vqf2ogg converter

History

Some years ago, when mp3 was emerging as a popular audio format, there were also some other audio formats being developed. One of the most promising of them back then was the VQF, or SoundVQ, by Yamaha. It had better compression rates and better quality than mp3 files. A VQF with a 80 kbps bitrate had a sound quality of a 128 kbps mp3. I quickly 'embraced' the new 'better' VQF format and was convinced it was a better choice.

I actively encouraged the adoption of VQF by friends, at school, translated a VQF FAQ, joined and created IRC channels, had even a couple of websites about it. Thing is... as things turned out, VQF didn't really become adopted at all.

For that reason, software supporting VQF were slowly abandoned. The only way to play VQFs natively on Linux is through a player called dreamplay, which no longer works with modern compilers (gcc > 2.95) and a vqfplugin for XMMS, which also only compiled on gcc < 2.95. Not only that, some songs won't play on them and there's no solution out of going back to Windows to play them on the Winamp plugin or the Yamaha SoundVQ Player.

I then ended up with GBs of VQFs which would quickly became obsolete and non-playable on my operation system of choice. I decided to convert them to an open and supported format, with high quality and good compression rates: OGG Verbs. So I wrote a script to that for me.

Script and Download

The script I wrote in Perl can be downloaded here: vqf2ogg. You need perl installed and a couple of other things described in the header of the script (in comments). It's kinda primitive, as you have to edit the variables manually to have it work on your own set up, but it was enough to happily convert all my VQFs to oggs. It could easily be adapted to fit similar needs, like converting them to mp3 instead of oggs.

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