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
        13·
        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.

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

            better then virtual box, when comparing to vmware it has some wins and some losses, windows guests, vmware wins, linux guests qemu wins, assuming you dont need any more advanced features. in which qemu always wins

          • Beto@lemmy.studioEnglish
            2·
            1 year ago

            It depends on what you mean by better. Faster? More user friendly? More versatile?

            • Nimous@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
              1·
              1 year ago

              If it has the performance it is better. If it doesn’t have professional features of vmware workstation like networking and settings, it’s not better.

      • m-p{3}@lemmy.caEnglish
        7·
        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.

      • Kissaki@feddit.deEnglish
        7·
        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
        4·
        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.

  • sub_o@beehaw.orgEnglish
    8·
    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.

    • RunAwayFrog@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Not audiophilic enough.

      ffmpeg -i in.flac -ar 48000 \
            -af aresample=resampler=soxr:precision=28:cheby=1:dither_method=shibata \
            -c:a libopus -b:a 224k out.opus
  • pudcollar@lemmy.mlEnglish
    6·
    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
    71·
    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

  • art101@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    If you’re using Windows then Foobar 2000 is great. I use it for manually managing and tidying my collection in addition to converting pretty much any format to any other format.

    That being said, you can install it as a snap in Linux as well if that’s your poison.

  • S13Ni@lemmy.studioEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Everyone is recommending ffmpeg. So am I, but with Axiom UI, since everyone is not used to working in terminal. You can convert entire folders just as well like you could with ffmpeg normally. I am used to command line stuff, but I still prefer this for simple conversions out of convenience. https://axiomui.github.io/

  • Jemmy@lemmy.oneEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I used to use musicbee for this. Good app for organising your music on your desktop and you can configure it to convert audio format when syncing to your phone. It’s been a while since I used it, but it did the job nicely

  • 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.