I have about 5,000 FLAC albums at various levels of compression. A lot are already at level 8, but many are not. Is there some nifty app. that will run through the non-8 compressed ones and recompress them to an 8 for me, checking its work?
I cannot see that dBpoweramp can do this.
Thanks for any insights.
There is no way, that I know of, to convert a file without duplicating it. However, dBpoweramp does have a DSP that will delete the source file after conversion.
Addendum: I stand corrected.[strike][/strike]
From the FLAC documentation page (http://flac.sourceforge.net/documentation_tools_flac.html).
flac abc.flac --force
I'm sure a little experimentation with foobar2000 convert and the --force option would lead you to a workable solution.
Is $info(codec_profile) (http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Foobar2000:Title_Formatting_Reference#.24info.28name.29) populated by the compression level in the case of FLAC files?
Nope. The compression level information isn't stored anywhere in FLAC's metadata blocks, and I don't believe it can be derived from anything.
Correct, FLAC does not indicate its compression rate (unless it was written to the ID Tags).
Not that it matters. Recompress them all. It's not like you'll need your slide rule and a ream of paper to do it. It very well may take two weeks, but idle cycles are the devil's playthings!
In old days, there were lots of warnings that the --force might eat your files (the right thing for a converter to do is to write, compare, and then delete -- I believe this is the feature of dBpoweramp mentioned by EagleScout1998). If using --force, I would (and did) copy, recompress, verify and then copy back.