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.

  • words_numberEnglish
    8·
    1 year ago

    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).