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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?"
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 out.
Is a VFS module for samba called File Ext Map. 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.
make ogg
make mp3
make wma
make rip
Something alont those lines...I'll leave the Makefile as an excersize for the reader :)
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.
Sig!
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 them (and if it did, I couln't afford it).
So, the approach of the original post seems valid. Grab everything as FLAC, and convert to other formats as needed. Less than $100 (after rebates) at your local computer superstore will get you enough space to hold over 500 CDs worth of music in FLAC.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
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 music device that *cannot* play MP3? Will there ever be a format as pervasive as MP3? Until I have reasonable certainty that I can take audio in "format X" and have it play on every device under the sun, I will stick with MP3 for lossy audio -- because it plays on every device under the sun.
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 may object that even with perfect hearing and a great pair of headphones, one would only notice a difference between a "lame --preset extreme" file and the original in one album out of a thousand. That's probably true. The same sure isn't true about a 128 cbr file, of the sort one can buy online from a dozen vendors for the same price as a CD - it isn't hard to find a track full of noticeable artifacts when made with the best encoder around. People who encode things are even lower rates ("because it's mostly speech anyway") really shouldn't have to wait around in order to hate themselves - there's plenty of reason to feel bad right now.
So, why not assume it's good enough and not worry? Here's the catch: the cost of archiving audio in a lossless format is very small today, and will become vanishingly small over the next few years. For something like 15 cents an album at the price of a hard drive (much less if you're archiving to dvd and you buy disks on sale), you can guarantee for all time that your audio will always be good enough. It will sound great on the headphone you're going to buy in five years, to the audiophile spouse you haven't yet met, and even when chopped up added to an audio mix when some radio station geek digs it out of an estate sale seventy five years from now.
In ten years, when the additional cost of storing your entire audio library in lossless format drops to the price of a meal, you'll hate yourself for not having done so. (Of course those of you silly enough to buy tracks with drm limits on the number of machines on which it can be played are going to hate yourselves much more, and probably somewhat sooner.)
Just think how annoying it is when you hear a recording of some great, lost radio program that was made on a consumer tape deck set to "long play." If you're anything like me, you curse the short sighted people who bargained away the future for the cost of a dollar cassette.
And don't assume that you can just run out and pick up a new copy of the album. Even within the mainstream music industry, there are countless lost albums whose masters have been destroyed, and many more which lie abandoned with no promise of a reprinting. There's no reason to believe things will be any different in the future.
Anyway - to be slightly more on topic - I agree, FLAC is great. Don't know of any exiting conversion utilities, however it would take more than a few dozen lines of perl to throw something together. There are command line tools to rip a cd, run a database lookup, and encode to most formats.
If you want to make it slighly less annoying, hit a pc junker store and pick up as many cheap old cdrom drives as you have IDE slots. That'll make the disk changing somewhat less annoying. (If you want to go nuts, pick up five 486 pc's, and fill them all with cd drives... that is, assuming spending a weekend setting up an automated super-ripper sounds like more fun than spending a weekend babysitting your cdrom drive.)