Hi. We have all of our CD's ripped in loss-less FLAC and WMA, but with my wife's iPhone and my Pre, I find I really need them in mp3 format as well. I have been using media monkey to do on the fly mp3 conversion, and it works OK, but moving moving a pile of songs takes a long time to do the conversions, even in on a quad core system. And a lot of the time, we're looking to move over a lot of music just before leaving on an outing, so it's too slow for that.

So since I have a ton of storage available on my home NAS, I would like to have a parallel mp3 archive of all the music, with automatic converting whenever new FLAC or WMA tracks are added. For the few mp3 tracks I do have (downloaded from amazon), I'd like them just copied over. I don't want to have both versions in the same library, since at home or over the network, I'd like to be able to only see the lossless versions. The mp3 archive would not be indexed by anyone (except itunes) and just moved over on demand. It's important that all the metadata be converted over as well.

Does such a tool exist? I've looked through the archives here and can't find such a tool referenced, but if I've missed something, let me apologize in advance for that.

Thanks,
mike

Mediamonkey, Foobar, dBpoweramp, Winamp, and countless others all do mass transcoding.

As far as having a program monitor a directory for files to transcode, I don't think anyone has ever wanted that feature.

For FLAC to MP3 conversion there is flac2mp3.pl, a perl-script which maintains a parallel MP3-library. It traverses the FLAC-library structure and transcodes any new files to the corresponding MP3-library. Updated tags on files will also be spotted and transferred, without transcoding if the checksum for the sound content is unchanged. Just launch this script whenever you have added new FLAC files or updated tags.

For some reason Robin Bowes' flac2mp3.pl site is down at the moment. There you will find more information.

The present release doesn't support embedded cover art but I wrote a modified version which adds this functionality (ticket #96). The released version also doesn't copy non-flac files (e.g. mp3 or jpg-files) in the FLAC library structure over to the MP3-library but I have made a modified version which handles that too. If you are interested PM me here on Hydrogenaudio and I will send you my version.

Nifty, but still not automatic.

fb2k + foo_new_file_stamper_mod.dll component

What OS do you use? If it's Linux, mp3fs is a great utility: http://mp3fs.sourceforge.net/

This looks great. One way to completely automate this process would be to use Windows Task Scheduler. Just schedule the script to run every night.

PM sent, I'd love to get a copy of the script that also moves over JPGs in the folder.