Opus Obsession

I like everything in my life to be simple and uniform, and I spent some time creating scripts that ease the process of compulsively reformatting every file I download.

If you plan on modifying your files in any way, please make a backup first. For instance, all my high resolution audio files are copied to my second hard drive and compressed, just in case I need them in the future!

All my audio files are Opus because Opus sounds great at lower bitrates compared to other codecs. I usually convert a downloaded MP3 to a 96kbps Opus file with FFMPEG by running the command:

ffmpeg -i song.mp3 -ab 96k song.opus

Of course, music CD's usually have a lot of files that I need to convert, so I wrote a script to do this for me:

# opusify.sh - convert all MP3's to Opus.

for i in *.mp3; do
   ffmpeg -i "$i" -ab 96k "${i[@]/%mp3/opus}"
   rm *.mp3
done

I usually also edit the metadata of my music with Picard.

Now, sometimes when I buy a new CD and copy the songs to my computer, an ls command looks like this:

That Really (Really) Long Band Name - 01 - A Song Title.mp3
That Really (Really) Long Band Name - 02 - The Second Song.mp3
That Really (Really) Long Band Name - 03 - The Remix You Didn't Need.mp3
That Really (Really) Long Band Name - 04 - The Song You Always Skip.mp3
That Really (Really) Long Band Name - 05 - The One All Your Friends Talk About.mp3

On a portable device, the entire filename might not even be displayed, and I don't like that, so I made another script that can replace or remove strings from filenames:

# filenamer.sh - Replace strings from filenames

for i in *.opus; do
   mv "$i" "${i/old/new}"
done

In the above case, instead of:

i/old/new

We would write:

i/That\ Really\ \(Really\)\ Long\ Band\ Name\ -\ /

\ is an escape character, which we need for spaces and some special characters (like parenthesis).

And now everything looks right!

01 - A Song Title.mp3
02 - The Second Song.mp3
03 - The Remix You Didn't Need.mp3
04 - The Song You Always Skip.mp3
05 - The One All Your Friends Talk About.mp3

I like that! Let's move on to my last scenario.

Let's say you buy a CD and copy the music to your computer. The files look like this:

Track1.opus
Track2.opus
Track3.opus
Track4.opus
Track5.opus

Well darn. I can't tell which song comes first without looking at the back of the CD case!

Thankfully (ideally), most songs come with metadata that tell us the track number, song title, artist name etc.. We just need a script that can take the metadata from the song, and rename the file corresponding to that metadata! For this I used an existing program called opuscomment, which, thankfully, was very easy to compile.

The script for converting every song name to its metadata name looks like this:

#!/bin/bash

# autoTAG.sh - Rename the song file to the
# track number followed by the track title.

for i in *.opus; do
   opuscomment '$i' |
   egrep -i 'tracknumber|title' |
   sed 's/tracknumber=//I; s/title=//I' |
   sed -z 's/\n/ /' > file.txt
   mv '$i' '$(cat file.txt).opus'
done

rm file.txt

Admittedly, this is not beautiful, but now the files all look like this:

1 Some Good Song.opus
2 Another Great Tune.opus
3 If I Wrote a Song.opus
4 My Music Would Be Banned.opus
5 From America.opus

Finally, my music collection is the way I want it, perfect for playing in MPV or cmus!