Over the years I have converted most of my music collection to digital files. I have mostly used EAC, THE BEST ripper and encoder. I have predominately created two files (.wav and .mp3). I kept the .wav file because it represents the full quality version of the file and would always let me get back to the original sound in case my .mp3 were not sufficient for some reason. Recently I decided to change my methodology and go with .flac (stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec) a lossless compressed format.
One of the main reasons I have changed is most good audio players [Billy does] now play .flac natively.
This would allow me to reduce my storage while still preserving the ability to get back to the original file if needed.
However, the problem is converting all of the existing folders of .wav files to .flac files and then getting rid of the redundant files (the .mp3 and .wav). In case your wondering I had about 10,000 files in around 900 folders to deal with, and really didn’t want to do much of this work by hand.
Well, sourceforge to the rescue with flac for windows. That gives me a command line tool to convert .wav to .flac. Then I just needed to create a script to handle the removal of the other files. Along with flac.exe I needed a couple of other binaries to help my script out. Choice.exe always makes batch files a bit more easy for users, realdate.com allows me to timestamp the files nicely, and last but far far from least is one of my favorites sed (good old stream editor), get it along with other unix binaries natively complied for win32. With this bunch, and my fairly simple batch file, processing the files was pretty straight forward.
Some notes:
1. If you want the script to remove your .mp3 files that have the same name as your .wav files (except the extension of course) the path needs to be the same (they must live in the same directory).
2. I’m sure there is a [faster][simpler][more efficient] way of doing all of this, if so, feel free to either edit the batch file, link me to the other site etc…
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