So, this is probably OT, but then since I started the topic, maybe I can be forgiven...  Anyway, I have a reasonably large music collection (say 500-600 CD's worth) that is mostly in apple lossless format.  I just got the unraid and I'm moving the music over to the unraid box and I'm going to try to start serving it all up slimserver (or something better?).  Anyway, I hate apple and I want to rid myself of anything apple lossless.  Does anyone know of software that will run in an unraid box that I could use to convert all that music to flac?

 

Second, what I would love to do is set up parallel music folders, one with all my lossless music (for playing on my home stereo), and another with the mp3 version of everything (for easy loading to ipods, etc.).  Ideally, I could first have something scan through my entire collection and transcode it all at once to mp3.  Then, I would love to just have a regularly scheduled job that scans the 'lossless' folder and if it finds something new it transcodes it and puts an mp3 version out into the correct directory.

 

Thanks (hoping to strike a chord with music lovers everywhere...),

Chris

What you want is on-the-fly transcode of music files from one format to another.

 

For example, suppose you had a user share called 'Music'.  We could define a share configuration parameter which if enabled for the 'Music' share, would cause another share name, say 'Music.mp3' to be created.  When you navigate the 'Music.mp3' share, you see everything you would see if you navigate 'Music', except that all the music file extensions would change to 'mp3', and when you read the data from a music file, it would be transcoded on-the-fly to mp3 format.

 

This is a feature I've always wanted to implement but never have the time.  However with soon completion of 'ps3mediaserver' side project, now that I've learned how transcoding works & all the codecs required, perhaps might tackle this as my next 'side project' 

OMG.... 

 

Tom is back 

What you want is on-the-fly transcode of music files from one format to another.

 

For example, suppose you had a user share called 'Music'.  We could define a share configuration parameter which if enabled for the 'Music' share, would cause another share name, say 'Music.mp3' to be created.  When you navigate the 'Music.mp3' share, you see everything you would see if you navigate 'Music', except that all the music file extensions would change to 'mp3', and when you read the data from a music file, it would be transcoded on-the-fly to mp3 format.

 

This is a feature I've always wanted to implement but never have the time.  However with soon completion of 'ps3mediaserver' side project, now that I've learned how transcoding works & all the codecs required, perhaps might tackle this as my next 'side project' 

 

This would be awesome!  I have the majority of my music library in a lossless format (wavpack but am considering moving to FLAC).  If I could maintain my tags and in that format, but create the illusion of an MP3 version that iTunes could use (to sync with my iPod) that would be a huge time and space saver.  The other possibility is to create multiple MP3 "views" of the music at different bitrates.  I like to use high bitrate and am willing to live with the space implications, but my kids want more songs and are willing to live with less quality.  I have refrained from creating more than one .mp3 library based on a compromise in size vs quality, but to be able to have the choice by using this transcoder functionality would be simply awesome!

 

Tom, is it your intent to release these "side" projects to the community?  You wouldn't just tease us, would you? 

What you want is on-the-fly transcode of music files from one format to another.

 

For example, suppose you had a user share called 'Music'.  We could define a share configuration parameter which if enabled for the 'Music' share, would cause another share name, say 'Music.mp3' to be created.  When you navigate the 'Music.mp3' share, you see everything you would see if you navigate 'Music', except that all the music file extensions would change to 'mp3', and when you read the data from a music file, it would be transcoded on-the-fly to mp3 format.

 

This is a feature I've always wanted to implement but never have the time.  However with soon completion of 'ps3mediaserver' side project, now that I've learned how transcoding works & all the codecs required, perhaps might tackle this as my next 'side project' 

 

Tom, perhaps you could look into incorporating something like this "Samba File Extension Mapping VFS Module" into Unraid: http://file-ext-map.sourceforge.net/

I'm curious about how this could work.  For example, transcoding a single file on the fly doesn't seem like such a big deal.  A 3 minute song is an mp3 of roughly 3MB (of course, this depends on your sample rate).  So, to convert a single flac file of 50MB to an equivalent mp3 isn't such a big deal.  As long as it takes less than 3 minutes to transcode, who can tell the difference?  But, what if I want to grab 30 or 40 songs to copy to my mp3 player.  If it takes 20 seconds to transcode the flac to mp3, to get 30 songs takes 600 seconds, or 10 minutes.  I wouldn't want to wait 10 minutes to reload a few albums on my mp3 player.  I think this works great in the scenario where I am playing a single file (a movie, or just playing one song), but how well would it work in this case, where I want to just grab a bunch of the files?

I'm curious about how this could work.  For example, transcoding a single file on the fly doesn't seem like such a big deal.  A 3 minute song is an mp3 of roughly 3MB (of course, this depends on your sample rate).  So, to convert a single flac file of 50MB to an equivalent mp3 isn't such a big deal.  As long as it takes less than 3 minutes to transcode, who can tell the difference?  But, what if I want to grab 30 or 40 songs to copy to my mp3 player.  If it takes 20 seconds to transcode the flac to mp3, to get 30 songs takes 600 seconds, or 10 minutes.  I wouldn't want to wait 10 minutes to reload a few albums on my mp3 player.  I think this works great in the scenario where I am playing a single file (a movie, or just playing one song), but how well would it work in this case, where I want to just grab a bunch of the files?

 

You are right - speed would be an issue.  It would also elongate the adding to iTunes, because each file would have to be transcoded during that process.  That would be really slow on a large music library.  But syncs can be run overnight.  After the inital cataloging which could take several days, I think this would be quite workable for us.  The tricky part will be finding something that will transcode and maintain the tag properties.  I currently use foobar2000, which is awesome for music format conversion.  I have it configured to use LAME under the covers to create the MP3s.  But it is not a command line tool and does not run under Linux.

 

Tom, perhaps you could look into incorporating something like this "Samba File Extension Mapping VFS Module" into Unraid: http://file-ext-map.sourceforge.net/

 

How hard would it be to make this into an installable package?  This sounds very much like what Tom wanted.

Tom, perhaps you could look into incorporating something like this "Samba File Extension Mapping VFS Module" into Unraid: http://file-ext-map.sourceforge.net/

 

How hard would it be to make this into an installable package?  This sounds very much like what Tom wanted.

 

It looks it's been written and compiled with the 2.27 version of Samba.  There is a version in the SourceForge CVS that is for Samba 3, but there is a bug report that it doesn't work when compiling it against Samba 3.0.10.  Someone more knowledgeable that I would have to compile it (and maybe fix it) for the version of Samba in unRAID (Samaba 3.2.3 in unRaid 4.4.2).  It would also require packages for the various audio formats (flac, mp3, ogg, etc) that one wants to transcode.  I don't know that there is a good solution to maintain tags.  It is not a simple process to transcode flac to mp3 while preserving tags.

 

This module was written to allow a networked mp3 player (the turtle beach audiotron) to play flac files from a SMB share, it was not intended to be used to transcode a large number of files for copying to another device or location.  That would be better done with a dedicated script, or even better a binary.

 

I've wrote a shell script that will mass transcode a directory of flac files and playlists to mp3 and ogg at a selected bitrate while preserving tags.  I have not investigated what it would take to get it to run on a unRAID server.  I wrote it an Ubuntu machine and it uses Korn shell scripting, flac, metaflac, lame, and oggenc.