lossfully¶ ↑

Smartly generate transcoded (lossy or otherwise) versions of your main music library.

This is not your average, “drag a bunch of folders on me and press go” audio converter. You need to write a file that points to your library and describes how you want to generate a second library. Let’s start with:

require 'lossfully'

Lossfully.generate '~/share/music/' => '~/share/music_lossy' do 
  encode '.ogg'
end

That will copy everything from ~/share/music to ~/share/music_lossy, encoding all of the non-vorbis audio files to vorbis. So far, this is something any of those GUI programs can do. But maybe you don’t want to convert your lossy formats into oggs, lest the gods of information theory smite you for your transcoding wickedness. Well, no problem. This converts any wav, flac, or wv files found into ogg, but copies the rest without modification:

Lossfully.generate '~/share/music/' => '~/share/music_lossy' do 
  encode :lossless => '.ogg'
end

But maybe this new library is going on your portable device, so you can’t take all of your music and you need to shrink some of the lossy files, too. How about just taking the songs from a playlist, and reencoding the lossy files that have an average bitrate over 192 kbps:

Lossfully.generate '~/share/music/awesome.m3u' => '~/share/music_lossy' do 
  encode :lossless => ['.ogg', 4] # use quality 4 for the encoding
  encode [:lossy, 192] => ['.ogg', 4]
end

You see, where this is going, right? Maybe something like:

Lossfully.generate '~/share/music/awesome.m3u' => '~/share/music_lossy' do 
  clobber :rename
  threads 2
  remove_missing true

  skip /\.cue/
  skip /\.jpg/

  encode :lossless => 'flac'
  encode [:ogg, 192] => ['.ogg', 4]
  encode [:mp3, 300] => ['.mp3', -192.2]
  encode :lossy => 'ogg'
end

For more details, check out the documentation of Lossfully::Generator.

• A copy of sox must be found in your path, which is what actually does the transcoding. There is currently no check to see if your version of sox is compiled with LAME (support for MP3s, etc). When confronted with audio files that sox can’t handle, Lossfully might treat them as nonaudio files, skip them silently, or crash. Who knows.

• Lots of audio files.

• gem install lossfully

Original author: Don March <don@ohspite.net>

Copyright © 2011 Don March.

Licensed under the GNU General Public License.

Lossfully is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

Lossfully is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see <www.gnu.org/licenses/>.