transcoding my music collection

I decided to transcode my active music collection from FLAC to MP3-320k, because I started to run out of space on my 64GB (!) phone and 25GB VPS.

To start, I created a temporary on my folder in which the FLAC files could live.

$ mkdir ~/Work/transcoding

Since my music folder is actually mixed-format, I wanted to only copy the FLAC files to the transcoding folder, and preserve the structure.

My first attempt looked something like this:

~/Music/ $ find . -name '*.flac' -exec cp {} ~/Work/transcoding/{} \;
[many errors]

Since cp doesn’t let us copy a file where the parent directory doesn’t exist, I resorted to a fast hack.

~/Music/ $ find . -name '*.flac' -exec mkdir -p ~/Work/transcoding/{} \;
~/Music/ $ find . -name '*.flac' -exec rmdir ~/Work/transcoding/{} \;
~/Music/ $ find . -name '*.flac' -exec cp {} ~/Work/transcoding/{} \;

This was what I knew how to do quickly, but if anyone would like to tell me the Right Way™ to do this, that’d be nice.

Next, we get to actually transcoding.

First try:

~/Work/transcoding/ $ find . -name '*.flac' -exec ffmpeg -i {} -threads 0 -b:a 320k {}.mp3
...

[In another terminal]
$ htop
[One core is maxed out, while the rest idle]

Even though we’re passing in -threads 0 here, it looks like ffmpeg’s mp3 encoder doesn’t thread too well. Not a problem, let’s use parallel.

~/Work/transcoding/ $ find . -name '*.flac' | parallel ffmpeg -i {} -threads 0 -b:a 320k {}.mp3
...

[Two minutes later]
~/Work/transcoding/ $

We’re done, I delete the old FLACs with some more find hackery (but we’ve had enough of that for now), and copy the transcoded MP3s over. My music directory’s shrunk from 30GB to only 17GB. Nice.