FLAC encoding to MP3 and Ogg

Okay, so you have a collection of amazing music in FLAC. But your portable media player only supports MP3. That means you have to convert the files before you can put them on your player. And it would be nice to convert whole albums.

If your player supports Ogg, you can simply execute this. It converts each of the .flac files in the current directory to Ogg.

oggenc -q7 *.flac

But how about MP3? LAME is a terrific MP3 encoder, but it doesn’t have an option to convert FLAC files.

Well, fortunately, Linux provides all the needed tools to get the needed combination of programs working together to do something.

for i in *.flac ; do flac -dc "${i}" | lame -b 320 --alt-preset insane - "/home/ml/mp3/${i%.flac}.mp3" ; done

Here we use the “for” cycle of bash to run the “flac” command for each of the .flac files in the current directory. Option -d tells flac to decode the given file and -c tells to write output to the standard output (stdout). LAME has two required arguments: input file and output file. But we can use a hyphen (“-”) for input file to use stdin and for output file to use stdout. In this case LAME has stdin received from flac. To transmit flac’s output to lame’s input we used pipes. Finally, ${i%.flac}.mp3 is a simple bash parameter substitution example. It takes the contents of the i variable, but without the ending “.flac”. Then you can just put .mp3 to the end of the string to make a new file extension.

Смотрим кино с субтитрами сразу на двух языках

Увидев только что на Хабрахабре вот эту блогозапись, подумал, а нельзя ли сделать так в Линуксе. Оказалось — можно. Причём метод не зависит от проигрывателя видео, главное, чтобы программа поддерживала субтитры в формате ASS.

if anyone needs this, i created a bash script allowing you to
watch/convert movies with two subtitles shown at the same time. you
may use this if a foreign friend comes to visit you and you both would
like to watch a movie with subtitles in your mother language, for
instance.

Если кому-то надо, я создал скрипт на bash'е, позволяющий смотреть/конвертировать фильмы так, чтобы одновременно показывались две дорожки субтитров. Вы можете им пользоваться, если, скажем, к вам в гости приезжает друг из другой страны, и вы бы оба хотели посмотреть фильм с субтитрами на вашем родном языке.