A simple script to convert a directory of audio files into MakeNoise Morphagene compatible format.

README.md

mg-convert

This simple script converts all audio files in a provided directory into MakeNoise Morphagene compatible files (48KHz, floating-point, 32-bit, stereo WAV). It auotmatically names the files in the proper format too.

Requirements

You must be comfortable with the comand-line, and have sox installed.

Copy this script to somewhere in your PATH, and make it executable (chmod +x mg-convert).

Example

ls /some/direcotry/of/sounds

├── foo.wav
├── bar.wav
└── baz.wav

mg-convert /some/directory/of/sounds

will produce:

├── foo.wav
├── bar.wav
├── baz.wav
└── converted
    ├── mg1.wav
    ├── mg2.wav
    └── mg3.wav

Everything in the converted subdirectory will be in Morphagene compatible format. All original input files are preserved. Subsequent runs will override anything in the converted directory.

NOTE

I've only tried this with a handful of input file formats, but in theory should work with any file format sox can process.

Use at your own risk, I'm not able to provide support for this.

mg-convert

#!/bin/bash
set -e

INPUTDIR=$(pwd)
if [ "$#" -eq 1 ]; then
    INPUTDIR=$1
    if [ ! -d $INPUTDIR ];then
        echo "The directory you provided does not exist."
        exit 1
    fi
fi
echo -e "Processing files in: $INPUTDIR\n"

mkdir -p $INPUTDIR/converted

names="123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvw"
function suffix() {
    echo ${names:$1:1}
}

COUNTER=0
for filename in $INPUTDIR/*.wav; do
    if [ "$COUNTER" -eq 32 ]; then
        echo "WARNING: Too many files. Morphagene's max is 32. Exiting without processing the rest."
        exit 0
    fi

    echo -e "Converting: $filename...\n"
    outfile=mg$(suffix $COUNTER).wav
    # this is where the magic happens
    
    # somehow couldn't get ffmpeg to work :(
    # ffmpeg  -i "$filename" -ar 48000 -c:a pcm_f32le -ac 2 -y "$INPUTDIR/converted/$outfile"
    
    # VLC worked, but can't normalize during conversion :(
    # eval /Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC -I dummy -vvv \""$filename"\" --audio-filter normvol --norm-max-level 5 --sout \''#transcode{vcodec=none,acodec=fl33,ab=128,channels=2,samplerate=48000,scodec=none,soverlay}:standard{mux=wav,access=file{no-overwrite},dst='"$INPUTDIR/converted/$outfile"'}'\' vlc://quit
    
    # sox FTW!
    sox --norm "$filename" -c 2 -r 48k -e float -b 32 "$INPUTDIR/converted/$outfile"
    echo -e "\nDone!\n\n"
    let COUNTER=COUNTER+1
done

echo "All converted files are located in: $INPUTDIR/converted"

Thanks for the script!
It seems that ffmpeg does not work b/c the channel routing seems to be stereo rather than 2 channel (who knew that there seems to be a difference)

A working file from sox/reaper looks like this w/ ffprobe

Stream #0:0: Audio: pcm_f32le ([3][0][0][0] / 0x0003), 48000 Hz, 2 channels, flt, 3072 kb/s

A non-working file from ffmpeg looks like this

Stream #0:0: Audio: pcm_f32le ([3][0][0][0] / 0x0003), 48000 Hz, stereo, flt, 3072 kb/s

One addition: You could change

sox --norm "$filename" -c 2 -r 48k -e float -b 32 "$INPUTDIR/converted/$outfile"

to

sox --norm "$filename" -c 2 -r 48k -e float -b 32 "$INPUTDIR/converted/$outfile" trim 0 02:54

so the files get automatically trimmed if they exceed the maximum size.

@capital-G Thanks so much. That really helps!