[Gllug] Maintaining music libraries in various formats

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 02:39:48PM +0100, Jon Dye wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I currently have my music collection as a bunch of mp3s, oggs or flacs
> on a fileserver on my home network.  That's fine for me using linux to
> play them back but we have several devices (including Windows machines
> and iPods) at home that don't support either ogg or flac.  I also
> don't really want to copy the files as flac to my mps player (my
> mobile phone) as they take up a lot of space so I currently transcode
> them to ogg or mps.  Ultimately I'd like to keep everything as flac as
> I have lots of space so I will be gradually re-ripping stuff to flac.
> 
> Because file space is cheap I had a crazy idea to keep a directory of
> originals on the network and then to run a periodic script to build a
> directory of mps3 or oggs from the originals.  This would save time
> transcoding and would support the various devices on the network
> better.  Has anyone heard of a scheme like this or knows of any
> software designed to do this.

That's a such a good idea, I do exactly this myself :-) A 1 TB usb hard
drive containing the FLAC files as masters, and then a script to convert
to other formats I care about, currently just mp3 for the ipod.

> Ideally the update script would:
> 1. Create/Update the corresponding mp3/ogg file whenever a file in the
> originals directory changes (i.e. I rip a new CD)

I've got a trivial/crude shell script that does this point, for 
flac -> mp3 preserving tags. I'll attach it in case its any use.

> 2. Update the metadata in the originals directory whenever the
> metadata in a mp3/ogg directory changes.
> 3. Support all file formats in the originals directory (as I won't
> have only flacs there at the start). I suppose hard linking mp3s/oggs
> where relevant is therefore a good option here.

This gets to be more fun, need to check file extension and change the
commands run for conversion. Or use a tool that can auto-detect everything
like mencoder or perhaps gstreamer.

Regards,
Daniel
-- 
|: http://berrange.com/     -o-    http://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange/ :|
|: http://libvirt.org  -o-  http://virt-manager.org  -o-  http://ovirt.org :|
|: http://autobuild.org       -o-         http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :|
|: http://freshmeat.net/~danielpb/    -o-   http://gtk-vnc.sourceforge.net :|
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: flac2mp3-all.sh
Type: application/x-sh
Size: 1636 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/gllug/attachments/20090820/520f178a/attachment.sh>
-------------- next part --------------
-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug