flac2mp3 - FLAC to MP3 converter

James A. Hillyerd
Release: 1.1

Description

flac2mp3 is a tool to convert potentially large sets of FLAC audio files into the MP3 audio format. It is implemented as a bash shell script, and should run on any Unix-like operating system.

I wrote flac2mp3 because I am archiving my entire CD collection to FLAC, and would like an easy way to have a mirror image in MP3 format.

Change Log

1.0

Original Release

1.0.1

Fix encode failed detection bug.
If encoding fails, try encoding without specifying a genre.

1.0.2

Properly handle lower-case FLAC metadata tag field names.

1.0.3

Use metaflac --export-tags-to, --export-vc--to is deprecated. (Thanks Daniel)
Check for and source .flac2mp3.conf in user's home directory. (Thanks Webograph)
Added ebuild for Gentoo. (Thanks Webograph)

1.1

Add year to ID3 tag - oops. (Thanks Alain)
Use file locking to allow more than one instance of flac2mp3 to run in parallel the same time for multi-CPU machines. (Thanks Jeramey)
Optionally copy artwork (*.jpg) to MP3 target directory.

Requirements

You will need to have the following applications installed:

Bash Shell -- Almost every Linux distribution includes this

Unix utilities -- Utilities included in every copy of unix since the dawn of time, including 'find', 'sed' and 'sort'.

FLAC tools -- Available on the FLAC website: http://flac.sourceforge.net

Lame -- Included in many Linux distros, also available on the LAME website: http://lame.sourceforge.net

Configuration

There is a configuration section at the top of the flac2mp3 script.
Alternately you may place your configuration into $HOME/.flac2mp3.conf.

You will probably want to adjust the LAME_OPTS to your liking. (See output of lame --longhelp for details) You may also need to set the paths to flac, metaflac and lame if flac2mp3 cannot find them on it's own.

Usage

flac2mp3 is very easy to use:

flac2mp3 <flac-input-dir> <mp3-output-dir>

License

flac2mp3 is public domain. If you can figure out how to make money off it, please feel free to do so!

Updates

Please see the Byte Monkey website for updates.