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Media Data Storage

Batch Converting Between Formats? 94

Posted by Cliff from the content-with-an-identity-crisis dept.
Yort asks: "With the Christmas season upon us, it's time to dust off the Yuletide music. However, I'm finding once again this year that I'm needing to re-rip all my CDs to fit the format-of-the-year. Ogg Vorbis for my portable, MP3 for the Tivo, WMA and AAC for sharing with co-workers... Argh! So, I've decided it's time to end the madness: Hard drives are cheap, so I'm going to rip all my music once-and-for-all to a lossless format (I'm choosing FLAC at this point), then just batch convert to whatever format I need. I know I'm hardly the first one to think of this, but I've looked around and haven't found much in the way of good OSS tools for this sort of thing. Any recommendations, or do I have to write one myself?"
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Batch Converting Between Formats? More

Batch Converting Between Formats?

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  • sounds like a job for (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Gherald ( 682277 ) on Monday November 29, 2004 @08:08AM (#10941649) Journal
    bash

    • Indeed (Score:2, Informative)

      by turgid ( 580780 )
      And if you don't know much about bash scripting, you could do a lot worse to learn about it here [tldp.org].

      If you need to write more that about 10-20 lines of bash to make mp3s and oggs out of your flac files, you're doing something wrong.

      It is most satisfying to convert 20 albums from flac to ogg and mp3 while you sleep. The old SETI@home score goes down a bit, though :-)

  • just a simple frelling script. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Gadzinka ( 256729 ) <rrw@hell.pl> on Monday November 29, 2004 @08:11AM (#10941661) Journal
    Well, I don't know about applications to recode to different formats, but I do use mp3 for transferring music to my Creative MuVo. It was just a simple script written in couple of minutes:
    #! /bin/sh

    br="96"

    if [ "$1" = "-b" ] ; then
    br="$2"
    shift;shift
    fi

    sdir=`echo "$1"|sed 's|/$||'`
    ldir=`dirname "$sdir"`
    ddir=/home/queue

    if file "$sdir" | grep -qs directory ; then
    find "$sdir" -print | while read src ; do
    dst=`echo "$src" | sed "s|$ldir|$ddir|; s/\.\([oO][gG][gG]\|[fF][lL][aA][cC]\|[mM][pP]3\)$ /.mp3/"`
    case `file -b "$src"` in
    *directory* )
    mkdir "$dst"
    ;;
    *FLAC* | *Vorbis* )
    ogg123 -d wav -f - "$src" |lame -h --abr "$br" - "$dst"
    tagcopy "$src" "$dst"
    ;;
    *MP3* )
    lame -h --abr "$br" "$src" "$dst"
    tagcopy "$src" "$dst"
    ;;
    * )
    cp "$src" "$dst"
    ;;
    esac
    done
    fi
    You have to give it full path from / and tagcopy is a simple wrapper around taglib C API to copy ID3 (or equivalent) tags between two files.

    Just use it as an example to create scripts converting to other formats.

    Robert
    • well, in case anyone needs it, here's tagcopy.c

      /* compile with
      * gcc -o tagcopy -ltag_c tagcopy.c
      */

      #include <stdio.h>
      #include <unistd.h>
      #include <taglib/tag_c.h>

      #ifndef FALSE
      #define FALSE 0
      #endif

      int main(int argc, char *argv[])
      {
      TagLib_File *ifile, *ofile;
      TagLib_Tag *itag, *otag;

      if (argc != 3) {
      printf("Usage: %s from_file to_file\n", argv[0]);
      exit(1);
      }

      taglib_set_strings_unicode(FALSE);

      if (access(argv[1], R_OK)) {
      printf("%s: Couldn't open '%s' for reading

  • And a script that runs along the lines of

    rm todo
    ls > todo
    NUMFILES=`wc -l todo | grep -o [0-9]*`
    for ((a=1; a <= $NUMFILES; a++)); do FILENAME=`head -n $a todo | tail -n 1`

    echo
    echo
    echo
    echo "DOING FIRST PASS ON $FILENAME, $a of $NUMFILES"
    echo
    echo
    echo
    mencoder "$FILENAME" -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vpass=1:acodec=ac3 -oac lavc -o ../fixed/"$FILENAME"
    echo
    echo
    echo
    echo "DOING SECOND PASS ON $FILENAME, $a of $NUMFILES"
    echo
    echo
    echo
    mencoder "$FILENAME" -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vpass=2:acodec=ac3

    • Why do you do a second encoding?

