ogg -> mp3

December 15, 2006 10:58 PM

Please suggest a Windows or Linux tool to batch-convert ogg files to mp3.

I ripped a lot of CDs over time, and thinking I was clever I ripped them to ogg format. I recently bought a car that has a CD player that will play mp3 files, but not ogg files. I would really like to find a tool that:

• is free (or very cheap)
• will batch-convert all the files in one go
• will maintain the directory structure of the original files
• will maintain the tag information

I searched around a bit but I haven't found anything. Any suggestions?

posted by jlub to Computers & Internet (11 answers total)

I'm not sure if it can maintain tag information, but ecasound is a very useful utility for all things audio-related, and should be able to convert an ogg file to an mp3 file pretty easily. As for batch conversion, hacking together a quick bash or perl script would probably be the best way to go about doing that.
posted by destrius at 11:06 PM on December 15, 2006

This seems to meet all your requirements.
posted by SirStan at 11:32 PM on December 15, 2006

ogg2mp3 might even do tagging for you (sorry, I missed that requirement).
posted by SirStan at 11:33 PM on December 15, 2006

If none of those tools work for you, toss me an email.

I wrote a Bash script that fits all of those requirements, except it's for FLAC -> MP3. If you absolutely need it, I should be able to hack in Ogg -> MP3 support in a few days.
posted by SemiSophos at 11:39 PM on December 15, 2006

Nobody has mentioned winLAME yet? It seems to fit the bill... fast, free, does batch conversion (not sure about directory structures)
posted by tmcw at 12:15 AM on December 16, 2006

- Yep, it can keep your directory structure.
posted by tmcw at 12:16 AM on December 16, 2006

Note that ogg is lossy, and converting from ogg to mp3 is almost always a bad idea. You end up with all the accumulated errors of both formats.

The best way to rip is losslessly, to a format like FLAC... you can then generate any lossy format you want from your lossless originals.

This may not be possible for you, but maybe it'll help some other soul thinking of ripping to MP3. Drive space is cheap. Rip losslessly, and keep your options open.
posted by Malor at 12:48 AM on December 16, 2006

Decode ogg to wav format. Encode wav to mp3. You can do this in a pipeline. Keeping metadata will be harder.

And yes, you will get noisier music than if you had gone straight to MP3. Don't expect this to be useful outside an already noisy environment like a car.
posted by cmiller at 8:14 AM on December 16, 2006

Response by poster: Thanks for the replies... I will try these out. I could just re-rip all the CDs to mp3 (believe it or not, I do actually own all the CDs), I was just hoping for a less time-consuming solution. And, as cmiller points out, audio quality is not a huge concern since these are for the car.
posted by jlub at 9:25 AM on December 16, 2006

Best answer: Now that I think about it, you might be able to do it with Foobar 2000. It has a massconvert utility that's very good. I didn't think it would do ogg to mp3, but now that I think about it, it might. Hope it's not too late for that answer to be useful.

Warning: Foobar is pretty intimidating, but amazingly powerful if you stick with it a bit.
posted by Malor at 3:14 AM on December 17, 2006

Response by poster: Foobar 2000 did the job. The only way I could get it to maintain the directory structure was to do the conversion in place (the output directories the same as the input directories), which was ok. Also it put a sequential number in to the filename of each file -- which is fine, except it kept incrementing the number across ALL the albums. Fortunately, I don't really care about the file names, just about the tags, so that didn't matter.
posted by jlub at 12:11 PM on January 4, 2007