Illusory Follies

So… I finally got my hard drives installed on my home server and now I just need to get my music collection into shape so I can actually play stuff. When I originally made copies of my CDs I converted them to FLAC. Why FLAC? Because I was being anal and didn’t want to “downgrade” my music to a measily 192kbps MP3 format. I know this is probably trivial, but if I retain the FLAC versions, it’s as if I have the original CD. Yes, I can’t tell the difference between 192kbps MP3 and the lossless FLAC, but the point is, if I ever want to convert all my music into AAC or (heaven’s forbid!) WMA format, I can do it fairly easily if I’m starting from a lossless format. If I start from the 192kbps MP3 I’ll start getting really degraded sounding stuff pretty quickly. So that’s my excuse.

How to accomplish this? In the past I’d used mpg321 to do the conversion but this time I used ffmpeg. I have all my CD collection in a directory on my system.

find "/var/mirror/Data/Audio/My CD Archive/" -name *.flac -exec /var/scripts/convert.sh {} \;

And /var/scripts/convert.sh contains:

ffmpeg -y -i "$1" -ab 192 "`echo "$1" | sed -e 's/.flac/.mp3/g'`"

This seems too much mess, but it appears to be working. The drawback? ffmpeg doesn’t seem to parse the “tag” information for each file so I’m ending up with “naked” MP3s (no ID3 tag). Not the end of the world. I’ll clean them up when I’m done.

The process is still chugging away — it’s completed about half of my collection.

Edit: I went ahead and figured out what I need to do to get the tags across. I installed the flac and id3 ebuilds and can now run the following script (using the same find command) to get the tags to match up from the flac files to the mp3 files.

OUTF=`echo "$1" | sed s/\.flac/.mp3/g`
ARTIST=`metaflac "$1" --show-tag=ARTIST | sed s/.*=//g`
TITLE=`metaflac "$1" --show-tag=TITLE | sed s/.*=//g`
ALBUM=`metaflac "$1" --show-tag=ALBUM | sed s/.*=//g`
GENRE=`metaflac "$1" --show-tag=GENRE | sed s/.*=//g`
TRACKNUMBER=`metaflac "$1" --show-tag=TRACKNUMBER | sed s/.*=//g`
id3 -t "$TITLE" -T "$TRACKNUMBER" -a "$ARTIST" -A "$ALBUM" -g "$GENRE" "$OUTF"

Thanks to this page for the info.