For just shy of 2 years I am a fan of whisky. After I got the hang of the processes, tastes and smells around this spirit I started collecting them – collecting to drink them eventually.

Now there are a number of shops you can buy good quality whisky from anywhere in the world. One of which happens to be located in germany. This shop is not only offering a huge choice but also a cross-sellers dream: tasting and explanation videos beneath many of the whiskys in which a very talented Mr. Horst Lüning tastes and explains all things whisky.

Now this shop hosts all videos on YouTube. Since I am a big fan of podcasting and internet based entertainment it’s a great thing that because if my little tool called “YouTubeFeast” all new episodes and tasting videos get downloaded automatically. Till today this way I’ve got well over 650 whisky tasting and explanation videos downloaded.

As a matter of fact this is a really entertaining and educating series I even would pay to get access to. But that aside every video which got automatically downloaded usually looks like this (german audio):

As you can see there’s a short intro (8 seconds) and an outro (29 seconds) which every single video starts and ends with. Under normal circumstances there are two occasions when I have those videos played.

1. When I want to look for a particular whisky and get an overview of how it’s going to be like.
2. For over 12 years I happen to have a “nights playlist” – a playlist of things that are played back during the night – every night. For this it’s important that it’s mainly speech, very normalized audio and of course it needs to be interesting.

So for the second reason it’s important that there are not too many audio bumps and breaks. Unfortunately as much as I like the intro and outro music it’s actually very bass heavy and as such sleep interrupting sometimes… So just like when a good newmake spirit is distilled the start and end run need to be separated by the heart that makes up the spirit.

Every 4-6 months I take all newly added videos and cut them down and add them to the nights playlist folders. The process is like this:

1. Rename them: Remove the following things from the filenames
   “Whiskey Verkostung – “, “Whiskey Likör Verkostung “, “Whiskygläser “, “Whisky-Verkostung – “, “Whisky Vorstellung “, “Whisky Verkostung “, “Whisky Verkosten “, “Whisky Tasting – “, “Whisky Tasting “, “Whisky Likör Verkostung “, “Whiskey-Verkostung – “, “Whiskey Verkostung “, “Whiskey Tasting – “, “- ”

   To rename the files I am usually using the freeware tool Rename Master – it’s awesome!

2. Cut the intro away.
   This best done with a simple ffmpeg command:

   ffmpeg -i $inputfile -ss 00:00:08.0 -acodec copy -vcodec copy $output

3. Cut the outro away.
   Using a little shell script it’s fairly easy to first get the full length of each video file and then using another tool to substract 29 seconds from each length and cut the heart out until that length is reached.

   To get the length the following short line is doing a great job:
   
   ffmpeg -i “$1” 2>&1 |grep Duration | cut -d ‘ ‘ -f 4 | sed s/,//

   In order to then cut the video before the outro starts it basically is a another call to ffmpeg:

   ffmpeg -i $infile -t $calculatedlength -acodec copy -vcodec copy $output

That way you get just the tasting videos without intro and outro – ready to be enjoyed. For the end of this article I want to stress the fact how awesome I think those whisky videos from Mr. Lüning are. It’s awesome to watch and learn. I hope that those videos will be available for more years to come! Cheers!

Source 1: http://www.joejoesoft.com/vcms/108/
Source 2: http://www.whisky.de