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# Convert Flac to Mp3

From ArchWiki

Summary
Converting audio formats
Related
Convert Any To Mp3
Convert any Movie to DVD Video

Here are a few scripts and tools that facilitate converting FLAC to MP3.

For more information on LAME switches/settings such as V0, visit the Hydrogenaudio LAME Wiki. V0 is roughly equivalent to `--preset extreme` which results in a variable bitrate usually between 220-260. The audio of a V0 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 reasonable.

## Scripts

In these two examples, the FLAC files in a directory are read, decompressed to WAV, and streamed into the MP3 encoder, LAME. Both scripts pass the ID3 tags from the FLAC files to the resulting MP3 files, and encode to MP3 V0.

The original .flac files are not modified and the resulting .mp3s 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 f in *.flac; do
      ffmpeg -i "$f" -qscale:a 0 "${f[@]/%flac/mp3}"
    done

### Without FFmpeg

If for some reason you have something against FFmpeg, 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`

    #!/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

### 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'll see the verbose decoding/encoding process in the terminal which may take a few moments. Done! At this point, it's trivial to `mv *.mp3` all your new MP3s wherever you wish.

A useful extension of the above scripts is to let it recurse into all subdirectories of the working directory. Replace the first line (`for .... do`) with

    $ find -type f -name "*.flac" -print0 | while read -d $'\0' a; do

## Packages

- whatmp3 - A small Python script that accepts a list of directories containing FLAC files as arguments and converts them to MP3 with the specified options.
- flac2all - Audio converter of FLAC to either Ogg Vorbis or MP3 retaining all tags and metadata.
- flac2mp3-bash - Bash script to convert Flac to Mp3 easily.

## See also

- https://www.xiph.org/flac/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLAC
- http://lame.sourceforge.net/
- http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Flac - More information on FLAC.

Retrieved from "https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php?title=Convert_Flac_to_Mp3&oldid=274769"
Categories:

- Audio/Video
- Scripts

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