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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”;