About six months ago, I wrote about a Python script I made that made my life easier when it came to encoding files.  Well I made some simple changes and updated it to v1.1.

Changes include:

• Ability to override the default tags
• Command line option to change the Ogg Vorbis quality
• Somewhat cleaner output
• Verbose output for debugging or embedding this in scripts
• The program can optionally create the destination folders if they don’t exist
• Better handling of directories
• “Dry Run” mode to see what would happen without actually encoding anything
• Other minor changes and bug fixes
• The script can live in any arbitrary location (the previous one might have been able to as well, but I never tested it)
• License changed to GPL v3

The big one is probably the ability to override tags, which is what I was needing specifically.  Eventually I’ll add the ability to check date stamps on files and only encode files older than what gets specified.  But not tonight :)

Again, this is just a small bit of insight into how I handle my music.  It may not seem like much, but having this script actually saves me a lot of time and headaches.  You can download the script here (right-click and Save As).  To run, you need Python 2.6 or 2.7; and lame, flac, oggenc, and id3v2 all located somewhere in your PATH.

I run this on Slackware Linux.  I highly doubt this script will run correctly in Windows, but you can try.  It should work on Mac OS X, but I haven’t tested it.