This leaves us in a conundrum as I don’t want to rerip all of my music, and
Kristina would like to not have rip everything either. I’ve found
Davyd Madeley’s
OGG->MP3 script. This works just fine under linux (mad props to
GStreamer folks). But
that still leaves us with the fact that MP3 is
teh suck.

A little hacking shows that there are AAC plugins for GStreamer (based on
libfaac) and that they
should
be able to create AAC files. Unfortunately, with GStreamer
0.8.8 this does not seem to be the case. Which is sad, because I might
actually consider converting my music to AAC, but that’s not going to happen
now.

So here’s what I’d like to do, provide an easy way for Kristina to load
OGG files, transcoded of course, onto her iPod. Ideally, it would be cool
if this could be relatively transparent. Here’s our setup to work with:

• music hosted on Ubuntu Hoary
• Client runs Windows XP Home edition
• Relatively new iPod Mini

Samba takes care of the file access. Is there a way I can make a virtual
sort of share that automatically transcodes music as it is accessed (similar
to what KDE does with KIO Slaves?). This
would be the ideal situation. If that’s not possible, is a way to have iTunes
transcode from OGG when it gets ogg files? If that’s not possible, anyone know
of a simple desktop app that my wife could use to transcode between OGG and
AAC or MP3?

Yeah, this is a lazyweb request. I’ve done my share of searching on this
problem. I dislike how everything in the windows world is hidden behind a
“pay me now” ideology. ::sigh:: There is an
OGG QuickTime component,
but I’ve heard mixed results on that.

ps: don’t even try and suggest iPod
Linux. I’m not going there with Kristina’s iPod. Both her and I have
something better to do.