Program to convert flac to mp3?

ffmpeg software-rec conversion mp3 flac

11,476

Solution 1

xrecode II preserves album art and other metadata, and is fast -- it uses all available cores. It's shareware, and works very well on Windows 7.

Solution 2

foobar2000 (on Windows) has a built-in, multi-format converter. To convert to mp3, you need to download the LAME mp3 encoder binary files; foobar2000 will ask for the location of lame.exe before converting.

Solution 3

ffmpeg -i input.flac -ab 196k -ac 2 -ar 48000 output.mp3

I'm not sure if it keeps tag and metadata. If FFmpeg doesn't work, for what platform do you need your converted (Windows, OSx, Linux) ?

Solution 4

Since you're using Linux, get SoundConverter.

The sound conversion application for the GNOME environment. It reads anything the GStreamer library can read (Ogg Vorbis, AAC, MP3, FLAC, WAV, AVI, MPEG, MOV, M4A, AC3, DTS, ALAC, MPC, Shorten, APE, SID, etc...), and writes WAV, FLAC, MP3, AAC, and Ogg Vorbis files.

SoundConverter aims to be simple to use, and very fast. Thanks to its multithreaded design, it will use as many cores as possible to speed up the conversion. It can also extract the audio from videos.

SoundConverter preserves meta information (tags).

Solution 5

Is this linux? mp3fs is an elegant solution. It is a FUSE file system that presents your FLACs as MP3s transparently.

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11,476

Jason Sundram

I like data visualization, music, Python, and scientific programming. Track me down all over the internet at http://about.me/jsundram

Updated on September 17, 2022

Comments

Jason Sundram over 1 year

I'm looking for a program to convert flac files to mp3, while preserving the embedded metadata (including album art).

I'm pretty sure this is possible with ffmpeg, but I don't know the command . . .

EDIT: This is on Windows 7, but I also use mac/linux, so whatever tool works the best, I'm happy to use.
- fluxtendu about 14 years
  
  Embedding album art in audio files doesn't make sense to me. It's an "album" art, not a "song" art. It multiply the space used by the number of tracks. And there's no real standard.
- Jason Sundram about 14 years
  
  @fluxtendu, I see your point, but I have my reasons.
Jason Sundram about 14 years

Thanks for the link -- I hadn't heard of mp3fs; it sounds awesome.
Jason Sundram about 14 years

The conversion is great, and I really like it, but the embedded album art is not preserved.
sblair about 14 years

@Jason Ah, yes, with foobar2000 you may have to do some manual post-conversion work with Tag&Rename or Mp3tag or something similar.
nimcap about 13 years

What are the limitations of the shareware?
jonathanconway over 12 years

Thanks for the 'foobar2000' recommendation. Nice conversion program.
Ory Band over 12 years

Doesn't work that well anymore.
Moab almost 12 years

No limitation other than the nag screen that makes you wait to use it...xrecode.com/xrecode2/register_en.htm
Moab almost 12 years

Not free but awesome software, still using version 11.5, I like it better than any other version.
brevno almost 12 years

At least the version of ffmpeg I have does seem to preserve tags by default. -ab 196k specifies a constant bitrate. ffmpeg -i input.flac -aq 2 output.mp3 would encode the audio as VBR V2 instead. Five channel FLAC files are converted to two channel MP3 files by default. The sample rate is also converted to 48.1 kHz by default if it's higher than that in the input file. -ar 48000 would also convert 44.1 kHz FLACs to 48 kHz MP3.
Guðmundur H over 11 years

...impressively fast! Thumbs up :-)
Victor Zakharov over 10 years

@GuðmundurH: ...and impressively free (I don't count the nag screen). +1