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 very old tool. Is the quality decent?
It is the engine powering most of the audio/video tools you use today.
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.
Is qemu better than virtualbox and vmware workstation?
Depends. I heard its the best for performance.
better then virtual box, when comparing to vmware it has some wins and some losses, windows guests, vmware wins, linux guests qemu wins, assuming you dont need any more advanced features. in which qemu always wins
It depends on what you mean by better. Faster? More user friendly? More versatile?
It’s one of the pillars of anything A/V. Most if not all streaming provider uses it in their backend and frontend, and most conversion and playback tools (ie: HandBrake, VLC) depends on it.
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.
Old doesn’t mean much if it’s maintained and improved like 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.
Or use Shutter Encoder, it’s basically FFMPEG with a GUI (altough with 1.7.3 I’ve run into problems with some codecs, use 1.7.2)
But for this it might be easier to just script it than drag and drop every file, depends on OP