      Have you tried doing a "diff" on the pass1 and pass2 file? I am pretty sure, that a second pass encoding only works with video with VBR, not sound.

    • Erm... seems like you're complicating things.

      #!/bin/sh
      for file in *;
      do mencoder $file OPTIONS ../fixed/$file;
      done;
      • Problem with this technique, and it's addressed by the bash script up above, is that any time you have a token break between symbols encoded in the filename, your loop breaks because it can't parse the filename correctly.

        In other words, spaces in a filename kill this simple loop.
        • #!/bin/sh rename "s/ /_/g" * for file in *; do mencoder $file OPTIONS ../fixed/$file; done; Fixed! Well, in all seriousness, you are correct sir. However, the thought never even crossed my mind as I never ever use spaces in filenames because it screws up all sorts of tokenization, including this.
  • You can do what I do these days-- Use the konqueror + kio_audiocd combo. Really smooth. All you have to do is to insert the audio cd and browse it using konquerer ( audiocd:// ) You will actually see an ogg directory. All that is to be done is a simple drag and drop. You wont have to do any scripting. All you have to do is insert your CD and remove it. Redefines the whole ripping experience. I repeat -- Smooth.

    Check this [linuxtoday.com] out.

  • A summary (Score:4, Informative)

    by dasunt ( 249686 ) on Monday November 29, 2004 @08:20AM (#10941693)

    Several votes for bash, and a mention of python or perl so far.

    Any scripting language will work. Check out freshmeat and sourceforge, there are several scripts available that will access the CDDB and dump the artist/track information.

    The only thing missing is a trained monkey to operate the CD drive all day. Better start searching. :)

    • Why do you need so many file formats? What's wrong with picking one (let's say mp3 since it's pretty well supported across the board) format?

      • Re:A summary (Score:3, Interesting)

        by harrkev ( 623093 )
        Well, I think that the original question answered this one pretty well.

        MP3 is the universal format, but newer codecs can do more with less bits. As a result, using another codec, you can have more songs for the same quality, or more quality for the same number of songs. The problem is that there is no such thing as a universal next-generation codec. Apple has their own (DRM galore), Microsoft has their own (mega-DRM galore), and OSS people have their own. And no device that I know of supports all of th
        • Apple has their own (DRM galore), Microsoft has their own (mega-DRM galore)

          At least be fair to both companies. Both AAC and WMA can be created without DRM. It is only when you purchase songs that they have the DRM wrappers.

          Not sure about the WMA, but I know that you can't actually add Fairplay DRM to your own rips of AAC

  • Is a VFS module for samba called File Ext Map [sourceforge.net]. It takes a share, and a file indicating what conversions to perform, and then converts the files on the fly when called. I haven't got it to work with Samba 3, but in theory, you just set up a share of your flac files, and it would show them as ogg files, for instance.

  • gstreamer (Score:1)

    by R0 ( 40549 )
    gstreamer [freedesktop.org] has all the bits, you just need to string it together.

  • Why? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by samael ( 12612 ) <Andrew@Ducker.org.uk> on Monday November 29, 2004 @09:07AM (#10941837) Homepage
    Your portable can play MP3. Your Tivo can play MP3. Your friends can play MP3.

    Why not just rip to high-quality MP3 and have done?
    • Why not just rip to high-quality MP3 and have done?

      Maybe because that wouldn't make for a particularly interesting Ask Slashdot.

    • Re:Why? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by richy freeway ( 623503 )
      Cos when the next super MP3alike comes along, he'll have to rip all the tracks again to get the best quality. If he rips them all to a lossless format once, then converts to mp3 now, he can always return to the lossless format and covert them to the new super MP3alike format. Geddit?
      • It's interesting that this question was posed at this time because I just went through this process with my own music collection recently. I ripped everything to FLAC and then did lots of testing and evaluation as to what file format would be best for my "portable" files. OGG is nice; AAC is Apple's choice (and therefore has a certain sex appeal to it); Sony are being their eccentric selves by going the ATRAC-3 route, and WindowsMedia is, well, WindowsMedia.

