[linux-audio-user] ardour and mp3?

[Paul Davis]

On Sat, 2007-02-03 at 16:39 -0500, Matt Price wrote:
> hi,
> 
> just starting to use ardour2 for production (thanks everyone for the
> help) and running into a little frustration with the mp3 files from my
> recorder.  ardour of course doesn't import from mp3; I can, I suppose,
> convert the files to mp3 one at a time when I want to, but I wonder if
> there's a more fluid way of e.g. converting files when they're uploaded,
> or at least converting all files in a particular folder or something.
> are there other people out there who have to deal with a similar
> situation?

this is an area where, unlike all proprietary DAWs, we'd prefer you to
leverage the power of the platform you are running Ardour on.

for example, suppose you have a program called mp3towave and a directory
full of mp3 files, you can create a script that looks like this:

------- cut here ------------
#!/bin/sh

for file in $*
do
    mp3towave $file
done
------- and here -------------

the beauty of this approach is that although today you "just" want to do
mp3 conversion, next week, you can adapt this to something else. for
example:

	* convert them to aiff instead
	* convert and resample them
	* convert them into mono files, 2 per mp3 file
	* rename them all based on some rule
	* convert ogg/vorbis files instead
	* convert AAC files instead
	* convert them and filter them as well

and so on. if we built this into Ardour, you'd end up with a huge mass
of code duplicating the cool functionality that Unix has offered you for
30 years or more ;)

let me know how this looks. i have not discussed specific tools you
could use for the conversion since it sounds as if you have that
covered.

--p