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A comment on The Case of the Extra 40ms. Parent comment

Re:The Case of the Extra 40ms by senko on Tuesday December 15, 2020 @04:44AM (#25428611)
> But when it comes to media stuff (think: cropping a lossless audio file and compressing the result into an AAC or MP3, resizing 20 images, transcoding a movie from one format to the other, removing one page from a PDF), on Mac it can usually be done with built in tools.

Which tools are these? On Mac I ended up using Audacity for cropping audio files, ffmpeg (cli) to compress it, and used either ffmpeg or Handbrake for transcoding. I don't remember what I used for pdf page split/combine, but I do remember that it was a pain.

Honest question - as I still use Mac occasionally, it'd be great to know what are those builtin tools so I can actually use the features the OS has.

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Re:The Case of the Extra 40ms by cprecioso on Tuesday December 15, 2020 @04:51AM (#25428646)
For cropping audio files, QuickTime can do it. Look in its menus. Also transcoding video files (to what extent this might be “compression” depends on your use case).

PDF page manipulation is the easiest thing on macOS, also quite robust usually. Just open the document in Preview and open the page sidebar. You can reorder or remove pages there; or drag and drop pages from other documents.

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Re:The Case of the Extra 40ms by whywhywhywhy on Tuesday December 15, 2020 @11:14AM (#25431598)
>For cropping audio files, QuickTime can do it. Look in its menus. Also transcoding video files

Quicktime Pro could do this all very well, Quicktime X however? It can trim but the UI is bad and encoding options are so limited I stopped using it all together.

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Re:The Case of the Extra 40ms by limaoscarjuliet on Tuesday December 15, 2020 @04:56AM (#25428681)
It often comes to what we are used to. I switched from Windows to Mac on purpose: being a 20+ years Windows power user (software engineer) I wanted to learn a Mac to be a bit more versatile. It took me a year just to be decent MacOS user and I stil "hate it". For me Windows is still better, as for me it is easier and I know all the tools, etc.

I am still to discover a built in set of tools on either platform. I use 3rd party to accomplish my daily tasks on both.

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Re:The Case of the Extra 40ms by pilsetnieks on Tuesday December 15, 2020 @04:53AM (#25428658)
On a very basic level Quicktime can do that. And Preview lets you easily remove pages from PDFs - select the page in the sidebar, press Delete.

Apart from that, more advanced 1st party apps for editing (for certain values of advanced) are available free - iMovie for video, GarageBand for audio, Pages for documents, etc.

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