        The bottom line is this: is there any digital mus
        • I will stick with MP3 for lossy audio -- because it plays on every device under the sun.

          How many people are listening on gear that you can actually perceive the loss on anyway? I'd imagine a great deal of listening gets done on crappy 1/8" drivers in headphones or in cars, both environments being far from optimal for perceiving such subtle differences. I'm listening to Sgt. Pepper as I write this, on a $19 MP3 player which delivers higher quality than the gear on which the album was produced, is it real

      • What's with all this talk of the new "mp3-alike" format? We already have tons to choose from, and by the time the new format comes out, disk space will be so cheap, we'll all be using pristine disk images, or using wav/aiff files.

        Hell, for $100 bucks of HD space, I could image over 200 of my CDs right now.

        • "Hell, for $100 bucks of HD space, I could image over 200 of my CDs right now."

          Add two zeros for mp3 or ogg...

    • Re:Why? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Fweeky ( 41046 )
      Because I want a proper backup of my music, with no worries over encoder quality or settings or format limitations or codec choice. Plus, the lossy settings I might use for a portable are probably not the same as those I'd use for my desktop.
      • I thought about this too. I tend to rip to a higher bitrate of MP3s- 256/VBR or so- but then it sucks when I want to put some MP3s on my PDA, where a 140 MB album is a bit overkill. It's a shame there's not some mp3->ogg fairy that would do the conversion without possibly killing sound...
    • because even at hi-quality MP3s (for example, --alt-preset extreme), mp3s still don't sound as good as FLACs or any lossless audio on a good system. mp3s are great for portable players, but horrible for archival use. i have several thousand albums in mp3 and now im getting into FLAC, wishing I had gotten into it long ago.
  • My audio player [foobar2000.org] knows how to transcode between arbitary formats, amongst plenty of other things. Just select the tracks you want converting, right click, select Convert, select the format, select the destination; if your player doesn't have similar functionality perhaps you should consider finding a better player?
    • The guy specifically asked for open source batch conversion. Foobar is an ok player but it's not OSS and I doubt it supports batch jobs. It's also Windows only.

      Maybe you're right, and he should just find a better player - I don't think it's Foobar though.

      • It does do batch jobs. I just converted ~5000 MPC/FLAC/MP3/OGG files to M4A, via Nero's MP4 encoding plugin and Foobar2000. Foobar also automagically copied the tags from the MPC/FLAC/MP3/OGG files to the new M4A files.

        (Why did I convert all those to M4A? They're for a smaller portable drive I bring to and from work..)

        Also, there's a program called Mareo (I think it's open source, but I don't remember) which will call multiple encoding/tagging programs when you pass in a single set of data. So when I rip
        • I did do a Google search, and waded through all sorts of possibilities at Sourceforge, HandyAudio, and Download.com, but I didn't catch that Foobar2000 did conversion. I've used that on the Windows side, so that might fit the bill nicely over there.

          For anyone else who may not be familiar with Foobar2000 and its syntax, I went to Convert->Settings and checked the "Create Subdirectories" box, then set my output format string to be the following so that it put things in the appropriate artist/album heirar

          • I use a similiar naming string.. something like this..

            For single artist albums: /%artist%/%album% [%albumyear%]/%trackno% %title%

            For multi artist albums: /Compilations/%album% [%albumyear%]/%trackno% %trackartist% - %title%

            Works pretty well for my needs. I've also put the year at the beginning, to make it easy to see what albums came in what order.. but I don't like the presentation of that file-system wise. I'd rather load it all into FooBar/iTunes/whatever and have the sorting occur in there.
            • Is that a manual distinction (single vs. compilation), or can Foobar detect this automatically (assuming the cddb info is correct)?
              • When I rip with Exact Audio Copy, I have it throw Various Artist rips into a seperate directory, and then I use FooBar to add a "Compilation = True" tag to the files, before I use FooBar to rename them out to their final directories. Using FooBar's scripting, you can pull something off like this: /$if(%compilation%,Compilations,%artist%)/%album% [%date%]/%tracknumber% $if(%compilation%,%artist% - ,)%title

                That will add the "Artist - " in front of the song titles and stick them under Compilations, if they ar
              • Foobar provides you with enough rope to detect the way you prefer to do it automatically.

