Size optimazation for projects using .mp3 music

[hanetzer]

Some projects I have seen use .mp3 audio; either as default or as an optional addon for musical quality. Now, mp3 is pretty nice for the most part, but it can be rather bulky. I present here, as an alternative, the conversion of mp3 to ogg format.

Now, as many of you may be aware, I use RMXP under linux using wine; the problem is that .mp3 and .mid music is a bit... tricky to say the least, under wine, however .ogg works perfectly fine, and is the default for 2/4 of the music types under RMXP, and .ogg can be used on most all machines. Further, it is much smaller in size than .mp3 [I converted my entire .mp3 collection, amounting to 8d19h of playtime, to .ogg & the collection shrunk from about 24gb to 9gb, a serious reduction in size] with no discernable loss of quality to my ear.

So, as a size-saving suggestion, you may want to try it out. There are many tools you can use to achieve this, both gui and cli, for all OS's. I personally prefered command line interface because it can be automated [the above conversion of my .mp3 collection took only 1 command, and preserved all of my music metadata (artist, album, etc) and did it all in-location without me having to re-arrange the resulting converted files.], with the exception of embedded album art.

Under linux you would want to use the program dir2ogg, and maybe iOS too as they are very similar. Under debian based linux distros you would install it with this comand:

Code:

sudo apt-get install dir2ogg

and performn the conversion inself with:

Code:

dir2ogg -r [--delete-input] *

executed from the root of your music collection's folder/directory [in my case my ~/Music directory], this will recursively [meaning enter all subfolders] convert any music file it finds to .ogg; the --delete-input will do exactly that, delete the original audio file after conversion [I would only do this atfter a test run to see if you are happy with the resultant audio quality, it was just fine for me]. To convert .mid you will need to first convert/export the .mid to .wav or some other format as dir2ogg cannot directly convert .mid.

As of yet I don't know of an easy way to do this under windows as I no longer run windows on any of my machines, so if anyone wants to put in their 2cents please do so.