Hi, I was wondering if there any applications in Linux that can change the bitrates of an existing ogg file?

I need this specifically for the purpose of converting ogg files I have on my pc to a lower bitrate so i can store them on my portable music player.

have you looked at the debian section of rarewares? could be helpful.... my first thought was soundconverter, my second soundkonverter. give them a try.

edit: sorry, I was assuming you were using some debian.... are you? if not, do a google search after those nice little apps.

Are you thinking of bitrate peeling? It was never implemented in any release-worthy version of vorbis. You can't do this without re-encoding.

How do you generally transfer music to your portable? I'd think one way to transcode on the fly as you load it up would be to make a little shell script that piped together a decoder and encoder, then sent the result to the dap. Then you could just drag n drop a list of files on the script and walk away.

No and it won't be until the entire library is rewritten, well at least for high standards of some folks on this forum.

thanks for replying guys.

I was thinking of writing a script or even doing some coding in python. BTW, I've found a python module called pymedia that does this, not checked it out yet.

http://pymedia.org/tut/src/recode_audio.py.html

If it proves too difficult to do this, I'll try rareware site.

Can't you just pipe the output of oggdec to oggenc??

yes...

it will have the same consequences as any lossy>lossy transcoding

...better have a good source and a low target...

don't bother with the idea of bitpeeling. you might as well re-encode (currently)


later

Argh.... I've managed to write a python script to transcode the tracks to 128 kbs and obviously noticed the loss of quality. I'm not sure how much this is done to transcoding but I think encode them again from CD some time in the future.

You might aswell think about ripping your cds to a lossless format, then you could convert them to your liking without having to re-rip your cds!

Huh, I often do single transcodes like that to load up my media player. I can sometimes tell if I sit at the computer and ABX them, but I've never been able to notice it outside of that. Half the time I can't even ABX, or just barely pass the pval mark.

OTOH I'm always transcoding from high bitrate MPC or Ogg to -V5 mp3. I think a couple people did some tests a while back and found that transcoding to a different codec was often better than re-encoding with the same codec.

This surprises me.. I figured that since they were the same codecs, throwing away the same information, that it'd be better.. I rarely transcode, but this is still extremely interesting to me.

And it is a shame that bitrate peeling isnt going to happen anytime soon, I'm sure it could have been extremely useful if it was a reality.