Couple of OGG to MP3 and playlist Qs -recommendations needed

[Lunch Money]

So,

I painstakingly converted my CDs to highest-quality (500kps) Ogg Vorbis format for my PC jukebox, to rebuild scratched/lost discs, and to use as reference material.

It's all in a shiny directory in my external drive, called "I:\Converted Music".

Within, each album has its own directory, named by artist then album. Eg. "I:\Converted Music\Mann Aimee - Bachelor No 2\..."

Now, I originally figured, "I'll just convert as needed for my MP3 player," but it's getting annoying, so I want to just convert the whole shebang at once. That's 40 Gigs of material, so I'll just leave it running overnight once I find the right software.

Question #1 - Can someone recommend a program that will allow me to convert them all (to either MP3 or WMA, I'm not picky as it's just for the portable)? I've found some batch conversion utilities, but they all seem to want a list of filenames and won't accept or output entire directories.

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Now, as I mentioned, I also want to use it as a jukebox, but there aren't associated playlists, and for whatever reason, my media players load them up out of order. I like to listen to albums in order, and don't want to hand-create playlists for the whole library.

Question #2 - What jukebox are you using that's OGG compatible? I was using Foobar just because it's what I use for other things, but it's pretty limited for jukebox capabilities, as far as I can tell.

Question #3 - Are there good playlist editors I should be aware of? In addition to per-album listening, I'd like to make some custom playlists for certain moods. I imagine it'd be part of the software recommendations from my question #2, but if there's a standalone playlist editor that's a must-have, I'd like to hear about it!



Thanks,
Greg

[DotNoir]

Q1 : Well, since you already have foobar, you can use that for doing a mass convert. I'm a long time fb2k user and I admit it might get confusing at time to time. Propably because it has so much potential in it and it needs quite a lot of time to get used to. Anyway, I'm at the moment on the beta train and I guess you are using version 0.8.3?

If you don't have plugins called foo_diskwriter.dll and foo_clienc.dll you should download them. Diskwriter is here : http://www.foobar2000.com/components.ht ... diskwriter and Cliencoder here: http://www.saunalahti.fi/~cse/foobar2000/?C=M;O=D. Then of course you need LAME for MP3 encoding. (on a side note, things are quite much easier with the 0.9 beta, but you cannot use your old config file with that...)

The diskwriter/Cliencoder package should come with predefined settings for LAME (alt-presets) so you just have to choose one to fit your needs (for portable maybe medium should be sufficent...). You might want to retain the directory struckture you have with OGGs, so you can put this one for the output filename formatting:
$if3(%album artist%,%artist%,unknown artist) - $if2(%album%,$if2(%venue%,unknown album))/$if(%tracknumber%,$if(%title%,$num(%tracknumber%,2) -,__ -) %title%,%_filename%) and remember to tick create subdirectories. Of course if you only have artist, album, tracknumber and title fields, you can use : %artist% - %album%/%tracknumber% - %title% for great justice. Then you select all your oggs, right click on the playlist and choose run conversion.

Q2 : I think foobar2000 is a good jukebox

Q3 : There is a new component in the new beta called autoplaylist, which lets you define what songs you want on the playlist (for example on genre etc). Tho there isn't any good way to do ratings on foobar.

I don't really have any recomendations for anything else. I haven't used anything other than foobar2000 to listen to, manage and convert my music collection for the last 2 years.

And on a side note, you might want to have a look at lossless codecs like http://www.wavpack.com for you album storage if you are already using 500kbps vorbis, the space doesn't seem to be a problem for you and you'd get a real lossless backup.

I Hope I was at least remotely of any help. Feel free to ask if I wasn't clear on something/anything.

[Lunch Money]

I considered true lossless, but I wanted to maintain compatibility with Tracktion. Since I'd be fooked to tell the difference between even 256kps and lossless, I figured 500kps was good enough.

Thanks for the tips, I'll have a look. My main concern with Foobar is that I have approx 200 subdirectories filled with some 3000 files in OGG format. I'm not sure Foobar's way of doing things will handle that kind of volume, but I'll certainly give'er another look.

Cheers!

I'll have a peek at beta 0.9, too, if I can get my paws on it.

Greg

[DotNoir]

Well, let's put it this way: I've done conversion of 100 gigs of lossless to mp3. foobar can handle quite much everything. I think the main thing is that you have all yout files tagged properly, then there shouldn't be any problem.

edit. And foobar has really no trouble with lots of songs either. There have been tests with over 100 000 songs on one playlist (duplicates though) and foobar has handled all well. I sort of know the programmer (on IRC) and I'm quite sure he really knows what he's doing.

[Lunch Money]

Cool beans. They ARE all tagged properly, so it shouldn't be a problem.

[DotNoir]

Oh yeah... Just don't make the same mistake I did once, I was sleepy and had the output filename string incorrectly... That made a mess... After that I learned to try with one album first and then proceed with the others

[Lunch Money]

Hrm. It seems almost good to go. The only thing missing is telling Foobar where to find the LAME codec, which incidentally I DO have installed seperately (ie. not through a Foobar-specific installation package).

Greg

[DotNoir]

Foobar needs the exe version of LAME, I think it cannot use the dll. (You can find it for example in www.rarewares.org)

Oh, I usually just throw the exe in windows/system32 folder, for the convinience of it...