Free flac to mp3 software for linux

FLAC is Free Lossless Audio Codec. Grossly oversimplified, FLAC is similar to MP3, but lossless, meaning that audio is compressed in FLAC without any loss in quality.
This is similar to how Zip works, except with FLAC you will get much better compression because it is designed specifically for audio, and you can play back compressed FLAC files in your favorite player (or your car or home stereo, see supported devices) just like you would an MP3 file.
FLAC is freely available and supported on most operating systems, including Windows, "unix" (Linux, *BSD, Solaris, OS X, IRIX), BeOS, OS/2, and Amiga. There are build systems for autotools, MSVC, Watcom C, and Project Builder.
The FLAC project consists of:
the stream format
reference encoders and decoders in library form
flac, a command-line program to encode and decode FLAC files
metaflac, a command-line metadata editor for FLAC files
input plugins for various music players
When we say that FLAC is "Free" it means more than just that it is available at no cost. It means that the specification of the format is fully open to the public to be used for any purpose (the FLAC project reserves the right to set the FLAC specification and certify compliance), and that neither the FLAC format nor any of the implemented encoding/decoding methods are covered by any known patent. It also means that all the source code is available under open-source licenses. It is the first truly open and free lossless audio format.
Main features:
- Lossless: The encoding of audio (PCM) data incurs no loss of information, and the decoded audio is bit-for-bit identical to what went into the encoder. Each frame contains a 16-bit CRC of the frame data for detecting transmission errors. The integrity of the audio data is further insured by storing an MD5 signature of the original unencoded audio data in the file header, which can be compared against later during decoding or testing.
- Fast: FLAC is asymmetric in favor of decode speed. Decoding requires only integer arithmetic, and is much less compute-intensive than for most perceptual codecs. Real-time decode performance is easily achievable on even modest hardware.
- Hardware support: Because of FLACs free reference implementation and low decoding complexity, FLAC is currently the only lossless codec that has any kind of hardware support.
- Streamable: Each FLAC frame contains enough data to decode that frame. FLAC does not even rely on previous or following frames. FLAC uses sync codes and CRCs (similar to MPEG and other formats), which, along with framing, allow decoders to pick up in the middle of a stream with a minimum of delay.
- Seekable: FLAC supports fast sample-accurate seeking. Not only is this useful for playback, it makes FLAC files suitable for use in editing applications.
- Flexible metadata: New metadata blocks can be defined and implemented in future versions of FLAC without breaking older streams or decoders. Currently there are metadata types for tags, cue sheets, and seek tables. Applications can write their own APPLICATION metadata once they register an ID
- Suitable for archiving: FLAC is an open format, and there is no generation loss if you need to convert your data to another format in the future. In addition to the frame CRCs and MD5 signature, flac has a verify option that decodes the encoded stream in parallel with the encoding process and compares the result to the original, aborting with an error if there is a mismatch.
- Convenient CD archiving: FLAC has a "cue sheet" metadata block for storing a CD table of contents and all track and index points. For instance, you can rip a CD to a single file, then import the CDs extracted cue sheet while encoding to yield a single file representation of the entire CD. If your original CD is damaged, the cue sheet can be exported later in order to burn an exact copy.
- Error resistant: Because of FLACs framing, stream errors limit the damage to the frame in which the error occurred, typically a small fraction of a second worth of data. Contrast this with some other lossless codecs, in which a single error destroys the remainder of the stream.
What FLAC is not:
- Lossy. FLAC is intended for lossless compression only, as there are many good lossy formats already, such as Vorbis, MPC, and MP3 (see LAME for an excellent open-source implementation).
- SDMI compliant, et cetera. There is no intention to support any methods of copy protection, which are, for all practical purposes, a complete waste of bits. (Another way to look at it is that since copy protection is futile, it really carries no information, so you might say FLAC already losslessly compresses all possible copy protection information down to zero bits!) Of course, we cant stop what some misguided person does with proprietary metadata blocks, but then again, non-proprietary decoders will skip them anyway.

flac2mp3 project is a tool to convert audio files from flac to mp3 format.

