Convert your Ogg Vorbis files to mp3

Sunday, November 30th, 2008 at 1:48 am | 2,189 views | trackback url
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First, I know you’re going to ask why you’d want to go from a high-quality VBR format like Ogg Vorbis to the paltry, low-quality mp3 format… and to that I have one word: Apple.

Apple saw fit in their infinite wisdom to NOT support the freely-available and license/patent free Ogg Vorbis audio format in their iPod and iPhone devices. Instead, they support the proprietary, licensed, restrictive mp3 formats instead.

The near-sightedness of commercial companies never ceases to amaze me.

To solve that, you can convert your oggs to mp3 (obviously, keeping the original .ogg files for your personal library), using the following one-liner (separated into multiple lines for ease of explanation):

for i in *.ogg; do 
[[ ! -a "${i%ogg}mp3" ]] && 
oggdec "$i" -o - | lame --preset standard - "${i%ogg}mp3" ; 
done

Now you can drag those mp3 files onto iTunes and sync them to your iPod or iPhone device. I much prefer SongBird on Windows and amaroK on Linux over iTunes, but… some may not have that option.

Last Modified: Sunday, November 30th, 2008 @ 01:48

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