FLAC To .ogg Vorbis

Funny how things go full circle sometimes. I initially worked on converting all of my music CDs to Vorbis files, a tedious and rather boring adventure in itself. I was reminded during a conversation on slashdot that it might be wiser to convert to FLAC first and then I could transcode into lesser quality codecs when needed. I thought it was a reasonable idea—too bad I had all my music in Vorbis format at the time! There's no way of going up in quality...

Time went by. I started another media-shift project, this time CD to FLAC, as I should have done in the first place. Now I actually have items in that collection that I need to transfer down to Vorbis! Ironic... such is life.

Enter our friend oggenc. Simple & effective, yet how to do entire directories in one shot? Fret not, there is nothing to it:

cd /dir/with/flacs
oggenc -q6 *.flac

I'm transcoding some files now that don't appear to have any tag info, so I'm not sure that transfers, but otherwise it is working swimmingly.

Here's a perl script option that might be more useful, but I haven't tried it so your mileage may vary:

#!/usr/bin/perl
#
# Copyright (c) 2004 - Jason L. Buberel - jason@xxxxxxxxxxx
# Licensed under the GNU GPL.
#
# Modified by Dax Kelson to run on a native UNIX/Linux box.

use Getopt::Long;
use File::stat;

$sourceDirPrefix = "/export/media/music/flacs";
$destDirPrefix = "/export/media/music/oggs";
$quality = 5;
GetOptions ( "source:s" => \$sourceDirPrefix,
"dest:s" => \$destDirPrefix,
"quality:i" => \$quality,
"force" => \$force );

# Commands
$oggCommand = "oggenc";
$flacCommand = "flac";

@dirs = `cd "$sourceDirPrefix" && find . -type d -print`;
@files = `cd "$sourceDirPrefix" && find . -type f -name "*.flac" -print`;

# Check to see if our find command found anything to convert.
if ( scalar @files == 0 ) {
die "Found no .flac files to convert!";
}

# recreate the directory hierarchy
foreach $dir (@dirs) {
$dir =~ s/\n$//;
$dir =~ s/^\.\///;

# check to see if the destination dir already exists
if ( !(stat ("$destDirPrefix/$dir")) ) {
# stat failed so create the directory
print "Creating output dir:\n $destDirPrefix/$dir\n";
$dir =~ s/\`/\'/g;
$result = `cd "$destDirPrefix" && mkdir -p "$dir"`;
}


}

# now process the actual sound files.
foreach $file (@files) {
$file =~ s/\n$//;
$file =~ s/^\.\///;

# figure out what the destination file would be...
$destinationFile = $file;
$destinationFile =~ s/\.flac*/\.ogg/;

# now stat the destinationFile, and see if it's date is more recent
# than that of the original file. If so, we re-encode.
# we also re-encode if the user supplied --force
$srcInfo = stat ("$sourceDirPrefix/$file");
$srcModTime = $srcInfo->mtime;
$destInfo = stat ("$destDirPrefix/$destinationFile");
if ( $destInfo ) {
$destModTime = $destInfo->mtime;
print "Skipping current file: $destDirPrefix/$destinationFile\n";
}
# if the destination file does not exist, or the user specified force,
# or the srcfile is more recent then the dest file, we encode.
if ( !$destInfo || $force || ( $srcModTime > $destModTime) ) {
$file =~ s/\`/\'/g;
$inFile = "$sourceDirPrefix/$file";
$outFile = "$destDirPrefix/$destinationFile";
$inFile =~ s/\0//g; $outFile =~ s/\0//g;
$result = `$oggCommand -q $quality -o "$outFile" "$inFile"`;
}

}

Compressed To Death (Magnetic)

I would really like to know what Metallica's Death Magnetic sounded like before it was sent out for mastering.

It definitely lost (and lost badly) to the Loudness War.

I am listening to The Day That Never Comes right now (iTunes) and they've gone beyond the brick wall, the track is clipping all over the place. Everything is painfully compressed. Compressed to death.

Post-production blues aside, the singles: Cyanide, The Day That Never Comes, My Apocalypse prove Metallica can still rock with old-school fire!

Yes!