I have a fairly large music collection, which is 9.9 GB in size. It’s mainly made up of MP3 files, with some OGG Vorbis files and a handful of WAV and WMA files. I would like to convert the entire library to AAC (or a better format, if there is one) in order to reduce the size of my collection by a considerable amount.
My library is organised using this folder structure:
~/Music/{Artist}/{Album}/{Track}
Can anyone recommend a GUI tool or shellscript which would recursively convert the files, map across the metadata, and dump the files into a different folder with the same directory structure?
EDIT: I have used a script to convert everything to Opus. Problem solved, just working out the kinks now.
If you are a Mac users (which I am assuming yes based on your preference toward AAC), the program Pine Player does an excellent job with batch conversion. Otherwise FFMPEG is probably acceptable as well.
Thanks, but I’m an openSUSE user. I was considering AAC because of a recommendation from MakeUseOf or some other tech news website.
That would be a pretty basic bash script, but as others have said, really not recommended.
If possible, only convert the wav files to AAC and keep all lossy files as they are.
Edit: I agree with other commenters, that it’s a bad idea to convert from one lossy codec to another one! If you want to do it anyway (and your files are at least encoded with high bitrates >192k), I’d recommend this:
The best lossy audio codec by far is opus (best perceived quality vs. small file size), which also has the benefit that it’s free and has got a great open source reference implementation that is also integrated in ffmpeg. So the conversion can be done with ffmpeg. I would personally use fd-find for multithreaded batch processing (using the -x option).
On Windows, nothing beats foobar for playback, tagging, and conversion support. I use Deadbeef which is like the Foobar of Linux. It has a similar user interface and a playlist format conversion tool as well. VLC also converted audio if I remember correctly?
