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TODO: handle exceptions even when they happen in callbacks TODO: give time estimates for progress bar TODO: choose dir, add recursively input files that need to be converted TODO: read GNOME HIGv2 and fix accordingly

README for GNOME sound converter application

This is my simple sound converter application for the GNOME environment. It is very rudimentary. It only reads from FLAC and Ogg Vorbis files and only outputs Ogg Vorbis files. The output files are put into the same directory as the input files, with the suffix replaced with ".ogg" (unless that file exists already, in which it adds a number also). The user interface is raw, but should be simple enough.

This application is somewhat less fast than various command line tools. Not a whole lot, however, and not enough to make me worry about performance for the foreseeable future. If you want ultimate performance, the command line tools are always going to be preferable.

Supported audio formats

All file formats that GStreamer can read from should now be supported (thanks to the wonderful "decodebin" element). The output formats are more restricted, however, since there is no "encodebin" element to magically convert to any format we might want.

Type Supported?

        Ogg Vorbis          yes
        FLAC                yes
        Wave                yes
        MP3                 no

Note that since Debian won't package MP3 encoders due to patent issues, I have no easy way to implement support for it. I would, however, accept a (clean) patch, if you can write the support yourself. Alternatively, if someone wants to give me access to a system that has the "lame" GStreamer element installed, I should be able to write the support myself. I am, however, too lazy to install GStreamer and the related external parts from source, since I have no use for MP3 myself.

Copyright and acknowledgements

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; version 2 of the License.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA