Plaidophile

Basically, I've gotten sick of the lack of usable ogg support on OSX (the ogg-qt component is lackluster, slow, and crappy, and doesn't provide track numbers so it can't even be used to listen to whole albums without manually creating a playlist, and for some reason it also doesn't support streaming off a network share), and of course I have a nice iPod arriving on Friday which can't do oggs at all. And really, I don't give a crap about the patents or IP issues, and the whole "ogg is patent-free" stuff is unproven.

Unfortunately, all of my CDs are still packed away for a while, but I decided to do some transcoding tests (source albums were dirty water and Please Let Your Faith and Patience Be Mine by Jeff Fal, various Chopin, and random songs off of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band) and, even with intense listening on my best headphones, the mp3s sound no different than the oggs, and are actually a bit smaller.

So, here's the script (which I saved as ogg2mp3):

#!/bin/sh

LAMEOPTS='-b 32 -V 2 -m j'

for src in "$@" ; do
        dest="`dirname $src`/`basename $src .ogg`.mp3"

        artist="`ogginfo $src | grep -i ARTIST= | cut -f2- -d=`"
        album="`ogginfo $src | grep -i ALBUM= | cut -f2- -d=`"
        title="`ogginfo $src | grep -i TITLE= | cut -f2- -d=`"
        track="`ogginfo $src | grep -i TRACKNUMBER= | cut -f2- -d=`"
        year="`ogginfo $src | grep -i YEAR= | cut -f2- -d=`"

        if [ ! -f $dest ] ; then
                nice -19 ogg123 -d wav -f - "$src" | lame $LAMEOPTS - "$dest"
        fi

        echo "Tagging $dest as $artist - $title"
        id3v2 -t "$title" -a "$artist" -A "$album" -T "$track" -y "$year" $dest
done

I did briefly experiment with using iTunes to convert oggs to AAC, but it didn't give enough customizability (no VBR, for example) and I really hate the unconfigurable way that iTunes names its files, especially for various artists compilations (which I have a few of).

So, bye ogg. Pragmatism wins out. Again.