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Muzik Faktry: Processing music files on Linux

Apparently i'm an oddball because my music files usually contain only the artist, title and genre tags and i only use 3 or 4 of the latter. I also add some ReplayGain information to even out the volume across files. I'm not interested in embedding lyrics, memes or whatever else people are sticking in their music these days. I prefer compact, error-free files that meet my medium-high quality standard and that's why we're here. If you're an audiophile geek with multiple ex-wives who spends weeks researching which DAC will provide the truest sound, this might be beneath you, but if you just like to listen to good sounding music while you prune your hedges, read on.

Typically i acquire specific songs from various artists rather than entire albums, mainly because i've yet to run across an album for which i like every song. The problem with this disjointed approach is that it results in consistency problems regarding tags, headers, volume levels, file names, etc.. Most maddening is when some aspiring government employee thinks that transcoding a 64 kbit/s MP3 to FLAC is somehow a great idea. With the exception of the latter, most problems are generally easy to fix using a few software tools.

Enter Muzik Faktry, a Bash shell script which is a comprehensive wrapper that handles various 3rd party tools and does so without relying on stuff i don't like relying on, such as Java, Wine, Mono, etc..

Muzik Faktry is a menu driven script that runs in a terminal, but don't let that scare you half to death if you're not a terminal freak... get it? There are plenty of prompts to guide you along and it presents a unified interface for running several software tools which are available for Linux-based operating systems (because they suck less than Windows).

Muzik Faktry was formerly named MP3 Factory because i had originally been focused on producing high quality MP3s until i learned more about what a scrambled mess the MP3 format is. As a result i shifted my focus to the lossless FLAC format which, from a coding POV, is much easier to work with. All of the tasks that Muzik Faktry performs are thus lossless, meaning there is no reduction in audio quality.

Muzik Faktry is intended primarily for transcoding (converting) uncompressed tracks or albums to the FLAC format and/or performing various operations on them before adding them to your collection, including comprehensive integrity checking. So comprehensive in fact, that when i first ran my MP3 music collection through it (before i moved to lossless), the bloody thing flagged every single file as "JUNK"!

The script may not be a complete solution for processing your music since it offers only rudimentary tagging functions, nor is it a complete replacement for deeper audio analysis tools, however it has served my needs extremely well without having to employ any additional tools.

Code repository: https://codeberg.org/12bytes/muzikfaktry
Direct download: https://codeberg.org/12bytes/muzikfaktry/archive/main.zip
RSS feed: https://codeberg.org/12bytes/muzikfaktry.rss

Muzik Faktry does not use the following programs, however i readily recommend them.

  • Kwave Sound Editor (pkg. name: kwave): Kwave for the KDE desktop is a nice and simple sound editor that i used while developing Muzik Faktry.
  • Sonic Visualiser (pkg. name: sonic-visualizer): An excellent tool to analyze audio in different ways.

Some digital audio resources: