[Wish] Please add bps and sample-rate conversion via sox

[Daniel Dietrich]

Could you please add the possibility to convert tracks to another bits per sample (bps) and sample rate via sox?

My use case: Convert high quality lossless music (flac format) to burn it to a standard audio disc.
At the moment, when i try to convert from flac to flac / wav / any other lossless codec, it's not possible to set the bps and sample rate with soundKonverter.

Ubuntu Precise, soundKonverter 1.0.0-rc3

[Daniel Faust (hessijames)]

That's something I would like to have, too. But it most likely requires some deep changes.
As a start it might be a good idea to have such a file. So if you don't mind it would be great if you could send me one to hessijames gmail com. And it would be great to know where you get those files from. Vinyl rip?

[Daniel Faust (hessijames)]

Never mind the file, I got some.

[Daniel Dietrich (shaddowy2)]

Sorry for the late reply. I obtained my files through various sources, for example https://www.hdtracks.com, http://www.linnrecords.com and http://www.qobuz.com/ and own vinyl rips.
You can find testfiles with different settings at http://www.linnrecords.com/linn-downloads-testfiles.aspx

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[^rooker (rooker)]

I'd also love to see the resampling- and bps-option for all output formats! :)
I'm promoting soundkonverter among musicians, as they often need to transcode their songs, and soundkonverter is convenient and easy to use. Thanks! :)

In case someone stumbles across this bugreport, here's a hint how to resample and change bps with sox:

  "$ sox input.flac -r 44100 -b 16 output.flac"

(This will even keep the metadata fields set in the input.flac file)

[Daniel Faust (hessijames)]

I released a first beta version of soundkonverter 2. It supports bps and sample-rate conversion via sox.
You can get the source at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/29089012/soundkonverter-1.9.80.tar.gz
Or you can find pre-compiled packages (including ubuntu) at http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/HessiJames/
Note: Compiling Ubuntu 12.10 packages won't work at the moment but I guess 12.04 packages will work just fine.
It would be great to hear your feedback.

[Daniel Dietrich (shaddowy2)]

Thank you for your work!

I tested the soundKonverter 1.9.80 .deb file under Ubuntu 12.10.

The conversion to Opus works nice, I did find only a small problem.:
1. When the replaygain checkbox is set from a previous soundKonverter session (for example from a Flac to Mp3 conversion) and I try in a new session to convert an audio file to opus, the replaygain checkbox gets greyed out, but every conversion fails because soundKonverter still tries to replaygain the opus file at the end, which results in an error.

One question: Does soundKonverter also copy the tags (Artist, Title,...) to the new opus files?
I couldn't check that, as no audio tag editor seems yet able to read/write Opus tags. Suggestions welcome :)

A bug I've encountered with the Sox conversions:
2. When I try to convert from Flac to Flac, Ogg or Mp3 and check only the channel conversion to Mono, the file gets encoded but it is still stereo.

[Daniel Faust (hessijames)]

Thanks for your feedback.
I fixed the two bugs you mentioned (plus another one that caused the sox effects to not work).
Regarding opus, taglib 1.8 does not support it. taglib 1.9 will, though. I will implement it as soon as I have the time.

[Daniel Dietrich (shaddowy2)]

Thank you for your work!
I will close the bug report for good :)