this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
38 points (85.2% liked)

Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

54411 readers
177 users here now

⚓ Dedicated to the discussion of digital piracy, including ethical problems and legal advancements.

Rules • Full Version

1. Posts must be related to the discussion of digital piracy

2. Don't request invites, trade, sell, or self-promote

3. Don't request or link to specific pirated titles, including DMs

4. Don't submit low-quality posts, be entitled, or harass others



Loot, Pillage, & Plunder

📜 c/Piracy Wiki (Community Edition):


💰 Please help cover server costs.

Ko-Fi Liberapay
Ko-fi Liberapay

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
38
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

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.
top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago (13 children)
load more comments (13 replies)
[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)
ffmpeg -i in.flac -c:a libopus -b 192k out.opus
[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Not audiophilic enough.

ffmpeg -i in.flac -ar 48000 \
            -af aresample=resampler=soxr:precision=28:cheby=1:dither_method=shibata \
            -c:a libopus -b:a 224k out.opus
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Why would an audiophile listen to lossy music?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Because the audiophile is broke, and will have to listen to some music on a lowly device, but the craving for some placebo is still there.

EDIT: btw, the bitrate is missing a k in your command 😉

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Edited, thanks!

load more comments (6 replies)
[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

PowerAmp has a good UI but lacks some features and usage ease so I highly recommend Musicolet.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I've been using Poweramp since version 1.5 on my HTC Hero (Android 1.5!). I'm just curious as to why Musicolet is better. I've already noticed their statement about no internet access, so that's a start.

Edit: Musicolet is louder on my Bluetooth headphones than Poweramp is, that makes 2 points. 😁

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

No internet access is some kind of philosophy for them but I don't like it for two reason: 1. This philosophy prevent them from adding a feature to find and embed synced lyrics automatically. 2. If they want to respect our privacy why not just make the app open source? like the paid version doesn't have any bold feature.

But with all that, I still use it because Poweramp UI is not good! innovative, but not actually good.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I recommend converting to opus. Best efficiency.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Everyone is recommending ffmpeg. So am I, but with Axiom UI, since everyone is not used to working in terminal. You can convert entire folders just as well like you could with ffmpeg normally. I am used to command line stuff, but I still prefer this for simple conversions out of convenience. https://axiomui.github.io/

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I use FFmpeg Batch Audio Video converter, it's just a GUI FFmpeg. I use it to convert FLAC to MP3 when I was going on a trip and only had a CD Player and I use it to convert 7.1 Audio down to AC3 5.1 to fit my sound system. It has a MP3 preset but I had to add one for the 5.1 conversion.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I wrote a script for this btw if you'd rather use the CLI. Runs a whole little wizard and everything lol, even tells you to have a nice day on exit! I'm no programmer but it's honest work.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

https://litter.catbox.moe/ty3zds

Here ya go, it'll be there for 12hr. Like I said it ain't the best, it is basically a glorified hello world that I used to learn how to bash a little, but I have used it so often lol.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I dunno, I normally use my bash script + ffmpeg to convert batch flacs to mp3s

#!/bin/bash

cd "${1}"

for subdir in *; do
    cd "${subdir}"

    for input in *.flac; do
        echo ${input%.*}
        ffmpeg -i "${input}" -ab 320k  -map_metadata 0 -id3v2_version 3 "${input%.*}.mp3" && rm "${input}"
    done

    cd ..
done

Then i'd just run my script.sh [directory that contains flac] you might want to remove && rm "${input}" if you don't want it to delete your flac files automatically.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I used to use musicbee for this. Good app for organising your music on your desktop and you can configure it to convert audio format when syncing to your phone. It's been a while since I used it, but it did the job nicely

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Audacity free and open source also user friendly

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Audacity uses FFMPEG to work with flac files, since it's only going to convert them might as well go directly with FFMPEG

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

But contains telemetry since iirc v 3.1.3. There's also a fork called tenacity that is pretty alright.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I personally use AIMP. It has a built in converter it worked well for me

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Besides ffmpeg I would also recommend audio converter for the ones who want an Android app with a GUI, I believe it uses FFmpeg under the hood

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What have you set your compression level to for the flac files?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

What do you mean what I set? I downloaded them from various sources on internet.

load more comments
view more: next ›