flac2mp3

flac2mp3 is a Python wrapper around several tools used for encoding FLAC and MP3 files, namely flac, metaflac, and lame (all of which it assumes are installed). It uses multiple cores to simultaneously re-encode FLAC files as MP3 files while preserving any id3 tags found.

Supported Platforms

flac2mp3 has been tested on Snow Leopard and Ubuntu Linux, but should work on any environment that interfaces with Python's subprocess module and exposes the required programs to the script.

How it Works

The utility walks the given files and/or directories and collects all the FLAC files it finds, them passes them through flac to decode them, piping the output through lame to re-encode them, and stores them in the output directory intelligently using the nearest common ancestor directory as a template to ensure they don't end up lumped illogically in the output directory.

Simple Usage

python flac2mp3.py [-o OUTPUT_DIR] FILES [FILES ...]

If no output directory is specified, the new MP3 files are stored in the same directories as their FLAC parents.

Files can also be provided on stdin

find . -type f | ./flac2mp3.py --file -

Or in a file

python flac2mp3 --file list-of-files.txt

Further options can be discovered through the -h or --help commands, including specifying the number of cores to use, a file to log console output to, and whether to overwrite existing files.

Encoding Options

The default lame encoding settings are -m s --vbr-new -V2

Additionally, the following lame encoding command line settings are supported: -Vx VBR quality settings --preset /preset-name/