[Gllug] Maintaining music libraries in various formats

[Jon Dye]

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.

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)
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.

I had an idea to somehow use SCons to "build" the mp3s/oggs from the
flac files but that only supports requirements 1.  The other option
was to write a custom python (or similar) script to do it.

My question is, does anyone have any suggestions for existing tools
that do something similar or for ideas of how to implement what I
want.

JD
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