Converting FLAC to MP3 (including Tags) on command line

Nov 232011
 

 (Download the script from this article flac2mp3.sh)

When converting FLAC files to MP3, the first problem you will notice is that lame does not support FLAC files. This might now seem like big problem, because you can easily decode FLAC files using the command line tool flac and then use the decoded file with lame.

The Problem

The real problem is that you will loose your metadata in this process, so the tags you added to your FLAC won’t be copied to the MP3 file. While you could “easily” add them by hand, it is pretty annoying to do that even if you only want to convert a handful of files.

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“ERROR: Input file is not a supported format” when using oggenc to convert a FLAC to OGG Vorbis

Nov 162011
 

(Download the script here: reflac.sh)

Problem

When using oggenc to convert a FLAC file to OGG Vorbis using oggenc, you might encounter the following error:

"ERROR: Input file <file> is not a supported format"

Explanation

One possible reason for this can be an ID3 tag in the flac file. This can happen if the program you used to create your FLAC files uses ID3 tags instead of native FLAC tags to store metadata.

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