The tools I am talking about are mpg123 and mpg321. Although mpg321 claims to be a drop-in replacement for mpg123, I still prefer to use both tools (the former for converting .mp3 to .wav and the latter for converting .mp3 to .ogg). And in this article you will see how simple it is (using the command line) to convert these file types.

Installation

Since we will be using the command line for the conversion, we’ll install the tools from the command line. The distribution I am using for example is based on the recent, stable Debian. You will not need to add any repositories to your /etc/apt/sources.list file, because all of the tools are found on the standard repositories. To install these tools, follow these steps:

1. Open up a terminal window.
2. If needed, su to root (if you use sudo in place of root, just add sudo to the beginning of the installation commands below).
3. Issue the command apt-get install mpg123 mpg321 vorbis-tools

That’s it. Now let’s take a look at how the tools are used.

Convert .mp3 to .wav

The first conversion is to .wav. Why use .wav? First and foremost, the .wav file is not compressed and is lossless, so the sound is better. The only downfall is that the files are much bigger. So, if you have a particular file and you want to retain as much quality as you can, .wav is the format to use. Of course, in this instance we are converting a lossy file type (.mp3) so there is already diminished sound quality. But why diminish it further? To make this conversion, the command looks like this:

mpg123 -w output_file.wav input_file.mp3

Where output_file is the name of the .wav file that will be converted from the mp3 file named input_file. So let’s say you want to convert the file Rush_Tom_Sawyer.mp3 to .wav. That command would look like:

mpg123 -w Rush_Tom_Sawyer.wav Rush_Tom_Sawyer.mp3

Convert .mp3 to .ogg

The .ogg format is the open source equivalent to .mp3 and is supported by many players. The .ogg format is a good format to use when creating “mix cd’s” (I’m old, I still want to say “mix tapes”), because you can fit more files per CD than if you were using the .wav format. But to convert the .mp3 to .ogg the command looks like:

mpg321 Input_File.mp3 -w raw && oggenc raw -o Output_file.ogg

Let’s examine the same file we converted to .wav above. The command to convert to .ogg from .mp3 would look like:

mpg321 Rush_Tom_Sawyer.mp3 -w raw && oggenc raw -o Rush_Tom_Sawyer.ogg

Easy right?

Final thoughts

Now you can get crafty and create batch scripts that will allow you to do batch conversions. Naturally many will think “Why would I go through that, when I can just download a handy GUI tool like Soundconverter to do the job? Why? Because it’s always smart to have the command line option around. One day you might need it.

Easy Tag is an open source application available for Linux and Windows that allows you edit tags for the following file types:

• MP3
• MP2
• MP4/AAC
• FLAC
• Ogg Vorbis
• MusePack
• Monkey’s Audio
• WavPack

And what’s best about Easy Tag is that you most likely won’t have to manually edit all of those files.

Simple installation

You will find Easy Tag in your distribution repository, so you can fire up Synaptic, search for “easytag” (no quotes), select the package for installation, and click Apply to install.  Or, if you prefer command line, you could install with a command like yum install easytag. Once installed, you will find Easy Tag in your Audio (or Sound and Video) menu.

How Easy Tag works for you

Figure 1

There are two painless ways Easy Tag can be used: Automatic tag recognition and CDDB search. Althought it might be tempting to use the automatic tag recognition, the best, and most reliable method is using the CDDB choice. So when you fire up Easy Tag (and after it searches through your music library) you will see that it lists all of your music in the middle pane (see Figure 1).  What you see, in Figure 1, is a section of files with incorrect tags. You know a file has an incorrect tag if it is listed in red. Now let’s fix those tracks.

The best way to do this is to select an entire

Figure 2

album of tracks. Although it looks like all of the tracks for the Rush album Signals are correct, there is something amiss. So I will highlight all of those tracks and right click the selections. From the right click menu select CDDB search. When the new window opens (see Figure 2) select the correct listing and then click Apply. It will seem as if nothing has happened, but something has. Click the Close button. Now you have to save the changes. Go the the File menu and select Save. A small window will appear for each change you are about to make (See figure 2). Click Yes for each change (unless you check the “Repeat action…” checkbox).

When the save is complete you can go back to the track listings and see that those files are no longer listed in red. Their tags are now correct.

Figure 3

If your CDDB search comes up with no results, then you might have to reconfigure the server Easy Tag uses. To do this to go Settings > Preferences and then click the CD Database tag (see Figure 3).  You can change the server settings for automatic and manual searches. When I changed mine to freedb.freedb.org, all of my troubles went away.

Final thoughts

Use Easy Tag to clean up your music collection tags. Not only does this make a tedious task simpler, it keeps your music collection clean so that music players can easily read and display the tags for your music files.

If you do not have a software that supports plugins you could use the excellent freeware Burrn which supports many formats which are: wav, mp3, mpc, ogg, aac, mp4, ape, flac, ofr, wv, tta, m3u, pls and fpl playlists and cue sheets as well as embedded cuesheets for ape, wv and flac files. It reads the tags automatically and adds them to the burning process. Burrrn is really easy to use, it supports drag and drop and direct editing of song title and artist.

You will have to choose a burner the first time it starts. Once this is done the main window opens and you may add new songs to the CD by dragging songs or cue sheets to the main window.  If you want a certain order for your files you have to drag them one at a time. Last but not least it offers a way to adjust the replaygain for all songs before the songs are burned to the audio cd.