position: relative

I’m an old-fashioned IT guy: in filenames I prefer the standard ASCII character set, no spaces, no weird international characters and no meter long names. Before writing a directory to a DVD:

<?php
function cdRename($path, $maxlength) {
  $pi = pathinfo($path);
  $ext = isset($pi['extension']) ? $pi['extension'] : FALSE;
  $fn = $pi['filename'];
  $fn = substr($fn, 0, $maxlength);
  $fn = str_ireplace(//iso 8859-1 only :((
      array('á', 'à', 'ã', 'â', 'é', 'è', 'î', 'í', 'ú', 'u', 'ö', 'õ', 'ô'),
      array('a', 'a', 'a', 'a', 'e', 'e', 'i', 'i', 'u', 'u', 'o', 'o', 'o'), $fn);
  $npath = $pi['dirname'] . DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR . $fn . ($ext ? '.'.$ext : '');
  if ($npath != $path) rename($path, $npath);
}
$it = new RecursiveDirectoryIterator('./');
// RecursiveIteratorIterator - 0: LEAVES_ONLY, 1: SELF_FIRST, 2: CHILD_FIRST
foreach (new RecursiveIteratorIterator($it, 2) as $path) cdRename($path, 170);
?>

This is a PHP cli (shell) script, it truncates filenames (without touching the extension) and removes some international characters, which may pose problems when transferred to ntfs/fat/samba/ext3 etc. Unfortunately PHP is still a crap and if you save this script in UTF-8 then it will not work (at least it did not work for me on ntfs and php 5.2.6), so so far one can only replace iso 8859-1 characters; hope this will change with version 6. The script can also rename directories, since the iterator takes children items first – hope someone finds this useful.

For some reason Winamp couldn’t play the Apple Itunes m4a files for me, so I wanted to have a quick solution to convert m4a files to lossless flacs. VLC can write into files as an output, but with that the dumping speed is 1:1, which is not very fast. Basically the solution is just a couple of shell commands, so if you know mplayer, feel free to check the code bellow.

Okay, this is going to be pretty rough: this is a php shell script, I run on Windows, because:

• I don’t like Cygwin and I totally hate cmd.exe batch scripting (in this case FOR /R and backslashes).
• I know about the ecmascript and vbscript interpreters and yes, I totally hate those, because they suck compared to plain old Bash and friends.
• This is a command line php script; I’m on Windows, I registered the .cphp file extension to be handled by php cli, so I just press enter on such file. Believe me, this saved me hours of work, especially at my workplace, where I am using XP and cygwin is broken like hell (I don’t know the admin password to remove it). I know Python is all the hype, but I couldn’t care less.

<?php
$files = explode("\n", `dir /b /o:n *.m4a`);
$mplayer = 'Q:/bin/mplayer/mplayer';
$flac = 'C:/Progra~1/FLAC/flac';
foreach ($files as $file) {
  $file = trim($file);
  if (!empty($file)) {
      echo "Converting $file\n";
      shell_exec("$mplayer -vc null -vo null -af volnorm -ao pcm:fast:waveheader:file=\"$file.wav\" \"$file\"");
      shell_exec($flac . ' -8 "' . $file . '.wav" ' . str_replace('.m4a.wav', '.flac', $file));
  }
}