[John151]

I have been using EAC to rip my CDs to FLAC files.  Now I would to make "small footprint" copies for non-critical uses, such as playing on my paitio, in the car, etc..  Is there a good free-ware product that will create MP3 files from the FLAC miles (using LAME codec)? 

Thanks in advance!

P.S. Happy Memorial Day everyone!

[Papajin]

Well, I haven't researched this extensively, but I've been using Foobar 2000 to do mine in bulk.  My only complaint with this method is there's no way to tell it to just point it at my music directory, and have it walk down the entire tree only creating MP3's where some don't exist already.  That would be ideal so I don't have to keep new music separate.  Maybe someday I'll write a utility to do that... in the meantime holler if you see anything that works like that!

[John151]

My only complaint with this method is there's no way to tell it to just point it at my music directory, and have it walk down the entire tree only creating MP3's where some don't exist already.  That would be ideal so I don't have to keep new music separate. 

That would be slick.

A while back I was using EAC with Mareo to rip to both FLAC and MP3 at the same time (when I was ripping the wife's CD for her iPod, and making FLAC copies for myself).  That might work for you if you want to maintain multiple formats for all new music on a go-forward basis.

I thought Foobar 2000 sounded familiar, so I checked my download area, and I already have this downloaded (but not installed), althought I don't know when or why I downloaded it .  Now I just have to install!  Thanks for the suggestion! 

[Papajin]

FooBar appears to be an audio player only.  Can't find any features to convert and write out to new files. 

Not so!

==========

Add some files/cd's to the main playlist using whatever method you desire.  Use File>Add Directory to add the entire directory tree (can take awhile if you have a lot of music.)

Highlight the songs you wish to convert.  (Ctrl-A to highlight everything)

Right click your mouse in the highlighted area.

Select Convert>Convert to...

Click the "More settings" to get a better idea what's available.  You can use this area to tweak things to output exactly what you want.  I have mine setup to basically reproduce my FLAC file structure under an MP3 directory (and of course convert to MP3's!)

Choose the "encoding preset" you like best then close the "More settings" screen.

Choose "Ok".

==========

There's a bunch of stuff under the right click menu such as ReplayGain settings, a tag editor, etc.  I believe you'll also need a copy of LAME installed for the actual conversion if you don't have it already.

[John151]

Thanks.  I discovered that shortly after I posted, so I deleted my post.  I guess I deleted it after your started your post. 

What VBR setting are you using for LAME?  I played with setting 2 thru 5, and settled on 4 (based on file size).  Not using this for critical listening, so I am looking for the 80/20 sweet spot. 

[pm314]

Check out flac2mp3 also. I have not used it but have been looking for something like this also. It looks like you can schedule it to run nightly and update the MP3 directory with any new flac files you may have added that day.
The down side is that it appears to be a script so if you're not comfortable with that sort of thing it may not be what you are looking for.  There is a lot of discussion on it in the Slimdevices forums.
http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=35711

[ehart]

I did a search for Flac Players lately, and settled on Media Monkey, which also does the conversions you desire.  There is a free and a paid version, with the latter providing some additional capabilities.  If you like your software easy to setup and use, I think you will like Media Monkey better than Foobar 2000.

[Papajin]

flac2mp3 looks interesting!  Seems like it does most of what you'd want in a conversion utility of this sort.  A bit of a pain with the usage of perl, but I expect the reason they chose it was for easy portability amongst the different OS's.  I'm not currently maintaining MP3 copies at the moment, but when I start again, I'll probably give this a try!

[Regalma]

I've tried many, including Foobar (couldn't figure out how to use it) flac to mp3 and few others. They all had what I considered to be fatal flaws. I couldn't figure out how to use them, they required advanced knowledge like Perl programming, they couldn't maintain the original folder structure or they left the mp3 and flac files all mixed together. Finally I tried dbPoweramp. That was the one. What you do is copy all your files and folder structure over to another drive or part of your drive. Configure what type of mp3 file you want tell it to maintain original folder structure and to delete the source files. Start the conversion and several hours later you can have 1000's of files converted, still in the orginal folder structure and no having to seperate the mp3 from the Flac files. The easiest, most user friendly program I could find. It's free except after the trial period you have to pay something for an mp3 license, something like that. I don't remember the details. But if you consider how many, many hours of work and frustration it saved me it was cheap. Also, it is a good program for editing FLAC tags in large numbers. Almost as good as Creative's software is for editing mp3 tags. That is the standard in my experience.

[tonyptony]

Concur with dBpowerAmp. It's worth the price.