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Solution: Converting flac to mp3

rechosen | 10 April, 2007 14:40

Sometimes you need to convert a load of flac files to mp3's, for example when wanting to listen them on your mp3 player. This solution contains a single line of bash that'll convert all flac files in the current directory to mp3's, keeping the flac files.

Attention: this post now has an advanced counterpart providing a nice script. See Solution: Converting flac to mp3 advanced (supports drag 'n drop).

Note that you will need flac and lame for this to work. Run the following line in the directory where the flac files are:

[rechosen@localhost ~]$ for file in *.flac; do $(flac -cd "$file" | lame -h - "${file%.flac}.mp3"); done

This will output the mp3 files in the same directory as the flac files. If any of the mp3 files that's being created already exists, it will be overwritten. When the conversion has finished, you can copy the mp3 files to an other location like this:

[rechosen@localhost ~]$ cp *.mp3 /media/sda1

Note that this will copy all mp3 files in the current directory, not just the ones converted from the flac files! Of course, you could replace "/media/sda1" with any other directory. You could also replace "cp" by "mv" to move the mp3 files instead of copying them.

You can also make lame create the mp3 files somewhere else. Take the following line:

[rechosen@localhost ~]$ for file in *.flac; do $(flac -cd "$file" | lame -h - YOURLOCATION/"${file%.flac}.mp3"); done

And replace YOURLOCATION with the location you want the mp3 files to be created in. For example:

[rechosen@localhost ~]$ for file in *.flac; do $(flac -cd "$file" | lame -h - /tmp/"${file%.flac}.mp3"); done

The above line would output the mp3's in the /tmp directory.

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Comments

another flac2mp3

AlienMind | 29/01/2009, 23:10

for FNAME in *.flac
do
PREFIX=`basename "${FNAME}" .flac`
if [ ! -e fifo ]
then
mkfifo fifo.wav
fi
lame --vbr-new -b 160 fifo.wav "${PREFIX}".mp3 &
mplayer "${FNAME}" \
-vc null -vo null -benchmark \
-ao pcm:fast:file=fifo.wav
rm fifo.wav
done

Full blown script

Greg | 20/12/2009, 17:49

Hi,

thank's for your script and the comments.
Based on them I've created a python script that's walks recursivly and supports more file types (wav, ogg, flac, mp3, mru):

see:

http://code.google.com/p/music-collection-sync/

Greg

Perl Audio Converter 4.0.5

Charles Mitchell | 30/12/2009, 18:14

For Debian based systems (I run Kubuntu Jaunty) I found a nice app that works like a charm.

sudo apt-get install pacpl

Description:
Perl Audio Converter is a tool for converting multiple audio types from one format to another. It supports AAC, AC3, AIFF, APE, AU, AVR, BONK, CAF, CDR, FAP, FLA, FLAC, IRCAM, LA, LPAC, M4A, MAT, MAT4, MAT5, MMF, MP2, MP3, MP4, MPC, MPP, NIST, OFR, OFS, OGG, PAC, PAF, PVF, RA, RAM, RAW, SD2, SF, SHN, SMP, SND, SPX, TTA, VOC, W64, WAV, WMA, and WV. It can also convert audio from the following video extensions: RM, RV, ASF, DivX, MPG, MKV, MPEG, AVI, MOV, OGM, QT, VCD, SVCD, M4V, NSV, NUV, PSP, SMK, VOB, FLV, and WMV. A CD ripping function with CDDB support, batch conversion, tag preservation for most supported formats, independent tag reading/writing, and extensions for Amarok, Dolphin, and Konqueror are also provided.

Flac to mp3

Jon | 23/01/2010, 15:24

Thanks, this was very handy. I didn't have lame installed by default (using fc11) and wasn't aware that conversion was this easy. Cheers.

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