Hi,

My music collection is a mixture of mp3s and (predominantly) FLACs. Single songs are arranged in one directory, whilst albums (all FLACs) are in sub-directories of the artist’s folder. There is an m3u playlist in each of the album directories.

Having finally overcome prejudice and bought an mp3 player (Cowon iAudio X5L), I am looking to make an exact replica of the entire directory, except with all the FLACs converted to MP3s, and retaining the playlists (to save me the effort of manually going through 200 albums and re-doing each playlist…) and directory structure. Although having done hours of trawling, I can’t seem to find a program, or feature of a program what will allow me to both,

a) go through the directory and transcode, whilst retaining the playlists,
b) and convert only the FLACs and leaving the mp3s.

I’m sure that foobar2000 has some sort of capability to do this, and if so, could anybody possibly let me know how?

If not, is there another (reasonably user friendly) program that would allow me to do this?

Many thanks,

Charlie.

So, you would want the MP3s to be stored in the same folder structure, but in a different root folder (i.e.: not in the same folder as the FLAC)?

Do your playlists have absolute or relative references? Is it "C:\My Music\Pixies\Doolittle\01 - Debaser.flac" or just "01 - Debaser.flac"?

Are all the playlists the same name, e.g.: "playlist.m3u"?

Are the FLAC files all tagged?

OK,

1.


Precisely. The reason being that I could keep the large collection on an external hard-drive, as I do at present, and have an 'mp3' replica on the laptop, as well as the mp3 portable.

2.


Relative references: "01 - Debaser.flac".

3.


No, the playlists are in the format "Artist - Album.m3u"

4.


Yep.



Is this good or bad news ?

C.

Or maybe there isn't a way of doing it...?

At all?

It will probably be fairly hard to set up, but I think your best bet is to do all of your flacs, and sort them in a directory, and copy mp3s to that directory. Then, you can parse the text files (playlists) and replace every occurence of flac with mp3

Good luck,
Tristan.

This may be a silly question, but what do you mean by 'parse' the text files?

Also, are you saying go through each individual album of flacs, transcode them one (album) at a time to mp3?

C.

Parse: "To analyze or separate (input, for example) into more easily processed components."

The playlists you could do quite easily with a script.

Parsing is basically performing an action on an object - in this case you would parse the playlist by loading it in, amending ".flac" to ".mp3" and writing it to a new file. (The "parse" part is finding all strings that end with ".flac".)

I would suggest doing the files in a script as well, but transferring the tags becomes awkward. Tag.exe will let you copy tags from one file to another, but it won't write ID3v2.

I would probably do an Explorer search on the root music directory to find all FLAC files "*.flac". Drag them into foobar and then convert them to MP3 using the tags to recreate artist\album folders.

I would then use a script to "parse" the playlists.

It kinda depends on whether you want an exact copy of your current folder setup, or whether you basically just want to transcode your FLACs into a sensible new folder structure...

In fact, I just remembered a similar script I have written.

It's no exactly what you want, but it is something...

If you drop a folder onto create-playlist.bat it will create an m3u playlist file called "playlist.m3u" within every subfolder which contains a legal filetype (e.g.: mp3).

I know your playlists are called "<artist> - <album>.m3u" - and that can be achieved - but this is an example of how things can be achieved (even if they aren't exactly what you want).

A little more info here.

Edit: To clarify: you would convert all your FLACs using foobar, storing all MP3s in the root folder "C:\MP3". You would then drag "C:\MP3" onto the batch file and a playlist would be created in each subfolder called "playlist.m3u".

Even better:

TAG.EXE --playlist --recursive *.mp3

This will create a playlist like "<artist> -<album>.m3u" in each subfolder.

Got there eventually.

Edit: You may want to use:

TAG.EXE --onlyfiles --playlist --recursive *.mp3