crip is a terminal-based ripper/encoder/tagger tool for creating Ogg Vorbis/FLAC/MP3 files under UNIX/Linux. It is well-suited for anyone (especially the perfectionist) who seeks to make a lot of files from CDs and have them all properly labeled and professional-quality with a minimum of hassle and yet still have flexibility and full control over everything. Current versions of crip only support Ogg Vorbis and FLAC. If you want to encode MP3 files you should use crip-1.0.
I am constantly refining the process of creating perfect music files to be as automated as possible while still leaving the user with control over as much as possible. To see for yourself how painless it is to make professional-grade music files on your UNIX/Linux machine, go through the crip tutorial.
This script is special because it is the only one that I know that is capable of doing group vorbisgain/replaygain and/or normalization (adjust the volume to be as loud as possible without clipping/distortion) and group labelling/tagging, which makes it easy to allow a group of tracks to be treated as one piece. It can also trim off the silence at the beginning and end of these tracks/groups.
First the script fetches the CDDB info off the internet. Then it prompts you for the grouping of the tracks. This is important because it will treat each group of tracks as one piece, label and vorbisgain/replaygain and/or normalize them (using the volume gain/peak of that group). Normalization is now obsolete with the creation of vorbisgain (replaygain) utilities, so I have that turned off by default and itll run vorbisgain instead.
You can, of course, have each track be a group by itself (such as what youd want to do with most pop CDs). But since Ive also ripped a lot of Classical music I found it necessary to group tracks differently fairly often.
Then it will prompt you for the Artist and Album info (which is already defaulted to what is pulled from CDDB). Afterwards it will prompt you for a filename for each track you selected. Again this field is defaulted to what it suspects that youd want. For most pop CDs all I have to do is hit enter here because the filename is almost always exactly what Id want.
It will then prompt you that its ready to rip. From here everything is automated, so hit return and it usually finishes in about an hour. The script calls cdparanoia to rip the tracks, and then oggenc/flac/lame to encode them. It also labels the files with info appropriately, including the CDDB CD DiscID number (so you will always have a CD reference hex-number inside your OGG/FLAC/MP3 file).
Ive looked into other scripts out there that do something similar to this script, but decided to write my own since I couldnt find one that groups tracks and trims silence. I used this script to rip and encode my collection of over 200 Bach CDs, as well as a bunch of other Classical and non-Classical CDs very easily.
Ive provided links below that include some of the prerequisites that you may need.
Main features:
- Track grouping for automated tagging and appropriate normalization/vorbisgain on multi-track pieces.
- CDDB fetching to populate default information.
- CDDB submit to update the CDDB database with your more accurate info.
- Automates as much of the tagging as possible for fully-labeled professional quality music files.
- Automatically trims digital silence at the beginning and end of a track/group (if desired).
- European character support. Also European character-mapping support.
- Flexibility and full user control in tagging and file naming.
Enhancements:
- Bugfix: -m flag on the command line was not being processed

Duplicate Music Matcher is a script to quickly find duplicate MP3 files based on letter matching.
Duplicate Music Matcher is helpful for weeding out duplicates that may not be of the same encoding, format, or even the same filename.
Enhancements:
- pymad pyvorbis python-flac deps were all removed in favor of mutagen
- GUI code was updated (no more SimpleGladeApp)
- Delete key have been bound in the GUI
- More accurate matching for ogg and flac files
- The filename column is now resizable
- The GUI play and stop buttons now use audacious.FLAC should now also give a length value
- Some oggs might have a huge bitrate value due to a bug in mutagen.

Apache::MP3::Skin is a subclass of Apache::MP3::Playlist with the ability to "skin" the output using HTML::Template.

SYNOPSIS

# httpd.conf or srm.conf
AddType audio/mpeg .mp3 .MP3

# httpd.conf or access.conf
< Location /songs >
SetHandler perl-script
PerlHandler Apache::MP3::Skin
PerlSetVar HomePath /songs # optional
PerlSetVar DefaultSkin default.tmpl # required

# Without DefaultSkin being set to a valid file
# Apache::MP3::Skin will be the same as Apache::MP3
< /Location >

Apache::MP3::Skin subclasses Apache::MP3::Playlist enabling the use of skin files which are html files with special tags enabled by HTML::Template. See Apache::MP3 for details on installing and using.

