Janina Sajka <janina(a)rednote.net> wrote: I like using soxi from sox. The following should get you started: (but do not run shell commands without understanding them :) find \( -iname '*.flac' -o -iname '*.mp3' -o -iname '*.ogg' \) -print0 | \ xargs -0 soxi The find(1) invocation above searches for files with flac, mp3, and ogg suffixes case-insensitively (-iname) wrapped inside the quoted '()' for grouping via '-o' ("or"). -print0 in find pairs with the -0 in xargs so it can deal with shell-unfriendly characters without breaking. Finally the soxi(1) command does the grunt work of handling all the command-line arguments for each supported filetype. You can also parse and sum the time with the output of "soxi -D" instead of just "soxi" (which shows output in a human-friendly format). On Debian-based systems, you'll probably want install sox with all the formats supported: apt-get install sox libsox-fmt-all See the section 1 manpages for soxi, find, and xargs for more options and possibilities.