Batch convert .wav to mp3 and ogg

audacityaudiobatchmp3ogg

I have a few hundred .wav files that I need to convert to both ogg and mp3 format. Is there a way that I can do this in batch either from Audacity or from some other command line tool?

Best Answer

From a Unix-like (Linux, OSX, etc) commandline, ffmpeg can be used like this:

for f in *.wav; do ffmpeg -i "$f" -c:a libmp3lame -q:a 2 "${f/%wav/mp3}" -c:a libvorbis -q:a 4 "${f/%wav/ogg}"; done

This will convert every WAV in a directory into one MP3 and one OGG; note that it's case-sensitive (the above command will convert every file ending in .wav, but not .WAV). If you want a case-insensitive version:

for f in *.{wav,WAV}; do ffmpeg -i "$f" -c:a libmp3lame -q:a 2 "${f%.*}.mp3" -c:a libvorbis -q:a 4 "${f%.*}.ogg"; done

To convert every WAV in a directory recursively (that is: every WAV in the current directory, and all directories in the current directory), you could use find:

find . -type f -name '*.wav' -exec bash -c 'ffmpeg -i "$0" -c:a libmp3lame -q:a 2 "${0/%wav/mp3}" -c:a libvorbis -q:a 4 "${f/%wav/ogg}' '{}' \;

(Max respect to Dennis for his response here for finding me a working implementation of find with ffmpeg)

For case-insensitive search with find, use -iname instead of -name.

A note on -q:a: for MP3, the quality range is 0-9, where 0 is best quality, and 2 is good enough for most people for converting CD audio; for OGG, it's 1-10, where 10 is the best and 5 is equivalent to CD quality for most people.

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