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 -i in.flac -c:a libopus -b 192k out.opus
I recommend converting to opus. Best efficiency.
I use FRE:AC https://www.freac.org/downloads-mainmenu-33
It can do bulk conversions with a recursive directory search and works in most OSes
I had the exact same use case as you, 1TB of FLACs onto a 256gb phone. Because you prefer minimal quality loss, Opus is the format for you, not MP3. You can maintain transparency-level quality with 128kbps, Opus is roughly equivalent in quality to a mp3 twice its size. AAC and Vorbis are also preferable to MP3 in this aspect, but inferior to Opus. At this point, mp3s are only useful for devices that can’t decode any better codec.
Then i do a search-replace for *.flac -> *.opus on the playlists. I use PowerAmp on android to play the tunes, can recommend.
PowerAmp has a good UI but lacks some features and usage ease so I highly recommend Musicolet.
I just tried it. I can’t bulk import external playlists, so I’m not using it. I keep my playlists in with the music directories so I have to scroll past 3,000 artists to get to any of them in musicolet.
dont convert them to mp3, use either AAC or Opus, 192kbps is typically good enough for high quality, but a lot of people will just encode 128kbps
Gonna have to hard agree with this.
I’d look into Apple’s AAC format as it is the best compromise of space and quality currently.
I encode my FLACs to 256k vbr, which is high enough and saves a ton of space vompared to mp3.
Also I use musicbee to do this.
opus and AAC are more or less the same, with some wins and losses either way, just don’t use ffaac or ffopus for encoding lol
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thats not true at all…
If you’re using Windows then Foobar 2000 is great. I use it for manually managing and tidying my collection in addition to converting pretty much any format to any other format.
That being said, you can install it as a snap in Linux as well if that’s your poison.
I personally use AIMP. It has a built in converter it worked well for me
Audacity free and open source also user friendly
But contains telemetry since iirc v 3.1.3. There’s also a fork called tenacity that is pretty alright.