The Sound of Music

Ok, I've finally run of out of excuses *not* to convert my music collection to the free, open, ogg vorbis format.
I've kept them as mp3s for three main reasons:

1. I use my phone (Motorola L7) as a portable music player, but it only does mp3s.
2. I love my music, so my entire collection is meticulously tagged. If I convert it all, I'll have to redo the tags, right?
3. According to Amarok, I have just over 5000 tracks (2 weeks worth of listening). Converting that much music is bound to be a pain.

However, I've just got a 30GB iPod Video from a friend who just bought an iPod Touch (more on that here), and I'm planning on putting Rockbox on it (again, more in a future post). So that eliminates reason 1.

mp32ogg
Reasons 2 and 3 were taken care of when I read about mp32ogg, a perl script that converts mp3s to oggs (the clue is in the name).
It doesn't appear to have been under development since 2002, but it still does the job, so...

One of my favourite features of this script is that it can rename tracks based on their ID3 tags. It can only use the title, artist, or album name tags, but that's pretty sufficent (unless you name tracks based on track length or genre?)
The best use I've found of this, is some old tracks I had, that were victims of iTunes. For those that have never had the pleasure of the iTunes/iPod combination, when you use iTunes to put tracks onto an iPod, it renames the track to 4 random letters. (e.g. avca.mp3, hjbv.mp3, vhvc.mp3, etc)
However, running that track through mp32ogg with the --rename=%t option set (rename as title), outputs tracks with their original names. I was impressed :)

The conversion
I told it to get to work on my ~/multimedia/audio folder, re-encoding everything at a quality level of 5, renaming the new oggs with the title stored in their tags, and deleting the old mp3s when they were converted (that one made me nervous!)
It automatically acts recursively, so that's nice and easy, and it gets bonus points for being command line, so I can come and write this blog post while I'm waiting :)

Converting from one lossy format to another, the quality was never going to be perfect anyways, but saving about 0.8MB on each file is a pretty good trade-off :) (NB: 0.8MB might not sound like much, until you times it by 5000-ish tracks I have in my music collection) Considering my /home on the music centre/server thing I have (more on that in another post) was 98% full yesterday, the extra 4GB of space is nice :)

It did throw out a few errors, something about not recognising the type of mp3... which makes no sense to me. Worse still, an error stops it from working (it won't just skip the bad track and carry on), and even worse, it doesn't tell you which track caused the error.
Some quick googling didn't give any solutions, and since the program isn't being developed, I doubt we can expect a fix.
I managed to work around the error (sort of) by telling it to convert ~/multimedia/audio/A*, then B* and so on. It still missed a lot of tracks, but the majority got converted in the end.

Conclusion
And a quick listen to a couple of tracks showed no obvious decline in quality, although I'm sure I'll notice some over the coming weeks, at which point I'll start looking at ripping my CDs into ogg format.

mp32ogg is a nice simple app, it only takes a minute or so on the help page before you can set it to work on your whole collection in the background.
It's a shame that it's no longer being developed (if I'm wrong, let me know, but I can't find anything since 2002), and I would definately recommend it, despite the issue it has with some files.

Now I just need to find something for my wma and wav files :)