Feel the Ogg love!

5 March 2007

Nanny Ogg and Exquisitor Vorbis are characters in the Discworld series of books by Terry Pratchett.

Ogg is also a container for set of next-generation media formats, including Ogg Theora which is the video component, and Ogg Vorbis the audio component. Decent media players should play ogg vorbis files by default.

There are many others, including Ogg Dirac for extremely high-definition video that has been largely developed by the BBC.

I am going to try to convert to using ogg vorbis rather than mp3. I'll keep you updated whether I succeed or fail.

I went looking for a few scripts and applications that will help me in my mission, the main focus here is on batch conversion. All of these are available through Gentoo's portage, some or all of these may be available from your package manager too. Without further ado, this is what I found.

We need a (Perl) Hero

ogg2mp3 is a well-used Perl script. Here is the link to the tar.bz2 file.

It is in need of a maintainer, it works now but the dependencies may change in the future.

Going the other way, mp32ogg is another Perl script that also needs a maintainer.

If you are good at Perl and want a little and maintainable, but powerful and useful bit of software to put in your website, have a go at this maintaining these, you may be able to rationalise it so the scripts are more similar. You could even make one script that can do both jobs. Think of the glory!

Unbreakable Python

dir2ogg is a python script, that is maintained by Darren Kirby, which can convert a whole load of file formats to ogg-vorbis

Depending on what codecs you have supported on your system, you can feed it mp3, m4a, wma, and wav files to get ogg-vorbis files out. It keeps the ID3 tags, and you can do as many directories as you like and you can make it drill down recursively through directories. Rock on!

The Gnome way

Lastly, if you want to use graphics, there is a really nice little graphical Application called SoundConverter. I recognised it was PyGTK rather than GTK straight away, but I am not sure why.

1 Joe Bloggs says...

I've published some of my own music online using MP3. I always wanted to use OGG, simply because I was in sympathy with open source. However, when it came down to it I didn't release any music in OGG format because to me even at 'quality 10' it sounded muddy, and cut out too many higher frequency bands. My music is heavily instrumented, and I use the entire audible frequency range. With OGG it sounded about the same as 128kbps MP3 or worse, so I used 320kbps MP3 instead, which sounded acceptable. The best open source encoder is FLAC (non-lossy) but unfortunately the files it makes are very large.

Posted at 11:05 a.m. on March 5, 2007

2 Darren Kirby says...

Hi,

Just wanted to let you know that I am trying to phase out dir2ogg for sneetchalizer instead: http://badcomputer.org/code/sneetchalizer/

Thanks for the mention, -d

Posted at 9:15 p.m. on March 26, 2007

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