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.
  • sub_o@beehaw.org
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    2 years ago

    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.

  • pudcollar@lemmy.ml
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    2 years ago

    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.

      • Beto@lemmy.studio
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        2 years ago

        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.