I have written this article in the hope it will save you a bit of time. It took me ages to find this information on the web!
I spent many weeks in 2004 archiving my CD’s onto an external hard drive in the lossless audio format FLAC. I did this because I wanted to have a perfect copy of my music which I could subsequently convert into various lossy formats such as Ogg Vorbis, MP3, AAC etc. Ripping CD’s is a laborious process and I only wanted to do it once!
For every day use I have converted my music collection into Ogg Vorbis format (using quality setting 4 in case you’re interested).
I am thrilled to bits with how it’s worked out. FLAC does a great job of saving me disk space and quite how Ogg Vorbis can sound SO good yet take up such little space is nothing short of miraculous!
Having said that, from time-to-time it is useful for me to be able to convert my music into MP3 format. I use the free MP3 encoder “LAME”. Yet another open source miracle.
This article explains how I perform the conversion from FLAC to MP3 using a great piece of free software I (eventually) found on the web.
The best program I have found for converting FLAC audio files to MP3 using LAME is “Frontah”.
It is basically a nice frontend for various audio codecs. It will convert between the formats we are interested in ie. FLAC and MP3 but can also handle others such as Ogg Vorbis, Monkey’s Audio, Musepak, AAC etc.
It makes the whole process very easy, transfers all the file tag information (track title, artist, album etc.) and allows you to pass additional command line parameters to the codec so you can customise the encoding process.
You can download “Frontah” for free from:
http://home.vxu.se/mdati00/frontah/
When you have downloaded “Frontah” there is no need to install it – it just runs when you double-click the “frontah.exe” file.
Before you start encoding make sure you have downloaded the LAME MP3 codec, unzipped the files and copied them to the same directory as Frontah. Do the same with your FLAC codec files.
For more information on using Frontah visit the website:
2 Comments
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