Any audio files → CDDA FLAC Tracks

My audio collection has grown rather big. It consists of various audio files in different formats. The most part of it is in lossless form, for example:

• FLAC files in separate tracks (various bps, sample rate, etc.);

• one big FLAC file + .cue file (sometimes with ridiculously high sample rate, produced by people who believe in 192 kHz);

• Monkey's Audio, .ape format (sometimes again one big file + .cue file);

• Apple Lossless, .m4a format;

• etc.

So, I've decided to bring my entire collection to a uniform state by converting all files to FLAC of CDDA quality, so that every track is a separate file. This is the best way to store music, I think.

It feels like a nightmare to convert all the stuff manually, because I need to:

• preserve useful tags;

• add some tags that we can infer;

• remove “comment” and “genre” tags because they are useless;

• merge every double album into one digital album;

• eliminate bonus tracks that go with classic albums;

• convert names of files too, so they all are of the same form: NN Track Title.flac, where NN is composition's index in album;

• fix names of some albums, for example Abbey Road [2009 Digital Remaster] should be Abbey Road (for I can hear that it's a remaster);

• I think it's a good idea to create playlists per album and per artist;

• I could create some reports about duration/quality of every album and save them as .txt files.

For two last tasks I have mkm3u and LSA. The rest of it is done with this script.

Installation

This is a Python 3 script, you will need Python 3 installed to run it. Also, it depends on the following things that you need to install too:

• TagLib—a library for reading and editing the meta-data of several popular audio formats;

• TagLib bindings for Python;

• FFmpeg—über-level audio and video converter.

TagLib and FFmpeg are available in repositories of most major distributions, Python bindings for TabLib can be installed with pip quite easily too.

To install flacize, cd into the repository and execute the following:

# pip install -r requirements.txt
# bash install.sh

Done. You can use uninstall.sh script to uninstall the software.

Documentation

flacize comes with its own man page. Here is short synopsis:

usage: flacize [-h] [-o DIR] [-r N] [-w N] [-c N] [-p] [-d] [-s N] [-t N] [-e N]
               [--license] [--version]
               [DIR]

Convert any audio files into CDDA quality FLAC tracks

positional arguments:
  DIR                   directory to scan

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -o DIR, --output DIR  output directory (created if needed)
  -r N, --rate N        output sample rate (defaults to 44100 Hz)
  -w N, --width N       output sample width (defaults to 16 bit)
  -c N, --channels N    number of channels (defaults to 2)
  -p, --preserve        preserve quality of originals
  -d, --delete          delete original files after conversion
  -s N, --shift N       add N to index of every track
  -t N, --total N       specify total number of tracks N
  -e N, --crop N        crop last N tracks (e.g. remove bonus tracks)
  -a, --dont-ask        don't ask user even if cannot deduce some tag
  --license             show program's license and exit
  --version             show program's version number and exit

License

Copyright © 2015–2017 Mark Karpov

Distributed under GNU GPL, version 3.