I have a collection of music in flac format and now I want to store them on my phone. flac files get too much space and downloading all the playlist in mp3 takes as much time as finding decent and real high quality flacs (there is plenty of songs on internet which only look like 320kbps and are not really high quality). So I decided to convert my flac files into mp3 and I prefer minimum amount of quality loss; what is the best software for it?
- Doesn’t matter if conversion take some time if the quality would be decent.
ffmpeg -i in.flac -c:a libopus -b 192k out.opus
Not audiophilic enough.
ffmpeg -i in.flac -ar 48000 \
-af aresample=resampler=soxr:precision=28:cheby=1:dither_method=shibata \
-c:a libopus -b:a 224k out.opus
Because the audiophile is broke, and will have to listen to some music on a lowly device, but the craving for some placebo is still there.
EDIT: btw, the bitrate is missing a k in your command 😉
ffmpeg
It’s a CLI tool, it’s a great generalist tool for converting video and audio but you have to script it if you want to do a recursive batch job.
ffmpeg is written by Fabrice Bellard, who’s one of the most underrated programmers in the world (he also wrote QEMU). It’s probably the best tool out there, still actively maintained, and most commercial apps are probably using it under the hood for any kind of conversion.
It’s not old. It’s actively maintained. It has recent releases and is actively being developed. It existed for a long time - as in it’s stable and feature-rich.
It’s so versatile I use it for all my audio and video mixing, encoding, and conversion needs.
If you can write a small script invoking it for all files automatically is simple enough - and better than manually writing a conversion command for each file.
Get a phone with microsd port. Then you can have up to 1tb of lossless music
If you were in my country you would know something like that means I have to sell my liver to get it.
What have you set your compression level to for the flac files?
dont convert them to mp3, use either AAC or Opus, 192kbps is typically good enough for high quality, but a lot of people will just encode 128kbps
Gonna have to hard agree with this.
I’d look into Apple’s AAC format as it is the best compromise of space and quality currently.
I encode my FLACs to 256k vbr, which is high enough and saves a ton of space vompared to mp3.
Also I use musicbee to do this.
