“Don’t shy away from a terminal based encoder like this”
The program abcde has a default abcde.conf file that is stored in $/etc/abcde.conf after initial installation. You can copy it to your home folder $/home/username and edit it yourself or use one of mine (much faster). By having a file that contains all of your program options is brilliant all you do is save the .abcde.conf file to a backup drive in case your system crashes and then copy it back when you up and running again.
Keep it simple stupid (KISS)
A great website that helped immensely is abcde: Setup Guide which explained almost everything except, I was looking to encode voice tracks to Vorbis (ogg) not just music. Voice recordings don’t need to be encoded at such high bitrates since I was trying to encode each track to the smallest size possible without losing any quality. What I learned is that Vorbis (ogg) natively encodes with variable bit rate (VBR) and sounds way better than MP3 even when encoded to such a small size. The web site does state “consult the man pages for a wealth of options” which I did. I certainly learned some things while reading them but I dread trying to decode what their saying to me. On the web I typed oggenc in yahoo and found Hydrogenaudio a great site that gave me the encoding options of Vorbis and Flac.
To help me remember what encoding options to set when I use abcde in the future, I added a few of my own comments to all the abcde.conf files so you don’t have to look anywhere else to find what you like best.
What’s so amazing about abcde is once you configure the .abcde.conf script you just drop in a CD and type $abcde at a terminal and away it goes fully automated.
You can download any of my custom abcde.conf files below or just grab’em from the green (DOWNLDS box) at the right.
- Encode tracks to Flac and Ogg = abcde.conf-Flac-OGG-version
- Encode tracks to MP3 = abcde.conf-MP3-version
- Encode tracks to OGG = abcde.conf-OGG-version
(encoder settings are for music)
(encoder settings are for VBR music)
(encoder settings are for voice)
Important:
- Please investigate which ever file you chose w/ your favorite editor cause it has some options that should be changed to fit your system and you may want to fiddle with my default encoding options.
- Once you downld each file just rename the file to .abcde.conf and store it in your home folder $/home/username.
- And finally, don’t forget that the .abcde.conf files start with a dot so their hidden.
- Enjoy
