22

I'm looking for a program to convert flac files to mp3, while preserving the embedded metadata (including album art).

I'm pretty sure this is possible with ffmpeg, but I don't know the command . . .

EDIT: This is on Windows 7, but I also use mac/linux, so whatever tool works the best, I'm happy to use.

Franck Dernoncourt
  • 24,246
  • 64
  • 231
  • 400
Jason Sundram
  • 3,341

8 Answers8

10

foobar2000 (on Windows) has a built-in, multi-format converter. To convert to mp3, you need to download the LAME mp3 encoder binary files; foobar2000 will ask for the location of lame.exe before converting.

sblair
  • 12,757
7

xrecode II preserves album art and other metadata, and is fast -- it uses all available cores. It's shareware, and works very well on Windows 7.

Jason Sundram
  • 3,341
6
ffmpeg -i input.flac -ab 196k -ac 2 -ar 48000 output.mp3

I'm not sure if it keeps tag and metadata. If FFmpeg doesn't work, for what platform do you need your converted (Windows, OSx, Linux) ?

Kami
  • 3,248
4

Since you're using Linux, get SoundConverter.

alt text

The sound conversion application for the GNOME environment. It reads anything the GStreamer library can read (Ogg Vorbis, AAC, MP3, FLAC, WAV, AVI, MPEG, MOV, M4A, AC3, DTS, ALAC, MPC, Shorten, APE, SID, etc...), and writes WAV, FLAC, MP3, AAC, and Ogg Vorbis files.

SoundConverter aims to be simple to use, and very fast. Thanks to its multithreaded design, it will use as many cores as possible to speed up the conversion. It can also extract the audio from videos.

SoundConverter preserves meta information (tags).

Gareth
  • 19,080
3

Media Monkey can do this.

It's Windows based (but you haven't specified your OS) and the mp3 encoder that comes with the free version is time limited. However, you can just replace the dll manually to remove this restriction.

It will also do batch conversions. You can either add your flac files to the library or just browse to them using the built in explorer view, select them all and then Tools > Convert Audio Format works on all the selected items.

ChrisF
  • 41,540
3

Is this linux? mp3fs is an elegant solution. It is a FUSE file system that presents your FLACs as MP3s transparently.

Dan Gravell
  • 320
3

dBpoweramp Music Converter preserves embedded album art when converting from FLAC to mp3.

sblair
  • 12,757
2

Max for Mac OS does this quickly and easily.

Jason Sundram
  • 3,341