What's the best way to convert FLAC to MP3?

[Tony T]

If you're on a Mac, you can convert using iTunes with: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/...dpost&p=681760

[reverber]

Coming a bit late into the discussion, but a cursory glance through the thread show no mention of MP3FS, a userspace file system that presents flac files as mp3, eliminating the need for storing mp3 copies of your flacs.

MP3FS lets one mount a directory of flac files and present them as mp3 files to an application. When one of these virtual mp3 files is accessed, it is converted on the fly for presentation to the requesting application. No more redundant collections to maintain.

Here is an article:
http://www.linux.com/archive/feed/57481

Cody

[pcMusicNewbie]

For those of you who running a Perl script similar to flac2mp3.pl
on a multi core machine, it is an easy task to parallelize your script
and greatly increase processing speed. Note - As flac conversion is a cpu
intensive task, running a flac job on every core will impair your computer's response time.

Add the following code in "the appropriate places" to your .pl file.


use Parallel::ForkManager;

# 4 for a quad core machine
my $pm = new Parallel::ForkManager(4);

# this is your main processing loop
while ("still processing flac files") {
$pm->start and next;

# convert a file

$pm->finish;
}

$pm->wait_all_children;

[Hercules]

I have a mixed FLAC and mp3 folder for my Squeezebox and I would like a separate folder for my portable player that contains all of the same music in MP3 only.

It sounds like flac2mp3 will help with the transcoding. What will it do when it encounters mp3 files? Will it ignore them, or will it copy them over to the portable library?

If it won't copy them over, I'd be interested to hear what tools other people use (on Windows) to do the syncing.

Thanks for any help.

[aubuti]

flac2mp3.pl (the Robin Bowes' script) will ignore the MP3 files.

My library is about 95% FLAC and 5% MP3, with MP3 duplicates of my FLAC files for my portable player. Basically I have three music folders.

\music\flac
\music\mp3
\music\common_mp3

FLAC files go in \music\flac, and the MP3 copies of those files go in \music\mp3. Files that I have _only_ in MP3 go in \music\common_mp3. Then put a Windows shortcut to \music\common_mp3 in the \music\flac folder, and put another Windows shortcut to \music\common_mp3 in the \music\mp3 folder. That way you can point SBS to \music\flac and it will find both your FLAC and MP3-only files. And you can point your portable player to \music\mp3, and it will find the files in both \music\mp3 and \music\common_mp3.

[paulster]

Yup, that's the best way to organise your library for this particular scenario, in my opinion.

[andynormancx]

There are several tools out there that will sync contents of folders. Take a look at Sync Toy from Microsoft for example. I just can't remember if it can selectively sync just particular file types.

[WAD62]

I use dBpoweramp to rip to FLAC for my main library, and the dBpoweramp batch converter to compress the FLAC library into a separate vbr mp3 library for my mobile devices.

A manual process, but it works nicely for me.

[Peter314]

Can rip to flac and mp3 simultaneously with the multi-encoder codec.

http://www.dbpoweramp.com/codec-central-utility.htm

[cliver]

I'm a bit late to the party but for what it's worth I use Easy CD-DA Extractor with Lame:
http://www.poikosoft.com/
It works fine for me even batch converting a large number of flac's across many directories.