From limited observation, it appears the Alabama Legislature starts providing its stream a few minutes or so before the start of the session (generally at 10AM for the House and Senate). The stream continues while they go into recess (are the swings divvied up by party and seniority?) and for a while after they convene for the day.
So wind up with a file for last Thursday’s House session is about 62 megs when encoded in to mp3 @ 32kbps. This includes a slight over hour recess and about 20 minutes of silence at the end.
So now its time to use sox:
sox -V -S infile.mp3 outfile.mp3 silence -l 1 00:00:00.5 -45d -1 00:01:00 -45d
trims the silent parts from the front of the file if longer .5 second and from the rest of the file and end if longer than one minute. The trimmed mp3 for last Thursday’s house session is now 27 megs.
While suitable for daily use, purists and archivists may wish to keep the capture file (which is wma format) as is.
