Best FLAC conversion software and how can i lower bitrates?

[boing]

I was wondering if any of you guys could recommend a decent FLAC to mp3 convertor for me. I've seen plenty online but I'm paranoid about installing free software so I was hoping to get some feedback from people with personal experience of it.

Also, if I rip a CD at a high bitrate and want to lower the bitrate to play it on a phone (preserve battery a little) do I have to re-rip everything or is there another way to lower the bitrate?

Cheers.

 

[oynaz]

Use EAC or Foobar2000. VLC can convert as well.

 

[boing]

Thanks oynaz, VLC is good for playing but I can't get it to convert to a playable mp3 file, I'll give EAC a go and see how I get on.

 

[BEJ]

Google "freac". Easy to use FLAC, WAV, etc converter to MP3. Also, you can set bitrates under "General Settings". Uses the latest "Lame" decoder.
Being an "anti-bitrate Nazi", I always "downgrade" my downloaded 320 MP3s to 192. Saves alot of HD space, thank you very much.

 

[Sid59]

Foobar2000.

I just downloaded and you can get started in 5 mins.

- Download Foobar
- Load your music
- Select Music
- Right Click > "Convert"
- Choose output "MP3 Lame"
- Choose Bitrate
- configure your output file name.
- set your destination folder
- profit.

 

[bunnyfubbles]

Google "freac". Easy to use FLAC, WAV, etc converter to MP3. Also, you can set bitrates under "General Settings". Uses the latest "Lame" decoder.
Being an "anti-bitrate Nazi", I always "downgrade" my downloaded 320 MP3s to 192. Saves alot of HD space, thank you very much.

1TB drives can regularly be found for <$50 and 2TB green storage drives are now averaging $80 before any deals/sales. The latter of which is at least 2,500 uncompressed entire CD albums, but more like 5,000+ with lossless compression and the fact that most albums don't consume the entirety of a 700MB CD.

And don't tell me you can't afford such a storage drive because if you legally own that much music, you've spent tens of thousands to amass it, the drive to store all that music would cost a tenth of one percent of what you spent on the music alone

at this point in time there's little excuse other than sheer laziness (or you are so poor and/or such a cheapskate that you can't pony up a couple of Andrew Jacksons to archive your vast collection of stolen music) not to keep archive files in the highest lossy bitrate possible if a lossless archive is not possible

encoding to a lower bitrate is of course perfectly acceptable for transfer to and use on portable devices

 

[dac7nco]

^Truth. I've spent many hundreds to keep my 2.2TB of sto... torr... music safe.

And now, a friendly message from Trey Parker:

 

[BEJ]

1TB drives can regularly be found for <$50 and 2TB green storage drives are now averaging $80 before any deals/sales. The latter of which is at least 2,500 uncompressed entire CD albums, but more like 5,000+ with lossless compression and the fact that most albums don't consume the entirety of a 700MB CD.

And don't tell me you can't afford such a storage drive because if you legally own that much music, you've spent tens of thousands to amass it, the drive to store all that music would cost a tenth of one percent of what you spent on the music alone

at this point in time there's little excuse other than sheer laziness (or you are so poor and/or such a cheapskate that you can't pony up a couple of Andrew Jacksons to archive your vast collection of stolen music) not to keep archive files in the highest lossy bitrate possible if a lossless archive is not possible

encoding to a lower bitrate is of course perfectly acceptable for transfer to and use on portable devices

I don't have to tell you anything about what I spend my money on nor did I indicate how much music I OWN. Happens that music downloads from Amazon aren't free or stolen.
I must assume you're an "audiopile" who can tell the difference between 192kbs and 193kbs. Encoding at a lower bitrate is perfectly acceptable for ANYONE who desires to do it.
You need to take care of yourself and let others do the same.

 

[bunnyfubbles]

I don't have to tell you anything about what I spend my money on nor did I indicate how much music I OWN. Happens that music downloads from Amazon aren't free or stolen.
I must assume you're an "audiopile" who can tell the difference between 192kbs and 193kbs. Encoding at a lower bitrate is perfectly acceptable for ANYONE who desires to do it.
You need to take care of yourself and let others do the same.

192kbit is an excellent compromise, but as I clearly pointed out before its borderline lunacy not to keep archive files in a higher bit rate given how absolutely inexpensive storage capacity is, even for relatively expensive slim form factor external drives you can get 250-320GB for $50 or 500GB for $70, with ease, and that should be more than enough space for 99.99% of people who legally own their digital music.

the primary point of keeping archive files in lossless form or at least as high a lossy bitrate as possible, is to avoid transcoding generation loss.

I didn't say there was no excuse, I said there was little, if you're lazy and just want to keep everything the same size because that is just that way you roll that's fine.

And no, I can't tell the difference between 192 and 193, but the difference between 192 and 320 or lossless can be night and day depending on the type of music being played.

 

[boing]

Bej, Sid, thanks for the feedback, I grabbed both but I'm trying foobar first, one problem, it's asking for me to locate 'lame.exe'?

I went to the lame website but it's not exactly noob freindly, any advice?

 

[jae]

Foobar or the old version FREE of dbPowerAmp

 

[Mr. Pedantic]

Foobar or the old version FREE of dbPowerAmp

Is there still a free version of the installer being hosted somewhere?

