NCoda 2 usage

Here's the help that you get when you run `ncoda -h':

$ ncoda -h
NCoda/SVN  (C) 2005-2008  David Watzke  http://ncoda.sf.net/
 usage: ncoda [options] -f output_format [input file(s)]
  e.g.: ncoda -C encode_ogg="-q5" -sf ogg -D "output dir" ./*.wav
 input: aac, flac, mp3, mp4, mpc, ogg, wma, wav
output: aac, flac, mp3, mp4, mpc, ogg, wav
* re-encoding (converting) is not implemented yet (decoding/encoding only)
options:
  -c x    load the configuration file "x"
          (default is ~/.config/ncoda/ncoda.conf)
  -C x=y  override a config file variable, e.g. assign x value "y"
          (this option can be passed multiple times)
  -d      set the output directory to the one containing the input file
          (default is the current working directory)
  -D x    set the output directory to "x"
  -f x    set the output format to "x"
  -F      enable overwriting
  -h      show this help message and exit
  -N      do not output color
  -Q      check dependencies and exit
  -s      continue on failure (skip to the next file)
  -T      disable tags (for re-encoding only)
  -v      print "NCoda/SVN" and exit
  -Z	  create a fresh config file and exit
          (this option can be combined with -c)

I think it's pretty clear what every single option does, but who would read the help, right? So I'm gonna go ahead and show you some usage examples.

If you want to simply decode all the .ogg files in the current working directory (to .wav), this is what you need to run:

$ ncoda -f wav ./*.ogg

Encoding is pretty much the same, but there's a higher chance that you might want to change some of the encoding options. That's no problem. You can set the global options for every encoder and decoder in the configuration file (default is ~/.config/ncoda/ncoda.conf and can be overriden with the option -c) or you can specify temporary options on the command line using the option -C, like this:

$ ncoda -f ogg -C encode_ogg="-q6 --downmix" ./*.wav

If an error occurs (e.g. the input file has insufficient permissions), ncoda will exit by default. You can change this behavior and make ncoda skip the problematic file by passing the option -s.

If you want to just create a fresh config file, run

$ ncoda -Z

$ ncoda -Z -c ~/.config/ncoda/hq.conf

$ ncoda -c ~/.config/ncoda/hq.conf -f mp3 ./*.wav

OK, enough about the config file. You can disable the use of the colors by passing the option -N. By default, ncoda saves the output files to the current working directory, but that you can easily change with option -D, which allows you to specify a path or with option -d, which makes ncoda output each file into the same directory that contains the input one.

When ncoda is about to overwrite a file while converting, it exits with an error. This can be altered with the option -F, which enables overwriting.

By default, ncoda checks only for dependencies that will be used within the current run. To check all of them and exit, run:

$ ncoda -Q