This script (mp3treesync.sh) can be used to keep an MP3 mirror of a non-MP3 source music tree. It is useful, for example, to maintain a portable music player-friendly music tree from your high quality FLAC tree. The mirror process only transcodes files to the destination tree if they're new or they have changed since the last mirroring - ie it will be slow the first time it is run, but should be relatively quick after that. The script depends on a few things to do the heavy lifting:
I've added a script that can be used to periodically download and transcode radio programmes from Real Audio internet streams here. It runs on Linux and makes use of a number of open source tools to do its job.
par.pl is a script to download streams in Real Audio format and transcode them to a format of the users' choice. The output audio file is also appropriately tagged.
Recent versions of SlimServer and the SqueezeBox2 support Replay Gain, a technology to remove the annoying difference in recording levels between different albums. Replay Gain for FLAC is completely non-destructive - you can always choose whether or not to make use of the Replay Gain tags when playing, and if you choose not to the original data is preserved completely unchanged.
Note: Since SlimServer 6 I have switched to using individual FLAC files for each track on an album rather than the single FLAC and CUESHEET method described here. I found that the support in SlimServer for FLAC+CUE was not totally reliable, and was broken more frequently by development changes than support for individual FLAC files.
I've written a simple Perl script that allows you to easily compute and store Replay Gain tags for a directory tree of music. The script will use the folder structure to recognise albums to ensure that both album and track tags are correctly computed.
You can find the script here.
I've written a couple of scripts and a HOWTO on this. It explains a method of allowing your (slow) compression job to be offloaded to your music server whilst preserving the tags and full cuesheet in Exact Audio Copy.
You can find the page here.