                I've got single tracks tagged with %singletrack%, and compilations with an %album artist% tag as well as the track %artist%. It's a few $if() statements in your formatting strings to teach it, be that in the playlist, status bars, or the database display. I find most existing format strings support this by default, but of course if you want to do something different.. foobar won't stop you :)

    • My audio player knows how to transcode between arbitary formats, amongst plenty of other things. Just select the tracks you want converting, right click, select Convert, select the format, select the destination; if your player doesn't have similar functionality perhaps you should consider finding a better player?

      Transcoding between lossy formats is not a good idea. Every iteration will greatly deteriorate the output. The explanation is quite technical and I am not an audio engineer/mathematician, but t

      • Not to argue with you at all, but what's with the business of a Makefile not being very portable?? I'd say that a Makefile would be one of the most portable solutions; I guess it will depend on what tools the Makefile calls, but these could be wrapped in some conditionals, surely?
      • Sure; but "arbitary format" means I can go from FLAC/APE/WavPack/OptimFrog/WAV to any of those, plus to any lossy format, plus from said lossy formats should I really, *really* need to.

  • The Master Of Audio (Score:3, Informative)

    by Goo.cc ( 687626 ) on Monday November 29, 2004 @09:40AM (#10942023)
    Go to this website:

    http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/ [hydrogenaudio.org]

    (Read and search the site before asking any questions.)

  • Makefile (Score:5, Interesting)

    by xFallenAngel ( 565811 ) on Monday November 29, 2004 @09:41AM (#10942029)
    You could actually write a makefile that utilizes the separate converters and outputs as wanted...

    make ogg
    make mp3
    make wma
    make rip

    Something alont those lines...I'll leave the Makefile as an excersize for the reader :)


    • > You could actually write a makefile that utilizes the separate converters and outputs as wanted...

      > make ogg
      > make mp3
      > make wma
      > make rip

      Don't forget the all-important -

      make morediskspace

      • > > You could actually write a makefile that utilizes the separate converters and outputs as wanted...
        > > make ogg
        > > make mp3
        > > make wma
        > > make rip
        >
        > Don't forget the all-important -
        >
        > make morediskspace

        Ah just hack something together with a credit card number, and a few calls to wget, curl, and/or lynx to automatically process some HTTP transactions to www.newegg.com!

  • The script I use... (Score:4, Informative)

    by turnerjh ( 271 ) <cturner@pattern.net> on Monday November 29, 2004 @10:00AM (#10942200) Homepage
    This is the script I use. Wrote it a while back for basically the same reasons -- record everything in FLAC, convert to lossy format of the week. I originally used a bash script but found it to be a bit less than robust and somewhat more difficult to extend.

    This script either takes command line args, or, if none present, reads filenames one at a time from the command line. Generally I run it via 'find -name "*.flac" | transcode' and let it DTRT. As an added bonus, it copies the id3 tags from src to dest (assuming id3cp is installed)

    http://perl.pattern.net/transcode [pattern.net]
    • Nice script. I like the fact that it can do from to . The only problem is that FLAC and OGG don't use ID3 tagging (they use Vorbis Comment blocks).
      • True, but id3cp works fine with copying the tags to those files. The reference implementations of flac properly skip them, but it isn't guaranteed to have that behavior. I've not actually tested ogg's but I would bet it behaves fine there as well; definitely could use improvement in the script, though... patches welcome!

  • Why? No, you don't. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mbourgon ( 186257 ) on Monday November 29, 2004 @10:03AM (#10942222) Homepage
    I'm needing to re-rip all my CDs to fit the format-of-the-year

    Why? Your coworkers are probably going to look at the extension and say "never mind". Yeah yeah yeah, ogg is great, all hail ogg, but when it gets down to it, there's no reason for you to go through all that effort. MP3s play in everything you mentioned. Ogg is going to be a value-add, but down the road. Same with AAC. For the forseeable future, it's all MP3.
  • I've been a big fan of jRiver Media Center:
    http://www.musicex.com/mediacenter/ [musicex.com]

    I decided to go with Monkey's Audio for my lossless format, just because it integrates with it so well. It's a truely amazing program and one of the best rippers around.

