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”;