Here are the commands I used to convert a shitload of FLAC files to Ogg Vorbis.
find ${HOME} -name '*.flac' -print0 | xargs -0 -n 8 -P 8 oggenc -q 9
find ${HOME} -name '*.flac' -print0 | xargs -0 -n 8 -P 8 rmFor some reason I had gotten it into my head to rip my entire CD collection to FLAC (Free Lossless Audio CODEC) so that I could have maximum fidelity digital music. After all, I had disk space out the wazoo and nothing better to do than swap CDs.
However, it’s occurred to me that being a middle-aged metalhead I’m just wasting disk space. There might be a quantifiable difference between FLAC and Ogg Vorbis encoded at maximum quality, but it’s not one I can hear with a decent set of wired headphones.
There’s no sense in ripping everything again, though. Not when it’s possible to transcode FLAC to Ogg Vorbis. However, I’ve got a lot of files and I don’t want to spend weeks transcoding tracks piecemeal.
Fortunately, as Adam Drake writes: command-line tools can be 235x faster than your Hadoop cluster. Not that I’ve got a Hadoop cluster at home. Probably a good thing, because if I did and Catherine saw the resulting power bill she’d probably have kittens.