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Batch Converting Between Formats?

Posted by Cliff on 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?"

7 of 94 comments (clear)

  1. sounds like a job for by Gherald · · Score: 4, Insightful

    bash

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  2. Why? by samael · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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?

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    1. Re:Why? by richy+freeway · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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?

    2. Re:Why? by Fweeky · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:Why? by SillyNickName4me · · Score: 2, Insightful

      > You know, burn a lossless format to CD-R or something.

      Because CD-Rs don't last. Yeah, I can buy them from some brand that gives a lifelong warantee, but really, no amount of money or replacement of CD-Rs is every going to get me back a unique recording so that is utterly pointless.

      Many CD-Rs that I have used so far fail to last for as long as I tend to keep music around, and those that did survive also did degrade noticably (substantially more errors and more jitter when played back on an audio device) Yeah, that was after approx a decade of storing a cd in its jewel case on a spot protected from sunlight and excesive heat and cold.

      > Why not just use the CDs themselves as a long-term storage of a lossless format?

      Scratch scratch, oops, CD unreadable.

      Harddisks fail as well, but solutions to prevent dataloss from disk failure are way more practical for those (mirroring, raid)

      Anout the only better alternative is to burn things to opticals (CD or DVD) in a very clean environment, verify them for proper working, and then seal them into a container with controlled atmosphere, temperature and light (or actually, lack of light). Whenever you need the backup, the first thing you have to do after breaking the seal is repeating the backup process in order to create a new known good backup.

      Of course all hardly relevant unless you care about keeping your music collection around for more then say a decade.

  3. Why? No, you don't. by mbourgon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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  4. Exactly my thoughts... by ponos · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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/. 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.