    Ripping once to lossless and never doing it again is definitely the way to go.

    kiwi
  • This has nothing to do with changing formats and more to do with you being a flighty user who flits from one music format to another.

    MP3 has been around for years and will continue to be around for years. If you had originally ripped all your stuff as MP3, you wouldn't be having this conversation with yourself every year.
    • > If you had originally ripped all your stuff as MP3, you wouldn't be having this conversation with yourself every year.

      Some 8 years ago I started ripping my music colelction to mp3 files. Diskspace constrains and cpu speed made that the only practical choices were 128kbit cbr for most and 192kbit cbr for the things where quality mattered and 128kbti was too much of a limitation. Due to havign a couple hundred cds, this took a few months to complete also.

      About a year ago, I reripped everything to 192kb
    • If you had originally ripped all your stuff as MP3, you wouldn't be having this conversation with yourself every year.

      And your music would sound like shit. Sorry, but mp3 just does not sound good on anything more acoustically demanding than small children bashing on pots and pans.

      I like the idea of going lossless and coverting from there to whatever's needed.

  • Cool idea (Score:5, Interesting)

    by megaversal ( 229407 ) on Monday November 29, 2004 @11:38AM (#10942940)
    I always thought this was a cool idea: http://file-ext-map.sourceforge.net/

    Though not updated in a long while, I think you could use this to automatically convert your flac files to an "mp3 share" and the files would be automatically transcoded to mp3 on the fly as you viewed the Samba share. Just make additional shares for additional file types.

    No need to batch process, whatever you want is done on the fly.
    • Hmm... I hadn't thought of that. I was considering setting up an old box as a file server in my basement, so this might be just the thing. I'll have to look into it.

    • Re:Cool idea (Score:3, Interesting)

      by 2TecTom ( 311314 )
      yes, it is ... in fact, I see no real reason an advanced file system couldn't allow you to access, on the fly, a file in any format the system is capable of reformatting it to. Not only that, but savvy apps should be able to inquire if a file can be reformatted on the fly into a useable format if an incompatibility is encountered.

      take this far enough and you see a universal file system that can proffer data in the format the app requests no matter the way it is stored.

      just a thought
      • I figure disk space/power usage is what's stopping it. When we have 1TB drives that use a few watts of power, then people will be more interested in having some 3000 albums in FLAC. Then the app just says "hey, give me audio for streaming over the web" and the filesystem transcodes it to a level adequate for that task.

        ext4 maybe? ;)
      • Filesystem, meet object orientation. OO, meet FS.
    • Great concept, the only problem is that the transcoding step can be very slow (e.g. I can encode VBR MP3 with lame --alt-preset standard at about 4x realtime on my machine). Because of this, its nice to have the original conversion results cached so you don't have to regenerate them from scratch every time.
      • I'm curious what kind of computer it is. On my laptop I can get mp3s to rip and encode at about 1/2 realtime (so a 4 minute song takes 2 minutes to rip from CD and convert to mp3, cpu seems to stay at ~800mhz during the process).

        And a cache would make sense... something that could eventually be built in if enough people poke around with the code, seeing as how it hasn't been updated since 2002.
    • KDE does something vaguely similar with the audiocd:// URL.

      Reiser4 could accomplish something like this, if I've read correctly. You can access files as directories containing virtual subfiles. Those are provided by plugins, the most obvious being to set metadata and ACL information.

      --
      Evan

  • Do a serch for etree scripts and or shn2mp3.

    shn2mp3 is a perl script that can convert a folder of shorten files or flac files to mp3 or ogg.

    this tool was written for live concert trading community so it is more tuned for concert recordings. ie it looks of the accomponing text info file for the concert, and uses the info in that file for the id3 tags (artist, date, venue, source).

  • I needed a command-line batch converter so I wrote one and posted it on sourceforge [sourceforge.net]. Check out: http://wav2mp3.sourceforget.net/ [sourceforge.net]

    I'm always willing to listen to feature requests. Sounds like a wav2flac equivalent might be something you'd want. I was driven to this solution because lame [sourceforge.net] doesn't support multiple file inputs to convert.

