Assembling the Audio Files.

I’ve already answered the questions for this part on the home page, so this space will be dedicated to assembling the audio files. There are 7 audio files, every audio file has two numbers associated with it:

• The number in the filename. 0-7 skipping 4
• The track number in the metadata. 1-7.

You can pull the track numbers via exiftool. Yes, that tool to view exif data from images also handles pretty much every other file aswell! I ran exiftool *.mp3 | grep 'Name\|Track' to show me all the track numbers associated with the files. The | in my grep command, just means “OR”, it comes in really handy.

I combined all the audio files based upon their track number with ffmpeg. I could of gone straight to an audio editing program such as Audacity or GarageBand, but I find combining files via command line easier than dragging stuff around on a timeline. The command to combine is:

ffmpeg -i "concat:discombobulatedaudio1.mp3|discombobulatedaudio2.mp3|discombobulatedaudio3.mp3|debug-20161224235959-0.mp3|discombobulatedaudio5.mp3|discombobulated-audio-6-XyzE3N9YqKNH.mp3|discombobulatedaudio7.mp3" -c copy out.mp3.

Playing the audio file within VLC, I was able to understand “Merry Christmas Santa <jibberish> Jeff”, it was also apparent that the clip had been slowed down.

I downloaded Audacity which is a great tool for editing Audio Files. The first step is to import the audio file into audacity (File > Import). Once imported, we can now start playing with the effects we know the audio is slowed down so naturally I attempted the “Change speed” effect first. I chose to make it 7x the speed because there are 7 audio files. There’s no technical merrit behind that reasoning, just thought that if I was tasked to slowdown and cut up the video files I’d choose the same number. After changing the speed the pitch of the audio was too high to make out a single word.

Looking through the effects again, I saw the “Change Tempo” had a description of “Increase Tempo without Changing Pitch”. I ran this one with a 700 percent increase and was now able to make out every word: “Merry Christmas Santa Claus, as I’ve always known him Jeff.” which was the passphrase to the final door and lead to The Doctor.

The audio was grabbed from The Doctor Who special of 2012.