* Keith O'Connell (kroc@blueyonder.co.uk)[20040621 11:34]: > I plan to write a script to take a batch of selected ogg tracks, use sox > to convert ogg to wav, then pipe that into lame to convert the wav to mp3. > > Is this sensible plan or am I making too big a job out of this? It sounds sensible logistically, as long as you are aware of the quality degradation you will find in lossy-to-lossy transcoded audio files. Realistically, you'll probably find that they're good enough for portable use (cheap headphones in noisy environments such as gym treadmill, etc.). If quality is a concern, you're better off re-ripping from the original source (CDs). There's a script called jack which makes this process pretty painless (ripping, encoding, CDDB query, and renaming). Configure that and it's as easy as dropping in a CD, "jack; eject", go do something else, and repeat when you hear the drive tray open. While we're on the subject of portables, let me plug the birthday present my wife got for me last month: the Rio Karma. It's a 20GB hard drive player and plays ogg vorbis and flac. It even comes with a dock with an ethernet jack; the player runs a little mini-webserver that serves up a java version of the "rio music manager". That it's not a straight usb mass-storage device is a drawback, but ogg and flac support far outweigh that for me. I highly recommend it for anyone seeking a portable music player. I know Iriver makes ogg players as well, and I haven't seriously used one to give it a fair comparison vs the Karma. The Karma is great though: good one-handed (either hand) operation with a jog-dial control, and did I mention it plays ogg and flac? =p good times, Vineet
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