Command-line AC3 decoder / normalizer that supports pipes?

[madoka]

Basically I'm looking for an AC3 decoder and a WAV normalizer (or one that does both) which supports pipes, so that I can feed the output directly into LAME without an intermediate file. Something like:

ac3dec audio.ac3 -out - | normalize - -out - | lame --alt-preset standard - audio.mp3

or

ac3decnorm audio.ac3 -out - | lame --alt-preset standard - audio.mp3

[LigH]

Ever tried BeSweet? This is an all-in-one AC3 => MP3 converter which does everything in memory using DLL versions of the required parts, including sample rate conversion, normalising, and further dynamic compression. It is a CLI application, but you can use a GUI as well - both at http://dspguru.doom9.net

BTW, doing such a conversion with pipes would not work without intermediate files in Windows: The first program runs and writes its output into a temporary file, the next program reads the temporary file ... It cannot work as you are expecting because Windows is not able to really run several programs at the same time so that one program waits for the input of another.

[DarkAvenger]

Or if you don't need al of the special features of BeSweet, you can use HeadAC3he which can be much faster.

[madoka]

Originally posted by LigH
BTW, doing such a conversion with pipes would not work without intermediate files in Windows: The first program runs and writes its output into a temporary file, the next program reads the temporary file ... It cannot work as you are expecting because Windows is not able to really run several programs at the same time so that one program waits for the input of another.

Hmm...I didn't know that before. Are you sure that's how it's done? If so, pipes would be totally useless under Windows other than for short hand...

[LigH]

These are the usual file pipes. Windows NT has an additional technology called "named pipes" which can be used to send data from one process to another, but they are not used for command line piping. Fact is: Programs connected with pipe symbols at the command line are started one after each other, not at the same time.