Sometimes the things that should be stupidly easy… aren’t. Converting a bunch of audio files at once, is one of those things.
My previous method of converting FLAC files (those are lossless, i.e. exactly like the CD, sound files that some people use to rip tracks from CD’s) to MP3’s (those famous files that work on your cellphone, mp3 player, dvd player, and just about everywhere else) involved Winamp, a plug-in, and a lot of file renaming. It wasn’t a system I could recommend to others.
Today, I found the need to make a few MP3’s. So, I searched for a “better way”. Here’s my FLAC to MP3 recipe:
- Install foobar2000. It’s a free media player from foobar2000.org. It appears to be safe to use, but YMMV.
- To create MP3’s you will need to find a (Windows) binary copy of LAME, the open source MP3 encoder. Google for it.
- Load your files in foobar2000.
- You might want to set your default file naming and file quality preferences. Or do that after the next step.
- Right-click to bring up a context menu that brings up a “convert” option – how thoughtful.
- Answer a couple easy questions about finding lame.exe and the destination folder.
- And let it go.
So far so good. This setup should be good for converting WAV and many other audio files too.