Wednesday, August 03, 2005

Converting flac to mp3

Recently one of my fathers asked me to rip a CD to a high quality format that he could play on his system. I chose flac, the free and lossless audio codec. It seemed like a good choice because I had lots of space (80GB) and Bill tends to be picky about his audio.

Later I found out that it wasn't such a good idea because Bill also wanted to play the files on an mp3 player that accepts mp3's only. No problem I thought, flac is after all a "free" audio codec. What I found was quite a different story. While there were quite a few converters, most of them written in python, most didn't work; then I came across audio-convert.

While audio-convert did require a few extras (zenity, python-vorbis, python-ogg) SuSE 9.3 had all of them. There is no install script so I just added the directory to the local path before using the script:

PATH=$PATH:~/audio-convert-0.2.1

Then I changed into the directory with the .flac files I wanted to convert and typed:

audio-convert *

A few dialog boxes pop up to let you choose what format you want to convert to. Simple simon!

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