Audio mass encode on Synology NAS (FLAC to MP3)

Quick Sunday hack while waiting for the damn rain to stop :-(

 I was looking for an easy solution to mass-convert my music library from FLAC to MP3 (because iP*ds don't play FLAC...). Don't worry, I'm still keeping the FLACs for home playing :)

My library is stored on a Synology NAS and the prospect of transferring all of it back and forth through my LAN didn't sound really attractive, so I figured maybe I could find a way to reencode everything on the NAS itself, using whatever tools are available on a vanilla box (i.e. no additional package).

And voila!

This script is pretty self-explanatory: just ssh to your box and launch the script at the root of the music library. It will go sequentially through every subdirectory and each FLAC file will be encoded to a 320kbit MP3 file, saved in the same directory under $newbasedir. Existing ID3 tags are preserved by ffmpeg.

Of course, this will not only run on Synology, but also on any Unix box with ffmpeg... although in this case, I'm sure there are much better solutions :)

Good to see that I can still write a few lines of script. Hope you like it!

  #!/bin/sh # This is needed to handle spaces in file names OLDIFS=$IFS IFS=$(echo -en "\n\b") # Base directory where MP3 files will be created newbasedir=/volume1/music/MP3new # MP3 bitrate in bits bitrate=320000 # Overwrite existing MP3 files (-y for yes, blank for no) overwrite=-y # Iterate on albums for j in * do cd $j echo $PWD newdir=$newbasedir/`basename $PWD` mkdir -p $newdir # Iterate on tracks for i in *.flac do newname=`basename $i flac`mp3 ffmpeg $overwrite -i $i -ab $bitrate -acodec mp2 $newdir/$newname >& /dev/null echo " "$newname done cd .. done IFS=$OLDIFS