FLAC to MP3

Converting a FLAC (or whatever else) to mp3 on Linux is so easy that I felt like telling the whole world about it (I know.. I know.. you know already!).

My girlfrienf just happend to have this old CD she ripped like ages ago to files in *.flac format. She wanted to use them on her portable player but.. well it just didn't support it. I decided to quickly help her and googled a bit. What I found out was that people try to make money on this particular problem. It's amazing!! Poor windows users need to buy a converter software for about $30 to easily accomplish this task. Since the free tools are already there (lame and flac) I just wrote this simple bash script to get the task done. Try it yourserlf!

If you are a "poor" windows user, then I guess (.. well I never tried it) you may run the script with Cygwin. Better solution for you would be to install yourself Ubuntu or any other Linux distribution.

#!/bin/sh # # Convert all flac files in the current dir to mp3 (lame) format. # BITRATE=320 SAMPLE=48 usage() { echo "USAGE: `basename $0` [bitrate] [sample]" echo "params:" echo " bitrate - a number in kbps (e.g. 128 or 320)" echo " sample - sampling frequency in kHz (e.g. 44 or 48)" } if [ $# -gt 2 ] || [ "$1" == "--help" ]; then usage; exit 1; elif [ $# -eq 1 ]; then BITRATE=$1 elif [ $# -eq 2 ]; then BITRATE=$1 SAMPLE=$2 fi usage; for file in *.flac; do # # Song information # TITLE="`metaflac --show-tag=TITLE "$file" | awk -F = '{ printf($2) }'`" ALBUM="`metaflac --show-tag=ALBUM "$file" | awk -F = '{ printf($2) }'`" ARTIST="`metaflac --show-tag=ARTIST "$file" | awk -F = '{ printf($2) }'`" TRACKNUMBER="`metaflac --show-tag=TRACKNUMBER "$file" | awk -F = '{ printf($2) }'`" GENRE="`metaflac --show-tag=GENRE "$file" | awk -F = '{ printf($2) }'`" COMMENT="`metaflac --show-tag=COMMENT "$file" | awk -F = '{ printf($2) }'`" DATE="`metaflac --show-tag=DATE "$file" | awk -F = '{ printf($2) }'`" # # Print some info # echo "Converting the song: $ARTIST - $TITLE ($file)"; # # Convert the song # $(flac -cd "$file" | lame -b $BITRATE --resample $SAMPLE \ --add-id3v2 --tt "$TITLE" --ta "$ARTIST" --tn "$TRACKNUMBER" \ --tg "$GENRE" --ty "$DATE" --tl "$ALBUM" \ -h - "${file%.flac}.mp3"); done exit 0;