caudec 1.7.5: multiprocess audio converter
Copyright © 2012 - 2014 Guillaume Cocatre-Zilgien
http://caudec.net/

caudec is a command-line utility that transcodes (converts) audio files from
one format (codec) to another. It leverages multi-core CPUs with lots of RAM
by using a ramdisk, and running multiple processes concurrently (one per file
and per codec).

* caudec is fast. Encoding Pink Floyd's The Wall (81 minutes, 26 tracks -
  arguably classier than ABBA, but caudec doesn't discriminate) from WAV to FLAC
  --best is done at 183x real time on a Core i7 @ 2.2 GHz with 8 processes,
  versus 46x with one process. FLAC -5 encodes at 532x, TAK -p2 at 705x.
* Supported input formats / codecs: WAV, AIFF, CAF, FLAC, WavPack,
  Monkey's Audio, TAK, Apple Lossless (ALAC).
* Supported output formats / codecs: WAV, AIFF, CAF, FLAC, Flake, WavPack,
  Monkey's Audio, TAK, Apple Lossless (ALAC), lossyWAV, LAME, Ogg Vorbis,
  Nero AAC, qaac, Musepack, Opus.
* Support for high quality resampling and downmixing / upmixing to stereo,
  with SoX.
* Optimized I/O: input files are copied onto a ramdisk sequentially, so as
  to get the best performance out of the underlying medium (e.g. a hard drive).
  Transcoding however is done concurrently. Example: file 1 gets copied. When
  that's done, transcoding of file 1 starts. Meanwhile, file 2 gets copied, etc…
  Very little time is lost reading the files.
* Transcoding to several different codecs at once is possible. In that case,
  decoding of input files is done only once.
* Multiple instances of caudec can be run concurrently while sharing ressources.
* Metadata is preserved (as much as possible) from one codec to another.
* Multiprocess Replaygain scanner (except for Opus and Musepack)
* Uses existing, popular command line encoders/decoders.

caudec is most useful when dealing with one album at a time (with 1, 2 or 3
discs, with each track as a separate file). Handling of multiple albums is done
via scripting (see http://caudec.net/documentation/examples/).
caudec cannot efficiently deal with very large files (recordings that are
several hours long), or very large numbers of files (messy collections with
a single directory and thousands of files). Those are known limitations, and
they are not within the scope of this program.

Tested under Arch Linux and OS Ⅹ Mountain Lion. Thanks to Tobias Link for
kindly giving me remote shell access to his Macbook so I could port caudec
to OS Ⅹ.

Please submit bug reports here: http://caudec.net/redirect/bugs

If you enjoy caudec and would like to make a donation, see:
http://caudec.net/donate/

caudec uses common UNIX tools (which, uname, grep, stat, sed/gsed, date/gdate,
tr, cut, wc, df, mktemp, xargs, nohup), as well as the following software:

Mandatory Software:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* bc: http://www.gnu.org/software/bc/
* SoX: http://sox.sourceforge.net/

Optional Software:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Native Codecs:
* FLAC: http://flac.sourceforge.net/
* Flake: http://flake-enc.sourceforge.net/
* WavPack: http://www.wavpack.com/
* Monkey's Audio: http://www.monkeysaudio.com/ and
  http://etree.org/shnutils/shntool/support/formats/ape/unix/
* ffmpeg (ALAC, AAC, Monkey's Audio): http://ffmpeg.org/
* LAME: http://lame.sourceforge.net/
* Ogg Vorbis: http://www.vorbis.com/
* Nero AAC: http://www.nero.com/eng/technologies-aac-codec.html
* Musepack: http://musepack.net/ and
  http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Musepack
* Opus: http://www.opus-codec.org/

Windows Codecs:
* Wine (for Windows binaries): http://www.winehq.org/
* TAK: http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=TAK
* lossyWAV: http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=LossyWAV
* LAME: http://www.rarewares.org/mp3-lame-bundle.php
* Ogg Vorbis: http://www.rarewares.org/ogg-oggenc.php
* qaac (iTunes AAC encoding): https://sites.google.com/site/qaacpage/

Replaygain:
* wavegain: http://freecode.com/projects/wavegain
* vorbisgain: http://sjeng.org/vorbisgain.html
* mp3gain: http://mp3gain.sourceforge.net/
* aacgain: http://aacgain.altosdesign.com/

Miscellaneous:
* wget (for checking for new versions): http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/wget.html
* APEv2 (for files with APEv2 metadata): http://caudec.net/
* cksfv (for hashing CRC32): http://zakalwe.fi/~shd/foss/cksfv/
* md5sum (Linux) or md5 (OS Ⅹ) for hashing MD5 sums
* sha1sum, sha256sum, sha512sum (Linux) or shasum (OS Ⅹ) for hashing SHA sums
* eyeD3 (for MP3 tagging): http://eyed3.nicfit.net/


In order to install caudec, required and optional software on OS Ⅹ, use the
Homebrew package management software: http://mxcl.github.io/homebrew/
Note that the GNU version of sed (gsed) is required; gdate is optional.

To install caudec when no package is available for your distribution, run:
$ sudo ./install.sh [ --prefix=/some/custom/path ]
That script will install caudec in /usr/local by default, or in the directory
specified with --prefix. A default configuration file will be installed as
/etc/caudecrc, or ~/.caudecrc. An additional 'decaude' link will be installed
alongside caudec, which is equivalent to 'caudec -d' (for decoding).