[Technology] Working in parallel

I have about 704 .flac music files that I want to convert to .ogg.  Mostly because flac is a lossless encoding while ogg is lossy, so for a potentially imperceptible reduction in audio quality, I reduce disk usage for these files by ~75%.  Hooray.



I noticed oggenc doesn't seem to make good use of my quadcore processor, so I used find + head + tail to split the collection into 4 sets that are being re-encoded in their own terminals.  Each process is using 70-80%, with gnome-shell stealing the other cycles (GNOME Shell tends to run ~90% when I have my second monitor attached).



Hooray.  Once they're in ogg, I'll have an easier time sharing them with my tablet.  Speaking of which, it's a bit sad that it's faster to copy music files to a USB key and then copy them from there to the tablet then to just copy them over wifi.  Hehe.  (~1MB/s over wifi versus ~15MB/s to the USB (but gets copied twice, for an average of 7.5MB/s)).