Friday 9 October 2009

Converting flac to mp3 - Soundconverter

Why would I want that? Not because mp3 is in any way superior, is just my phone doesn't support playing FLAC and its audio capabilities are no match for flac.

If you want to convert FLAC to mp3, say to listen to your music on your phone or mp3 player, and you use GNU/Linux I recommend soundconverter.

This is already packaged in Debian and available in etch, lenny, squeeze and sid. It is probably available on Ubuntu and all other major distros out there, so, enjoy.


(This is also a reminder for me. I used soundconverter before, but I was unable to remember which was the application.)

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for your recommendation! Gautier Portet has taken my quick hack and turned it into quite the nifty little tool.

Anonymous said...

I just do

flac --decode --stdout "foo.flac" | lame -V 0 --vbr-new - "foo.mp3"

Anonymous said...

Soundconverter is really cool, especially as it preserves meta information (tags).
But at least two major GNOME media players (Rhythmbox and Banshee) will also convert your music to mp3 when copied to a portable device (if gstreamer-lame from debian-multimedia.org is installed)
So why not use this fully-automatical solution?

Anonymous said...

I just do

flac --decode --stdout "foo.flac" | lame -V 0 --vbr-new - "foo.mp3"


Good luck with that when trying to convert full albums and trying to keep meta information.

I find the graphical interface of soundconverter a huge help.

But at least two major GNOME media players (Rhythmbox and Banshee) will also convert your music to mp3 when copied to a portable device (if gstreamer-lame from debian-multimedia.org is installed)
So why not use this fully-automatical solution?


Because my phone doesn't bahave in any way like an mp3 player since I can't mount it or access it via MTP protocol.

Anonymous said...

use the .is_audio_player trick
http://live.gnome.org/Rhythmbox/FAQ (or make sure HAL know that you phone will play audio files, and where they should be put, and in what format).

john said...

If you specifically want FLAC->MP3, you can alternatively use MP3FS to be able to access all my FLAC as MP3.

Though it's not packaged for Debian, it was quick to install the dependency -dev packages to compile and run it.

john said...

s/my/your/

eddyp said...

use the .is_audio_player trick
http://live.gnome.org/Rhythmbox/FAQ (or make sure HAL know that you phone will play audio files, and where they should be put, and in what format).


My phone isn't usually connected to the laptop via a cable; I tend to rely on Bluetooth and WiFi for connectivity.