 

[Joseph F]

And no, I can't tell the difference between 192 and 193, but the difference between 192 and 320 or lossless can be night and day depending on the type of music being played.

There is a definite difference in SQ in between 192 and 320, but sometimes it's hard for me to hear it because I only have a pair of Sennheiser HD205s and I usually listen to over-compressed rock music.

 

[wirednuts]

when i fist got into all of this back in like 99, i saved it all in 192kbs. years later i learned 256 was about as low as i should ever go, and if i can i might as well do flac. whats nice about flac is as long as you keep a good backup, you can copy and convert from those files as much as you want without loss of quality. i really dont like the idea of re-encoding off a 320kbs mp3, but in a pinch it works better then it would seem.

 

[Anubis]

i just use the FLAC frontend to decode them into wavs and then i use EAC to convert them into MP3s (V0)



http://flac.sourceforge.net/download.html

its a 2 step process but it works for me

 

[gottogo99]

Bej, Sid, thanks for the feedback, I grabbed both but I'm trying foobar first, one problem, it's asking for me to locate 'lame.exe'?

I went to the lame website but it's not exactly noob freindly, any advice?

Go to http://www.rarewares.org/mp3-lame-bundle.php and download LAME 3.98.4 using libsndfile 1.0.21 to your preferred folder. It's the command line encoder foobar2000 needs; it doesn't have its own encoder. Point foobar2000 to the encoder and you're good to go.

Foobar2000 will run the encoder multithreaded as much as possible, so if you have a quad core CPU and four or more files, it will encode four simultaneously.

 

[Binky]

Mediamonky (not free) does the conversion on-the-fly for your portable drives. This makes it MUCH easier to store some or all of your music in whatever format you desire, but when you sync your portable device it will automatically convert it to whatever format you choose. It's very useful. Obviously, this slows down the sync process.

 

[Maverick6969]

the primary point of keeping archive files in lossless form or at least as high a lossy bitrate as possible, is to avoid transcoding generation loss.

By the content of your posting in this thread, I take it you are an audiophile expert. I have a mish mash of music that I've collected over the years. Various formats such as MP3; wma; mp4. Seeing as I just bought my first iPod a year ago, I am finally getting around to sorting out the very long & tedious process of weeding out the duplicates in this mish mash collection. My question is how do I know which version to keep and which one to delete? One of the guys that I work with says if I find a duplicate, I should keep the mp3 version and delete the other one (.m4a for example). Do you agree with this? (In a way it does good sense considering m4a is a proprietary format as opposed to MP3 which is much more open & playable on many devices besides iPod.)

However, I also notice even among the duplicates
(say for example one is "Piano Man.mp3" and the other is: "Piano Man.wma") one is larger than the other. I know almost diddly squat about bit rates and such... to me it indicates the larger file has a higher bitrate so I've been deleting the smaller of the two. But what if that smaller sized file happens to be a MP3? Should I still keep the higher bit rate version even it's wma? I listened to both version using Foobar2K - I honestly could not tell much of a difference. I'm running into more & more duplicates it would be nice to standardize on 1 method of deleting/culling through these dupes.

And finally, I would like to ask what you meant by your quote above. The lossless part I understand. No degradation in quality or sound. I have no idea what the rest of it means however.

 

[Mr. Pedantic]

However, I also notice even among the duplicates
(say for example one is "Piano Man.mp3" and the other is: "Piano Man.wma") one is larger than the other. I know almost diddly squat about bit rates and such... to me it indicates the larger file has a higher bitrate so I've been deleting the smaller of the two. But what if that smaller sized file happens to be a MP3? Should I still keep the higher bit rate version even it's wma? I listened to both version using Foobar2K - I honestly could not tell much of a difference. I'm running into more & more duplicates it would be nice to standardize on 1 method of deleting/culling through these dupes.

It depends on the file type used. Higher bitrates and larger file sizes are not always a guarantee of higher quality, even within codecs - over time the algorithms that they use are refined and tuned for better quality at a given file size. Across codecs, this holds true too, as well as the fact that different codecs are going to have different qualities at given sizes (and maybe for different genres of music too), and the differences are not always going to be the same - for example, one codec may be better than another at 128kbps, but the reverse is true at 256 or 320kbps.

Obviously, this does not apply to lossless codecs - they keep all the original information, so the main things you are going to be looking at are file size, compatibility, and encoding/decoding speed (for playback, for example, or rebuilding a lower-quality library that's been lost). I have CPU power galore, so the main things for me are compatibility and file size.

As for which to delete, this depends on your priorities (sorry, I appreciate this is a really roundabout way to answer the question). For me, lossless trumps lossy, always. But if you don't have much digital space (hard to believe to be honest, with storage so cheap), then lossy might be better, or a really efficient lossless codec and compatibility/encoding speed be damned.

 

[GrumpyMan]

If you have 2 .mp3 files of the same material (song, movie, etc.), or wma or whatever format the file happens to be in, that are duplicates, always keep the largest file since it will be most likely a better rip of the original usually. But as Mr Pedantic says, not always the case.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

I just use MediaMonkey for all my conversion needs, with the caveat of replacing the default/supplied lame_enc.dll with the very latest build.