HOW TO: Convert a directory of media files

I recently found myself in need of a utility because I needed a way to convert a large number (thousands) of media [audio] files from one format to another. I anticipated their might be some problems, so I also needed something that would log these problems so I could go back and address those files individually as necessary.

This C#.NET solution is a collection of two projects to create one utility that converts one media directory and generates another. The main console application takes an input directory, output directory, and log file as arguments. It will search the input directory for files to convert. It then passes the file information on to a secondary EXE which handles the actual conversion. This conversion utility is build using LEADTOOLS Multimedia 20 and uses the ConvertCtrl to take the input media and generate the desired output. A second EXE was used here in case any problems arose from attempting to convert non-media files. If the EXE were to crash for any reason, this wouldn't stop the folder conversion. The failure would simply be logged to be checked later.

This utility could also be useful for other mass conversions such as converting video files for use with a media server, or maybe mass extraction of video data from medical files. The benefit this utility has over existing SDK demos (like Convert to Media Server) is the logging designed to help debug any problems that might have come up.


Before running this project, please extract it to the following directory:

Basic usage: CS_ConvertMedia.exe [i/o/l]
[-i] Input directory
[-o] Output directory
[-l] log file path

Ex: CS_ConvertMedia.exe -i "F:\Music" -o "H:\Music" -l "H:\Convert.log"