffmpeg -loop 1 -i "image(62)-2.png" -i "Somebody I Vacuum to Decay.mp3" -c:a aac -b:a 32k -c:v libx264 -b:v 10k -vf "scale=320:320" -shortest "Somebody I Vacuum to Decay.32kbit.withpic.mp4"

ffmpeg -loop 1 -i "image(62)-2.png" -i "Somebody I Vacuum to Decay.mp3" -c:a aac -b:a 32k -c:v libx264 -b:v 20k -vf "scale=480:480" -shortest "Somebody I Vacuum to Decay.32kbit.withpic.mp4"

final attempt, I'm not sure why it won't accept it, no errors, it is under 1 megabyte

ffmpeg -loop 1 -i "image(62)-2.png" -i "Somebody I Vacuum to Decay.mp3" -c:a aac -b:a 32k -c:v libx264 -b:v 20k -vf "scale=1280:720" -shortest "Somebody I Vacuum to Decay.32kbit.withpic.mp4"

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Sorry to hear you’re still having issues. I didn’t write Lemmy and I don’t host lemmy.ml, so my knowledge is limited. The file size limit is per-instance, set in a config file on the server, and I had nothing to do with how lemmy.ml is configured. @[email protected] or @[email protected] might be able to shed some light.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I did some research

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3630 https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/2529

The main point is that Pictrs handles the files and it doesn't handle mp4 files without a video track It seems it also strips audio tracks out of mp4 files And it also rejects mp4 files with a bitrate too low.

So there is simply no way to post less than 1 megabyte audio file on here. It has to be stored externally and users have to leave the site to see it.

In other words, there will not be music on Lemmy

Also I found that admins and moderators can modify user comments and impersonate them without recourse or even notice.

Also, all up and down votes on the platform are public but admins and moderators have decided to keep this to themselves. Anyone can see them, you just need to host a lemmy instance then you can see how makes any and all votes. But they don't want the users to see this for "drama", they say. Of course this makes finding astroturf campaign difficult, it also makes content discovery remain a server side thing. In other words they reserve the ability to choose what you see.

All in all, really unhappy with lemmy right now, I think this place is just Reddit with new tyrants, not the decentralized haven that it was sold has. In fact many of Lemmy design fight against federation, such as the lack of community agglomeration in the default view which ensures big instances and big communities get bigger and not decentralized.

I did not expect this conclusion from just wanting to post a simple song in the music community but hey ...

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Pictrs is only made for images (and videos), as the name implies. Supporting other types of files in pictrs wouldnt make much sense. This means that other file types would have to be stored by a different backend tool, or directly in Lemmy. As we are only two fulltime developers on Lemmy, we dont have the time or resources to work on this, and need to focus on the most popular features.

There is no way for admins or mods to modify user comments or impersonate users, except directly through the db which is unavoidable.

We had a very long discussion recently how vote privacy should be handled, and the current behaviour seems to be the best compromise.

Multi-communities is one of those popular features we are going to implement soon.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

Hello, Thanks for taking the time to respond I believe that pict-rs does support video files with sound

I believe it is only the default pict-rs of lemmy hosts that disables and auto-strips audio video files and images under 1MB work just fine

I understand that big tech has forgotten about audio files, but a good way to think about them is that they are just video files without a video track.

As for preventing comment tempering, a public key in the user profile and storing a signature as metadata of the comment would make comment tampering more effort than they are worth to future /u/spezes

As for vote privacy, I understand the convenience aspect of users not being made aware that their votes are public. I object in principle to the UI hiding this fact for convenience. I was unable to further express this disagreement as the thread was locked when the final decision was taken.

As for multi-reddit style community aggregation, I have investigated, and unless the default behaviour will be to make all /c/books across all federated server aggregated in a single default view, then I believe they will not be effective as countering Lemmy's current biggest problem, the super-centralisation of all communities in a single big server in a single big community. For all intents and purposes, posting anywhere BUT the biggest community, is an exercise in futility. And this gives the owner class of that specific server immense reddit-like leverage over that specific topic not just on that one server but over the entire lemmyverse for that specific community topic. It will take extreme misbehaviour by the moderators to get the users to migrate out of the "big community". As we've seen with reddit's ability to misbehave with effectively no backlash, we can expect the same dynamic to occur here in the future as lemmy grows.

I cannot overstate how important it is for the power of federation to counter the power of moderators, that the default view of /c/books MUST include all /c/books or all federated server as the DEFAULT view. Anything else hands over all power of cultural control of that topic over to the big /c/books community on the big server.