Is there a good command line tool for converting to and from FLAC audio format?
Solution 1
The fundamental tool for sound format conversions and simple transformations is SoX, the Swiss Army knife of sound-processing programs.
sox foo.mp3 foo.flac
If you're running Debian, support for writing MP3 in sox
is broken in lenny and squeeze (and as far as I know the same problem affects Ubuntu 10.04 and 10.10). This bug was fixed in early March 2011, so grabbing the latest source (or grabbing a binary for sox
14.3.1-1build1 or newer) and recompiling it should work.
An alternative for encoding to .mp3
is lame
. It doesn't read .flac
, but you can use sox
or flac
to convert from .flac
to .wav
and then lame
from .wav
to .mp3
.
flac -d foo.flac -c | lame - foo.mp3
Solution 2
sox version 13 and up supports FLAC, along with many other formats. sox can do many things to an audio file, not just convert from one format to another. It is to audio what ImageMagick is to graphics.
Solution 3
It's called flac
, oddly enough. It's somewhat painful to use, or was back when I scripted a transcoding job with it.
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Matthew
Updated on September 17, 2022Comments
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Matthew over 1 year
Ideally, I want to convert from MP3 to FLAC and back. I also need to be able to script this.
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Matthew about 13 yearsgreat analogy, man. that got you an upvote.