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.
      • Beto@lemmy.studioEnglish
        5·
        1 year 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.

      • Kissaki@feddit.deEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        It’s not old. It’s actively maintained. It has recent releases and is actively being developed. It existed for a long time - as in it’s stable and feature-rich.

        It’s so versatile I use it for all my audio and video mixing, encoding, and conversion needs.

        If you can write a small script invoking it for all files automatically is simple enough - and better than manually writing a conversion command for each file.

      • pudcollar@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        It’s a CLI tool, it’s a great generalist tool for converting video and audio but you have to script it if you want to do a recursive batch job.

      • m-p{3}@lemmy.caEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        It’s one of the pillars of anything A/V. Most if not all streaming provider uses it in their backend and frontend, and most conversion and playback tools (ie: HandBrake, VLC) depends on it.

  • pudcollar@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    1 year 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.

  • drwankingstein@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    dont convert them to mp3, use either AAC or Opus, 192kbps is typically good enough for high quality, but a lot of people will just encode 128kbps

    • ElectricAirship@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Gonna have to hard agree with this.

      I’d look into Apple’s AAC format as it is the best compromise of space and quality currently.

      I encode my FLACs to 256k vbr, which is high enough and saves a ton of space vompared to mp3.

      Also I use musicbee to do this.

  • sub_o@beehaw.orgEnglish
    3·
    1 year 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.

  • JelloBrains@kbin.social
    0·
    1 year ago

    I use FFmpeg Batch Audio Video converter, it’s just a GUI FFmpeg. I use it to convert FLAC to MP3 when I was going on a trip and only had a CD Player and I use it to convert 7.1 Audio down to AC3 5.1 to fit my sound system. It has a MP3 preset but I had to add one for the 5.1 conversion.