Convert Flac to Mp3
Related articles
This article presents ways of doing audio transcoding between FLAC and MP3 audio files using command line/scripted tools, and suggest a few graphical utilities to do the same and more.
Contents
Scripts
In these two examples, FLAC files in current directory are encoded by the LAME MP3 encoder. Both scripts pass the ID3 tags from the FLAC files to the resulting MP3 files, and encode to MP3 V0. V0 results in a variable bitrate usually between 220-260 kbps. The audio of a V0 file is transparent, meaning one cannot tell the difference between the lossy file and the original source (compact disc/lossless), but yet the file size is a quite lower. For more information on LAME switches/settings such as V0, visit the Hydrogenaudio LAME Wiki.
The original .flac
files are not modified and the resulting .mp3
s will be in the same directory. All files with extensions not matching *.flac
in the working directory (.nfo
, images, .sfv
, etc.) are ignored.
With FFmpeg
Chances are, your system already has ffmpeg installed, which brings in the flac and lame packages. FFmpeg has all the encoding and decoding facilities built in to do the job.
#!/bin/bash for a in ./*.flac; do ffmpeg -i "$a" -qscale:a 0 "${a[@]/%flac/mp3}" done
Parallel version
Since LAME is a single-threaded encoder, conversion can be accelerated by encoding multiple files concurrently on multiple cores. To do this, install the moreutils package, and run:
#!/bin/bash parallel-moreutils -i -j$(nproc) ffmpeg -i {} -qscale:a 0 {}.mp3 -- ./*.flac rename .flac.mp3 .mp3 ./*.mp3
Makefile for incremental recursive transcoding
Besides transcoding in parallel with make -j$(nproc)
, this has the added benefit of not regenerating transcoded files that already exist on subsequent executions:
SOURCE_DIR := flacdir XCODE_MP3_DIR := mp3dir # NOTE: see lame -v option for quality meaning XCODE_MP3_QUALITY := 0 # Find .flac sources and determine corresponding targets flac_srcs := $(shell find $(SOURCE_DIR) -type f -name '*.flac') flac_2_mp3_tgts := $(patsubst $(SOURCE_DIR)/%.flac, $(XCODE_MP3_DIR)/%.mp3, \ $(flac_srcs)) .PHONY: all mp3 flac_2_mp3 all: mp3 mp3: flac_2_mp3 flac_2_mp3: $(flac_2_mp3_tgts) $(XCODE_MP3_DIR)/%.mp3: $(SOURCE_DIR)/%.flac @echo "converting -> $@" @mkdir -p "$(@D)" @ffmpeg -v error -i "$<" -codec:a libmp3lame \ -q:a $(XCODE_MP3_QUALITY) "$(@)"
Without FFmpeg
If for some reason FFmpeg is not installed and you do not want to install it, you still need to have flac and lame installed. Here, the tagging process is more explicit using the metadata utility that comes with flac and passing the information to lame. The process duration will slightly increase since FLACs must first be decoded to WAVE and then fed into the MP3 encoder.
#!/bin/bash for a in ./*.flac; do # give output correct extension OUTF="${a[@]/%flac/mp3}" # get the tags ARTIST=$(metaflac "$a" --show-tag=ARTIST | sed s/.*=//g) TITLE=$(metaflac "$a" --show-tag=TITLE | sed s/.*=//g) ALBUM=$(metaflac "$a" --show-tag=ALBUM | sed s/.*=//g) GENRE=$(metaflac "$a" --show-tag=GENRE | sed s/.*=//g) TRACKNUMBER=$(metaflac "$a" --show-tag=TRACKNUMBER | sed s/.*=//g) DATE=$(metaflac "$a" --show-tag=DATE | sed s/.*=//g) # stream flac into the lame encoder flac -c -d "$a" | lame -V0 --add-id3v2 --pad-id3v2 --ignore-tag-errors \ --ta "$ARTIST" --tt "$TITLE" --tl "$ALBUM" --tg "${GENRE:-12}" \ --tn "${TRACKNUMBER:-0}" --ty "$DATE" - "$OUTF" done
Recursively
A useful extension of the above scripts is to let them recurse into all subdirectories of the working directory. To do so, replace the first line (for .... do
) with:
find -type f -name "*.flac" -print0 | while read -d $'\0' a; do
Usage
For ease of use, add the script to your PATH
. Open up a terminal, cd
to the directory of FLAC files that you wish to convert, and invoke flac2mp3
(or whatever you named the script). You will see the verbose decoding/encoding process in the terminal which may take a few moments. Done! At this point, it is trivial to mv *.mp3
all your new MP3s wherever you wish.
Packages
- whatmp3AUR - A small Python script that accepts a list of directories containing FLAC files as arguments and converts them to MP3 with the specified options.
- flac2allAUR - Audio converter of FLAC to either Ogg Vorbis or MP3 retaining all tags and metadata.
- flac2mp3-bashAUR - Bash script to convert Flac to Mp3 easily.
Graphical applications
- SoundConverter — A dedicated audio transcoding utility built for the GNOME desktop and relying on GStreamer. It can make use of GNOME Audio Profiles and features multithreaded conversions. It can also extract the audio from videos.
- soundKonverter — A Qt graphical frontend to various audio manipulation programs. Features conversion, ripping and other audio manipulation functionalities.
- WinFF — A GUI for the powerful multimedia converter FFmpeg. Features dedicated profiles for audio transcoding.
See also
- https://www.xiph.org/flac/
- wikipedia:FLAC
- http://lame.sourceforge.net/
- http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Flac - More information on FLAC.