Apple's Music app cannot read FLAC, so getting a lossless library onto an iPod
requires a converted copy somewhere. This keeps that copy beside the library on
a NAS rather than on a laptop, and keeps it current unattended.
Walks a source tree and reproduces it path for path as MP3: tags and cover art
carried across, already-MP3 sources copied rather than re-encoded, and mirror
files whose source has gone deleted along with any directories they emptied.
The source library is never written to.
Freshness is tracked by modification time -- an encoded file is stamped with
its source's mtime, so a file is stale exactly when the two differ. That keeps
runs idempotent without a database that could fall out of step with whatever
owns the library, which here is Lidarr.
Encodes go to a temporary file and are renamed into place, so an interrupted
run cannot leave a truncated MP3 that the next run mistakes for finished work.
A lock file in the mirror root prevents overlapping passes.
Ships as a Python package with a console script, a container image with a
TrueNAS Scale compose file, and a Nix flake providing the package, an overlay
and a dev shell. The test suite runs real ffmpeg encodes rather than mocks --
the failures worth catching are in what ffmpeg does with tags, cover art and
container formats.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
