Music is an important part of life and not every tune can be found on Apple Music or Spotify. I recently got my hand on a couple of libraries of early 20^th century music in the form of FALC lossless audio files. Unfortunately, Apple Music, my preferred media player on Mac, didn't play FLAC files.

The easy solution is to use a different media player. VLC plays just about anything. But I am an "engineer". An engineer never settles for the easy solution. So I decided to convert them to MP3. Conversion also had the advantage of listening to it on my iPhone and iPad.

To make life easy, I wrote a script to convert FLAC music files in a given folder to MP3. This script is not disruptive (doesn't alter your existing files) and instead creates a new file with the .mp3 extension using the popular library ffmpg.

Steps

Install ffmeg if you haven't already: ffmpeg is a suite of software used to manipulate audio video files.

brew install ffmpeg

Then create a file somewhere convenient. I have a folder that is already in the $PATH variable called $HOME/.scripts/. You can have it anywhere. Just make sure to run the script from that folder.

cd /path/to/scipts/folder
touch flac2mp3

Then use your favourite text editor to open the file.

nvim flac2mp3

Add the following lines. Here I am using zsh.

#!/bin/zsh

# Author: Ziyan Junaideen
# Website: www.jdeen.com
# E-mail: ziyan@jdeen.com
# Phone: +94-74-2869900
# Date: 2022-07-30
# Description: FLAC to MP3 conversion script
# Dependencies: ffmpg
# Examples:
#  ./flac2mp3 ~/Music/MyFlacFolder

# The script is intended to convert all flac files in the provided folder to similarly named MP3 files. There is no
# separate output folder. The files will be in the same folder.

FOLDER=$1

# Iterate through each `flac` file in the provided folder
for file in $FOLDER/*.flac
do
    # Get the filename without the extension
    filename=$(basename "$file" .flac)

    # Convert the file
    ffmpeg -i "$file" -acodec libmp3lame -qscale:a 2 "$FOLDER/$filename.mp3"
done

If you are not using zsh, you should change the first line to the following:

#!/bin/zsh

Now save and exit.

Then lets make this file executable.

chmod a+x flac2mp3

Now you can run:

flac2mp3 /path/to/my/library

The first line is the shebang which tells the computer what program to use to run it.

Improvements

There are many improvements I can think of, but this does my job.

I can think of:

• Support converting a single flac file
• Support relative folder paths
• Abstract the ffmpeg output in favour of the scripts own logging

That's it from me. Hope this was helpful.