Ubuntu – bulk/batch convert mp3 files to ogg via command line

It depends a little, on how Thunar handles multiple files. Basically, you can use parallel (website) to handle a lot of files.

sudo apt-get install parallel

So I would start with the following:

parallel avconv -i '{}' '{}.mp3' ::: %F

By default, it only does one job at a time. If you want to use multiple CPU cores in parallel, try parallel -j 4 ... for 4 jobs in parallel. Also check out man parallel.

In order to run it in Thunar's custom actions, this should be embedded like so:

xfce4-terminal -e "parallel avconv -i '{}' '{}.mp3' ::: %F"

To convert to other audio formats supported by avconv, just replace mp3 with that - but: take into consideration other issues like:

• flv and mp4 files contain aac audio and converting that to other audio formats may entail unwanted results - more here. If the aac file has about 95 kbps bitrate converting directly to mp3 would work, because the default bitrate for the mp3 would be 192kbps, which is a good option (according to here). If the aac file has a different bitrate, the mp3 should be modified accordingly.

• aac is a lossy format, and converting it to other formats should be considered in the context of the larger issue that converting between lossy formats is not recommendable. Even more, converting from a lossy format to a lossles one is pointless.

• a better option than converting aac to mp3 would be to just extract the aac audio into a m4a container, as described here.

Following Toon's Unix Recipes, for example (and the above examples):

sudo apt-get install ffmpeg
ffmpeg -i track1.aiff -f mp3 -acodec libmp3lame -ab 192000 -ar 44100 track1.mp3

(Older versions of Ubuntu can use avconv instead of ffmpeg.)