Batch Converting Between Formats?

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?"

Comments

sounds like a job for

[Gherald]

bash

Why?

[samael]

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?

Re:Why?

[richy freeway]

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?

Why? No, you don't.

[mbourgon]

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.