22 Sep
2010
22 Sep
'10
3:31 p.m.
Excerpts from Arnold Krille's message of 2010-09-22 12:59:09 +0200:
Hi,
On Wednesday 22 September 2010 11:11:49 Louigi Verona wrote:
I liked soundkonverter more back when I used that stuff (note the k
instead of c). It pulls a lot less dependencies too, but it seems to be
kde3.
Well, there are lots of ways to do it, and GUI tools are usually
inferior, at least when you want to control your conversion exactly.
They often don't expose the encoders parameters properly.
Yeah, I am not saying it is anyone's fault
and my CLI abilities are very
basic. Also, even when I do research such stuff, I forget it quickly. For
instance, I remember testing a CLI command to convert photos from one size
to another. It was very fast and efficient and I was really convinced that
it is much faster than firing up a GUI program. However, when I had to do a
similar task some months later, at that moment I had no access to the
Internet and I could not remember what command that was and how to use it.
So eventually I had to give up.
Same with file encoding. It does not come up very often, when it does -
will I remember the command?
Normally when I have to repeat a number of commands, I write a bash/sh-script.
That also helps in remembering. (One of the basic principles of programming
and administration, dry - don't repeat yourself.)
Only in this case of conversion/copying of files the resulting script would
have been to complicated for a ten-minutes hack (several subdirs with source-
files of ogg, mp3 and more as input converted to a target dir, preserving the
directory-structure while converting all files to mp3 when the target is the
mp3-only player and convert all to mp3 or ogg when the target is the mobile
player - thats the features that script would have needed), so I searched
aptitude for something and found the converter. It isn't as flexible as the
ideas I had for a script, but was faster to "write"...
Have fun,
Arnold