Bash script for converting all .wav files in a directory to .mp3

by Sebastian Benthall

I’ve been working with music files lately trying to get Steve Morrell‘s music online. In the process I’ve had to convert his albums, which I’ve ripped in .wav format, to .mp3.

To accomplish this, I’ve written a short bash script. It’s requires a number of tricks I wasn’t familiar with and had to look up.

#!/bin/bash

SAVEIF=$IFS
IFS=$(echo -en "\n\b")

for file in $(ls *wav)
do
  name=${file%%.wav}
  lame -V0 -h -b 160 --vbr-new $name.wav $name.mp3
done


IFS=$SAVEIFS

Though it isn’t recommended, I did the for loop on ls because I wanted to limit it to .wav files. But that means the script chokes on file names with spaces unless you swap out the IFS variable.

I used LAME for the conversion.

4 Comments to “Bash script for converting all .wav files in a directory to .mp3”

slinkp says:

April 17, 2013 at 12:32 am

You don’t need IFS or `ls`. You get what you want by just doing: for file in *mp3

Thanks for the %% tip, that’s a new one on me! Reading `man bash` now.

- Sebastian Benthall says:
  
  April 17, 2013 at 12:43 am
  
  Thanks, Paul!
  
lightdee says:

July 3, 2013 at 4:27 pm

You can do it with a one-liner on the command-line
$ for f in /dir/*.wav; do lame $f $f.mp3; done

Tecnoplaga says:

October 8, 2013 at 10:00 am

Thanks friend, this is other solution:

find . -depth -iname “*.wav” -exec sh -c ‘lame -V0 -h -b 160 –vbr-new “$1” “${1%.wav}.mp3″‘ _ {} \;

Digifesto