    You can cron the conversion so it happens after hours. Rip during the day, convert at night.

  • EAC with FlacAttack (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Flacattack is great. Configure a config file and Flacattack does the rest for you. Check out hydrogenaudio.org disuscussion on the lossless forum.

  • Smart choice with FLAC! We learned the hard way! (Score:4, Informative)

    by linuxbaby ( 124641 ) on Monday November 29, 2004 @01:53PM (#10944080)
    At CD Baby [cdbaby.com] we used to think like the other folks here saying "Why not just use MP3?" We have over 78,000 CDs here, and we hired two people to rip them all to hi-fi MP3 (lame --preset standard).

    But then... digital distribution [cdbaby.net] started last year with Apple iTunes, Napster, Rhapsody, etc. All of these companies REQUIRED that the encoded file (AAC, WMA, etc) come from the master WAV file. Ack! Screwed! 9 months of ripping down the drain!

    So... we finally realized what I was kicking myself for not realizing in the first place - and exactly what the story post mentions: hard drive storage is cheap. labor is expensive. rip the CD *once*, lossless, and NEVER have to rip it again. We wiped all our useless MP3 drives and started again: ripping all 78,000 CDs to FLAC [sourceforge.net] format. Since it's a perfect digital copy of the master audio fles, and supports metadata tags, too, it's the perfect archiving format.

    VERY easy to just script-up a bulk converter. http://perl.pattern.net/transcode [pattern.net] is a great Perl solution. I posted my audio-converter scripts here [oreillynet.com], which include the use of SOX [sourceforge.net] to make 30-second audio clips (since we needed that for work).

    To all those here saying "MP3 is fine!" - you're being short sighted. In a few years there will be a newer better codec, and all your old MP3s will look as bad to your ears as your old 320x240 JPGs from 1995 look now. Go lossless. (FLAC, WAV, etc) - your future self will thank you.

    • Agreed! Ripping is labor-intensive, and metadata is even more so. Getting the FLAC tags right the first time will make everything easier down the road.

      Some time ago, I proposed [sourceforge.net] a way to handle metadata externally, by simply giving each file a name like [cddb-disc-id][tracknumber].extension and then tagging each target format from the local cddb cache.

      How do you handle it if a metadata error is found later? Is there an easy way to regenerate the tags for all the formats when someone edits the master?
    • You know what I never ever understand about ripping. If you have some extremely old CDs, how in the world do you get the labels out of the songs. Wouldn't you have to label song by song manually by hand? You can do it at home, but how do big companies do so freaking many CDs?

  • Exactly my thoughts... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ponos ( 122721 ) on Monday November 29, 2004 @02:00PM (#10944153)

    I totally agree with the original poster. I just made a similar decision and reripped all my (original) CDs to flac, see my weblog http://pkt3141592.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]. I have made small scripts (~20 lines each) that convert flac2mp3, flac2vorbis and (flac)m3u to (mp3)m3u files. The neat thing is that I preserve all information tags across formats.

    I usually invoke the mini scripts like : find -name \*.flac -exec flac2vorbis \{\} \; and it works really well. I encoded 35 albums from flac to mp3 for my personal portable audio player in very little time.

    I am now considering an automated script that will generate .tex labels for every directory by reading information tags. It is not very hard to do but getting the output to look nice is going to be quite hard and my TeX skills are a little bit rusty.

    As a side thought I might eventually make an SQL database out of all this music but I don't think my collection will ever grow that much. Anyway, this has been a toy project of mine in the last 3-4 days and it has proved quite useful. I may post the end result (propably a collection of perl and bash magic ;-)) somewhere on sourceforge if it becomes non-trivial.

    P.

    • There are benifits to stuffing this in a db - think smart playlists on 'roids. I came to this conclusion from a different direction [fiftyfly.mine.nu] when working on a front end for a lan's icecast station [fiftyfly.mine.nu]. Now though I can use SQL to write playlists which is very tasty.
      • Why do people seem to think that SQL is the only way to filter and sort data? Don't get me wrong, it's convenient, but no more so than the facilities I've available in the programming system I use. It may be a pain in C/C++/Java though, so I suppose that explains the dblust.
        • Why do people seem to think that SQL is the only way to filter and sort data? Don't get me wrong, it's convenient, but no more so than the facilities I've available in the programming system I use. It may be a pain in C/C++/Java though, so I suppose that explains the dblust.

          It's a solved problem and SQL is (relatively) platform agnostic so it's convienient regardless of 'the programming system you use'. Leverage the tools at hand.

    • Why not just write your info to XML, then apply XSLT as necessary to fit the app?

  • Here's two scripts to do what you want (Score:3, Informative)

    by Matt Perry ( 793115 ) <perry DOT matt54 AT yahoo DOT com> on Monday November 29, 2004 @02:18PM (#10944328)
    Here's two scripts to do what you want:

    Hand it a playlist, and it'll convert the files in that playlist to MP3 format.
    http://perlmonks.thepen.com/401680.html [thepen.com]

    Batch recursive FLAC to Ogg conversion script
    http://www.buberel.org/linux/batch-flac-to-ogg-con verter.php [buberel.org]

  • etree-scripts / shn2mp3 (Score:2, Informative)

    by Bklyn ( 21642 )
    Over the years I've written a number of scripts to deal with lossless audio files (like FLAC and Shorten) and one of them is called "shn2mp3". It can convert SHN or FLAC files to MP3 or OGG files. It is targeted at live concert recordings that are accompanied by a text "info" file that describes the recording gear, setlist etc and this info is parsed and turned into tags. I wasn't, until now, aware of the "tagcopy" command used in another poster's sample script, but I think I'll knock up a new version
  • Use the audio player foobar 2000 and it's "diskwriter" plugin for the conversions. It's simple and provides support for more audio formats than you'll know what to do with.

  • Found this useful software:

    http://file-ext-map.sourceforge.net/

    It's a Samba 2.2 virtual file extension.

    So you can save a bunch of .flac files on your (Samba) server, and have them appear as .wav files as well, with the server converting them as they are requested.

    I dare say you could also arrange conversion to mp3 and ogg on the fly as well, though obously not fast enough to keep a 48x cd writer happy.
  • I'd like to rip CDs under Windows, primarily so my wife can rip without needing to switch from her current PC. They'll be etracted to 16bit, 44.1k .wav files and written to a share on a Linux box. From there, I'd like to have the Linux box check the folder every once in a while (via cron I assume) for new files to be encoded. Once it sees a new file, it should encode it to both MP3 and FLAC with id3 tags, and then delete the original. Additionally, I'd like to have the ability to add PCs running Linux (
  • I hope the mod-gods will allow a brief tangential rant.

    My prediction: all the people who rip or purchase audio in lossy formats today will hate their decision in a few years. (The only exception is, of course, ripping audio destined solely for a portable player - which is a very different scenario from trying to archive audio in compressed formats.)

    Sure - an mp3 file sounds pretty good, most of the time. It's stunning that it sounds as good as it does. But, it doesn't sound perfect.

    Reasonable people
  • I've converted 70+ LPs (yeah I'm old and creaky but so's yer mama) to WAV format. I agree with a poster who said metadata is hard - I had to name all of those wav files with song titles and put them in folders (this is Windows, but that doesn't matter really). I'm assuming if I want to go from WAV to FLAC that I'll need to enter all the metadata for the tags again manually? are tags the _only_ advantage over WAV (stereo 16-bit 44.1KHz i.e. supposedly CD-Audio standard) files? I'd like to get a handle on t
    • Meta data is not the only advantage to FLAC over WAV. FLAC will do a loss-less compression of approximately 2:1. So you save hard drive space. Flac is also a good standard format because it supports hi quality 24 bit audio if needed (so does wav..)

      The main thing is the compression. The second main thing is the meta data. The third main thing is that FLAC can be played without decompression being a middle step.
  • I went though the same thing as this guy did then one day I said "FUCK IT" and I have gone done the AAC path. Used MP3, OGG, FLAC and there has always been some reason I have had to change. The main reason I went with AAC(MP4) is becasue I got an iPod, MP4 is on par with OGG(give or take) and it works in Winamp. I will never use WMA and for the poor people out there that uses this format I feel sorry for you :)

    Trying to keep everyone happy is a waste of time and effort if they want my music then I am mo

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