I have a collection of music in flac format and now I want to store them on my phone. flac files get too much space and downloading all the playlist in mp3 takes as much time as finding decent and real high quality flacs (there is plenty of songs on internet which only look like 320kbps and are not really high quality). So I decided to convert my flac files into mp3 and I prefer minimum amount of quality loss; what is the best software for it?
- Doesn’t matter if conversion take some time if the quality would be decent.
I dunno, I normally use my bash script + ffmpeg to convert batch flacs to mp3s
#!/bin/bash cd "${1}" for subdir in *; do cd "${subdir}" for input in *.flac; do echo ${input%.*} ffmpeg -i "${input}" -ab 320k -map_metadata 0 -id3v2_version 3 "${input%.*}.mp3" && rm "${input}" done cd .. done
Then i’d just run my
script.sh [directory that contains flac]
you might want to remove&& rm "${input}"
if you don’t want it to delete your flac files automatically.I use FRE:AC https://www.freac.org/downloads-mainmenu-33
It can do bulk conversions with a recursive directory search and works in most OSes
I had the exact same use case as you, 1TB of FLACs onto a 256gb phone. Because you prefer minimal quality loss, Opus is the format for you, not MP3. You can maintain transparency-level quality with 128kbps, Opus is roughly equivalent in quality to a mp3 twice its size. AAC and Vorbis are also preferable to MP3 in this aspect, but inferior to Opus. At this point, mp3s are only useful for devices that can’t decode any better codec.
Then i do a search-replace for *.flac -> *.opus on the playlists. I use PowerAmp on android to play the tunes, can recommend.
ffmpeg
It’s a very old tool. Is the quality decent?
ffmpeg is written by Fabrice Bellard, who’s one of the most underrated programmers in the world (he also wrote QEMU). It’s probably the best tool out there, still actively maintained, and most commercial apps are probably using it under the hood for any kind of conversion.
Is qemu better than virtualbox and vmware workstation?
It depends on what you mean by better. Faster? More user friendly? More versatile?
It is the engine powering most of the audio/video tools you use today.