&MP3FS is A read-only FUSE filesystem which transcodes audio formats (currently FLAC) to MP3 on the fly when opened and read. This was written to enable me to use my FLAC collection with software and/or hardware which only understands MP3. e.g. gmediaserver to a netgear MP101 mp3 player.
MP3FS is also a novel alternative to traditional mp3 encoder applications. Just use your favorite file browser to select the files you want encoded and copy them somewhere!
How it Works:
When a file is opened, the decoder and encoder are initialised and the file metadata is read. At this time the final filesize can be determined as we only support constant bitrate mp3s.
ID3v2 tags are created from the vorbis comments in the flac file. They are located at the start of the file. As such, an application scanning a directory to read tags should not cause too much of a performance hit as the actual encoder does not need to be invoked (depending on how much data the read asks for).
A special exception to this is when an application tries to read the very last block first. Many applications do this to look for an id3v1 tag (stored in the last 128 bytes of the file). When this is detected, the filesystem simply return zeros (I dont support id3v1 tags). This dramatically speeds up applications, however it could potentially lead to corrupt mp3 files if the zeros are still in kernel cache when the application comes back to read the actual audio sequentially. In my experimentation this has not happened, I always get another read for the final block.
As the file is read, it is transcoded into an internal per-file buffer. This buffer continues to grow while the file is being read until the whole file is transcoded in memory. The memory is freed only when the file is closed. This simplifies the implementation.
Seeking within a file will cause the file to be transcoded up to the seek point (if not already done). This is not usually a problem since most programs will read a file from start to finish. Future enhancements may provide true random seeking.
For build instructions see INSTALL
Usage:
mount your filesystem like this: (you will probably have to be root)
mp3fs musicdir bitrate mountpoint [-o fuse_options]
e.g.:
mp3fs /mnt/music 256 /mnt/mp3 -o allow_other,ro
Here are the original files:
dave@bender:~/mp3fs$ ls -l /mnt/music/Smashing Pumpkins/Pisces Iscariot/
total 345732
-rw-r--r-- 1 mythtv mythtv 10267876 2005-06-19 18:36 01 - Soothe.flac
-rw-r--r-- 1 mythtv mythtv 23512276 2005-06-19 18:36 02 - Frail And Bedazzled.flac
-rw-r--r-- 1 mythtv mythtv 23332187 2005-06-19 18:36 03 - Plum.flac
-rw-r--r-- 1 mythtv mythtv 26402936 2005-06-19 18:36 04 - Whir.flac
-rw-r--r-- 1 mythtv mythtv 21591252 2005-06-19 18:36 05 - Blew Away.flac
-rw-r--r-- 1 mythtv mythtv 16719855 2005-06-19 18:36 06 - Pissant.flac
-rw-r--r-- 1 mythtv mythtv 33454889 2005-06-19 18:36 07 - Hello Kitty Kat.flac
-rw-r--r-- 1 mythtv mythtv 32073747 2005-06-19 18:36 08 - Obscured.flac
-rw-r--r-- 1 mythtv mythtv 17614217 2005-06-19 18:36 09 - Landslide.flac
-rw-r--r-- 1 mythtv mythtv 65406696 2005-06-19 18:36 10 - Starla.flac
-rw-r--r-- 1 mythtv mythtv 18651734 2005-06-19 18:36 11 - Blue.flac
-rw-r--r-- 1 mythtv mythtv 25055200 2005-06-19 18:36 12 - Girl Named Sandoz.flac
-rw-r--r-- 1 mythtv mythtv 28060023 2005-06-19 18:36 13 - La Dolly Vita.flac
-rw-r--r-- 1 mythtv mythtv 11432008 2005-06-19 18:36 14 - Spaced.flac
And now you can use the (virtual) mp3 files from the MP3FS mountpoint:
dave@bender:~/mp3fs$ ls -l /mnt/mp3/Smashing Pumpkins/Pisces Iscariot/
total 345732
-rw-r--r-- 1 mythtv mythtv 2446849 2005-06-19 18:36 01 - Soothe.mp3
-rw-r--r-- 1 mythtv mythtv 3197934 2005-06-19 18:36 02 - Frail And Bedazzled.mp3
-rw-r--r-- 1 mythtv mythtv 3467503 2005-06-19 18:36 03 - Plum.mp3
-rw-r--r-- 1 mythtv mythtv 4003745 2005-06-19 18:36 04 - Whir.mp3
-rw-r--r-- 1 mythtv mythtv 3414845 2005-06-19 18:36 05 - Blew Away.mp3
-rw-r--r-- 1 mythtv mythtv 2413413 2005-06-19 18:36 06 - Pissant.mp3
-rw-r--r-- 1 mythtv mythtv 4348572 2005-06-19 18:36 07 - Hello Kitty Kat.mp3
-rw-r--r-- 1 mythtv mythtv 5132656 2005-06-19 18:36 08 - Obscured.mp3
-rw-r--r-- 1 mythtv mythtv 3099704 2005-06-19 18:36 09 - Landslide.mp3
-rw-r--r-- 1 mythtv mythtv 10542719 2005-06-19 18:36 10 - Starla.mp3
-rw-r--r-- 1 mythtv mythtv 3210041 2005-06-19 18:36 11 - Blue.mp3
-rw-r--r-- 1 mythtv mythtv 3449127 2005-06-19 18:36 12 - Girl Named Sandoz.mp3
-rw-r--r-- 1 mythtv mythtv 4098213 2005-06-19 18:36 13 - La Dolly Vita.mp3
-rw-r--r-- 1 mythtv mythtv 2337344 2005-06-19 18:36 14 - Spaced.mp3
dave@bender:~/mp3fs$ id3info /mnt/mp3/Smashing Pumpkins/Pisces Iscariot/01 - Soothe.mp3
*** Tag information for /mnt/mp3/Smashing Pumpkins/Pisces Iscariot/01 - Soothe.mp3
=== TSSE (Software/Hardware and settings used for encoding): LAME v3.96.1
=== TIT2 (Title/songname/content description): Soothe
=== TPE1 (Lead performer(s)/Soloist(s)): Smashing Pumpkins
=== TALB (Album/Movie/Show title): Pisces Iscariot
=== TRCK (Track number/Position in set): 1
*** mp3 info
MPEG1/layer III
Bitrate: 128KBps
Frequency: 44KHz
dave@bender:~/mp3fs$ time cp /mnt/mp3/Smashing Pumpkins/Pisces Iscariot/01 - Soothe.mp3 /tmp/
real 0m12.917s
user 0m0.004s
sys 0m0.020s
dave@bender:~/mp3fs$ xmms /mnt/mp3/Smashing Pumpkins/Pisces Iscariot/*
Enhancements:
- A segfault and several memory leaks were fixed.