Compressing Teamspeak 3 Recordings Using sox

tl;dr: Loop through the files in bash, sox them to FLAC

Success!

I’ve been combining fileserver contents recently, and I came across a little archive of Teamspeak 3 recordings:

$ du -sh .
483G /home/robert/storage/media/ts_recordings/

Eep.

I wrote a quick-and-dirty script to convert the files:

#!/bin/bash

n=0
total=$(ls *.wav|wc)
ls *.wav | while read file; do
        sox -q ${file} ${file%.*}.flac
        if [ -e ${file%.*}.flac ]; then
                if ! [ -s {file%.*}.flac ]; then
                        rm ${file}
                else
                        echo "${file%.*}.flac is zero-length!"
                fi
        else
                echo "Failed on ${file}"
        fi

        ((n++))
        if  ! ((n % 10 )); then
                echo "${n} of ${total}"
        fi
done

The script checks that the FLACs replacing the WAVs exist and are not zero-length before removing the original.

This was fine, but after finishing, I was still left with a bunch of uncompressed files in RF64 format, which unfortunately errored.

It turns out sox 14.4.2 added RF64 read support, so I grabbed that on my Arch machine, and converted the few remaining files (substituting wav ? rf64 twice in the script above.

The final result?

$ du -sh .
64G /home/robert/storage/raid6/media/ts_recordings/

400 gigs less space and still lossless? Ahh, much better.