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
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.
I use FRE:AC https://www.freac.org/downloads-mainmenu-33
It can do bulk conversions with a recursive directory search and works in most OSes
I had the exact same use case as you, 1TB of FLACs onto a 256gb phone. Because you prefer minimal quality loss, Opus is the format for you, not MP3. You can maintain transparency-level quality with 128kbps, Opus is roughly equivalent in quality to a mp3 twice its size. AAC and Vorbis are also preferable to MP3 in this aspect, but inferior to Opus. At this point, mp3s are only useful for devices that can’t decode any better codec.
Then i do a search-replace for *.flac -> *.opus on the playlists. I use PowerAmp on android to play the tunes, can recommend.
PowerAmp has a good UI but lacks some features and usage ease so I highly recommend Musicolet.
I’ve been using Poweramp since version 1.5 on my HTC Hero (Android 1.5!). I’m just curious as to why Musicolet is better. I’ve already noticed their statement about no internet access, so that’s a start.
Edit: Musicolet is louder on my Bluetooth headphones than Poweramp is, that makes 2 points. 😁
No internet access is some kind of philosophy for them but I don’t like it for two reason: 1. This philosophy prevent them from adding a feature to find and embed synced lyrics automatically. 2. If they want to respect our privacy why not just make the app open source? like the paid version doesn’t have any bold feature.
But with all that, I still use it because Poweramp UI is not good! innovative, but not actually good.
Audacity free and open source also user friendly
I used to use musicbee for this. Good app for organising your music on your desktop and you can configure it to convert audio format when syncing to your phone. It’s been a while since I used it, but it did the job nicely
I recommend converting to opus. Best efficiency.
