[Solved] Mass converting of sound files to OGG format (?)

Post LXDE Videos, Pictures, Screenshots, Media Articles, Photos here, please.
M_Mynaardt
Posts: 72
Joined: Wed Dec 15, 2010 9:37 pm
Location: Victoria, BC, Canada

[Solved] Mass converting of sound files to OGG format (?)

Post by M_Mynaardt »

Hi, All!

I'm slowly getting used to LXDE; using Mint 9 LXDE and Peppermint OS, and I'm messing about a bit with Lubuntu 10.04. These are all persistent or live installs I have on USB-HDD. My cunning plan is to have a USB-HDD as both data backup and live install.

But anyway; I've figured out that some music apps, like Aqualung and LXMusic, don't play commercial sound files, such as in the .m4a format. Of course, the great majority of the sound files I have are in just that format (copied from my old iTunes library before I gave that other OS the boot).

I have been using the app OGG Convert. It works well enough to make a proper .OGG file out of an .m4a file. However, OGG Convert only lets you choose one file at a time to convert. This will therefore take me a good long time, with the number of sound files I've got that I'd like to convert... :cry:

Does anyone know if there's an app out there that can let you select a list of files to convert to .OGG format. I don't expect the actual conversion time per file to be any quicker, but it would be nice to select a list of files instead of one at a time...

Thanks to anyone who may be able to help with this one!
Last edited by M_Mynaardt on Wed Jan 19, 2011 8:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.
~*~ M_Mynaardt ~*~

LXDE is your computer's Friend!
Always trust LXDE!
M_Mynaardt
Posts: 72
Joined: Wed Dec 15, 2010 9:37 pm
Location: Victoria, BC, Canada

Re: Mass converting of sound files to OGG format (?)

Post by M_Mynaardt »

Someone on the Peppermint OS site told me the solution; the Python scrip thing called dir2ogg.

I've been using it to convert my m4a files to OGG files and it seems to work just fine. Of course, I didn't read the directions first (where's the fun in that, eh?) and it took me a while to figure out how to replace directories of m4a files, and their sub-directories of m4a files (if any), with OGG files.

I've been using the following with dir2ogg in the terminal:

Code: Select all

dir2ogg -r -m -q10 --delete-input "Directory with tunes" Another_Directory
-r is to recursively convert a directory's files and the files in its subdirectories.
-m is to convert m4a to OGG
-q10 is the maximum quality; the default is -q3.
--delete-input gets rid of the original m4a file; effectively replacing an m4a fill with an OGG file
And you can use multiple directory names; something else I missed by not reading the directions first, of course.

You can find dir2ogg at: http://jak-linux.org/projects/dir2ogg/

Hope someone else can find this helpful if they've got a collection of m4a files they want to convert to OGG files after seeing the light and changing to Linux from that other operating system!
~*~ M_Mynaardt ~*~

LXDE is your computer's Friend!
Always trust LXDE!
Locked