transcode FLAC to OPUS: How do I go about it?

[AvMaverick]

I have my music collection entirely in FLAC, and it’s nearing 50 gigs. Now while that isn’t an issue on my laptop, it is quite huge for my smartphone. I’ve heard that converting to OGG OPUS is much more efficient and retains similar quality.

Now, the obvious approach is that I go for a bash script that goes through all my folders, does the conversions via FFMPEG, and stores this entire collection in a separate folder.

Is there a better way to do it in your opinion?

And if you have experience with this, what settings would you recommend for FFMPEG?

 

Edit: I meant OPUS, not OGG.

[mariushm]

flac is lossless , ogg vorbis is just a bit better than mp3 in quality.

 

Better than mp3 and ogg vorbis you have plain AAC and even better than that, there's Opus which is open source and supported by browsers and smart phones.

[AvMaverick]

My bad, I meant OPUS lol. IDK why I wrote OGG

 

[NinJake]

FFMPEG is definitely the way to do any conversions. Pretty much any other online tool or offline software with a GUI uses FFMPEG in the background. I would also look into Opus rather than OGG as @mariushm stated. I don't have any set scripts to run atm but there's a variety of resources out in the internet.

[Dutch_Master]

I recalled doing a capture of sound media and converting it to OGG using the transcode tool. No idea if that's still available (that's your job ) but here's the basic command I used/stored:

transcode -x dvd -i /dev/cdrom -T <title>,<chapter>,<angle> -a <audiotrack> -y null,ogg -b 192 -E 44100,16,2 -m '<songtitle>.ogg'

IIRC copied straight from the man page

[Mark Kaine]

I use audiograbber!

 

(Well when I did this aeons ago~)

 

 

 

PS: looks something sketchy happened with it? Try to get it from majorgeeks or something? I dunno.

 

The reason it's so good, is because the UI is perfect and it's really fast, and whole program is like 2mb!?

 

 

1 hour ago, AvMaverick said:

My bad, I meant OPUS lol. IDK why I wrote OGG

 

Never heard of it!

[Mark Kaine]

1 hour ago, NinJake said:

FFMPEG is definitely the way to do any conversions. Pretty much any other online tool or offline software with a GUI uses FFMPEG in the background

True, but then you also have to know a program that does bulk conversion, otherwise you're probably stuck with some commandline batchfile nonsense, which is probably a nightmare with thousands of files?

[NinJake]

This should have plenty of information to wrap your head around doing a batch conversion via ffmpeg.

 

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5784661/how-do-you-convert-an-entire-directory-with-ffmpeg

 

Edit: @Mark Kaine you can batch convert files via ffmpeg as shown in these examples. It's not pretty or user friendly to those who aren't comfortable using a command line but I'm also sure you can find youtube videos or the like with people giving examples.

 

So no, it wouldn't necessarily be a nightmare to do with thousands of files once it's set up. Id personally move/copy all the files i want to convert into a single folder and then base the script off that 1 folder. (to prevent nesting of folders)

[Doobeedoo]

I have even more music on PC and was wonder would it be worth it to have FLAC files over MP3 on my S25U with Buds 3 Pro or which format and it's bitrate would be enough in this case. 

[NinJake]

@Doobeedoo for my phone, I've converted all my files to 320kbps mp3. It's more than enough for my use case (bluetooth audio to JBL speaker while out disc golfing with friends, or bluetooth audio to my car while driving via these files if I'm not streaming spotify or soundcloud)

 

I always keep the lossless formats on my pc and backed up to a cloud storage. I could potentially look into switching over all of my mp3s to OGG Vorbis (i really should) but that's a lot of work, and I'm not hurting on storage space.

 

For someone just starting to convert from lossless to lossy formats, I'd go the OGG Vorbis route.

[AvMaverick]

To solve this, I did work on a python script and a shell command.

 

https://github.com/AvMavs/flac-to-opus

 

This was mainly so that my phone's storage is less full