Converting from Ogg Vorbis to MP3 in Amarok

Since version 2.6, you can tell Amarok to convert (transcode) every music track to MP3 when copying it to a given device.

There’s a bug, however which causes MP3 files converted from Ogg Vorbis to lose all metadata (artist, album, title etc). This is a showstopper for me.

This happens because Amarok needs to pass an option to ffmpeg to tell it to get the metadata from the first stream found in the Ogg file as opposed to the default of getting it from global metadata. Unfortunately as far as I can tell there’s no way to configure the ffmpeg command line used by Amarok. The solution then is to replace the ffmpeg binary in the path with a script that will do that, like this one:

#!/usr/bin/python
import os
import sys

AVCONV_FFMPEG = '/usr/bin/ffmpeg.distrib'
os.execv(AVCONV_FFMPEG, sys.argv + ['-map_metadata', '0:0,s0'])

In Debian or Ubuntu, you can divert the real ffmpeg binary and install the script above as /usr/bin/ffmpeg:

$ sudo dpkg-divert --add /usr/bin/ffmpeg
$ sudo cp /tmp/fake-ffmpeg.py /usr/bin/ffmpeg
$ sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/ffmpeg

There’s another bug where Amarok needlessly converts even MP3 files when copying them to the device.

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