conversionsound
I tried to use Sound Converter to convert several folders of files from .m4a to .mp3 format and lost all file metadata in the conversion. I used Ubuntu 10.04 LTS with Sound Converter 1.4.4-2.
Is this expected? Should I be using another program to perform this function on Ubuntu?
I'd stick with ffmpeg. You weren't far off. Here's what I've just used to convert a load of 50-meg flacs to 5-meg m4as, complete with metadata:
find -name "*.flac" -exec ffmpeg -ab 192k -i "{}" -map_meta_data "{}.m4a":"{}" "{}.m4a" \;
You could expand that to clean up the original files or save them somewhere else (I was actually struggling with that bit).
For some reason, mine was crawling along at 190kbits/s so there might be a better encoding string (I should hope there is, this is a bit silly).
To simply convert files from Windows WAV to FLAC on the commandline the official tool flac would be the obvious choice.
flac ~/Music/*.wav
would convert all WAV files from the Music directory in your HOME to flac. By using the option:
flac --keep-foreign-metadata ~/Music/*.wav
even non-flac metadata will be preserved in your resulting *.flac file. However if - as you say - your files are not tagged there is not an easy way to achieve correct metatags. Some tools like metaflac from the flac package can import metatags from file but these files need to meet specific criteria for appropriate tag recognition involving conversion of your XML file.
Therefore I would rather recommend one of the graphical solutions like Ex Falso or
Musicbrainz Picard
that offer the creation of metatags from filenames (in case they are appropriate).
Picard also has a tool to auto-recognize a not tagged song to look it up in the Musicbrainz library and create appropriate metatags.
Before playing around with tags it is strongly recommended to backup your original files in case something goes wrong. I speak of own experience when tagging of multiple files resulted in entirely wrong and bad tags that led to almost unretrievable originals as these files were listed with a (random) wrong name in my library.
Best Answer
I tested soundconverter 1.4.4-2 using maverick and a sample Apple lossless in the .m4a container from here: http://samples.mplayerhq.hu/A-codecs/lossless/, the metadata is preserved after conversion to .mp3, I verified this with the Banshee media player,Totem and Rhythmbox, I even made copies of the file and tried a batch conversion and all files converted to .mp3 has the original metadata, I converted a .flac lossless to .mp4 also and again the metadata in the .flac was carried over to the .mp4 file, even the cover art from the flac file was there, I then converted the .mp4 audio file to .mp3 and the metadata was still there, I also used Easytag-aac to embed a cover art in the .m4a file and after conversion I was able to see the cover art in the .mp3 file when playing with Banshee.
From my experience here I would say that the loss of metadata after conversion with soundconverter should not be the expected outcome. Even this dated thread http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=138419&page=3 from the Ubuntu forum shows that soundconverter is supposed to retain the tags in the output format.