Last weekend I was poking around my music collection on my server and noticed a bunch of artists and albums not showing up in my library (I use Zune to listen to my music and copy it to my phone). Diving in I noticed one folder was full of M4A files... arg! Damn iTunes format... I don't want Apple or Microsoft format, I want standard plain old MP3! Using the following PowerShell command, I found there were a ton of these types of files on my server:
1: Get-ChildItem "\\RIVERCITY-NAS1\Music" -recurse -include *.m4a
Yikes... over 800 files! OK, that's enough to look for a way to automate this conversion process. After a bit of research, I found the freely available VLC player had the ability to convert these types of files... for free. Sweet! So after a little work, I got this PowerShell script working:
1: function ConvertToMp3(
2: [switch] $inputObject,
3: [string] $vlc = 'C:\Program Files (x86)\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe')
4: { 5: PROCESS {6: $codec = 'mp3';
7: $oldFile = $_; 8: $newFile = $oldFile.FullName.Replace($oldFile.Extension, 9: ".$codec").Replace("'","");
10: 11: &"$vlc" -I dummy "$oldFile" ":sout=#transcode{acodec=$codec,
12: vcodec=dummy}:standard{access=file,mux=raw,dst=`'$newFile`'}" vlc://quit | out-null; 13: 14: # delete the original file
15: Remove-Item $oldFile; 16: } 17: } 18: 19: function ConvertAllToMp3([string] $sourcePath) {
20: Get-ChildItem "$sourcePath\*" -recurse -include *.m4a | ConvertToMp3;
21: } 22: 23: ConvertAllToMp3 '\\RIVERCITY-NAS1\Music';
Sweet... until I noticed all the MP3 files didn't have any ID3 tags. So I needed to add a step. I found an old copy of the TagLib# library. that would read the tags from one file and copy them to another. So I added the following function to the script:
1: function DuplicateId3Tags
2: { 3: param (
4: [string]$sourceM4aTrack, 5: [string]$targetMp3Track 6: ) 7: 8: # load sharp library for working with tags
9: [Reflection.Assembly]::LoadFrom("C:\Users\andrew.RIVERCITY\Documents\Music Workshop\taglib-sharp.dll")
10: 11: #load files
12: $sourceM4a = [TagLib.File]::Create($sourceM4aTrack); 13: $targetMp3 = [TagLib.File]::Create($targetMp3Track); 14: 15: # copy tags
16: [TagLib.Tag]::Duplicate($sourceM4a.Tag, $targetMp3.Tag, $true); 17: 18: $targetMp3.Save(); 19: }And added a call to the function right before I delete the original file and voila... 100% MP3 again!
1: # update ID3 tags on target file
2: DuplicateId3Tags "$oldFile" "$newFile";