FFMPEG: convert flac to mp3 and copy id3tags

And again something to ffmpeg: this very sophisticated tool can not only convert video or audio files. It also can handle the associated metadata.

So, when you have a big music-library in the lossless format .flac (or .wav) and want to have it also on mobile devices you probably convert the files to mp3 or similar. Also, I do so, because when I’m travelling around I’ve mostly not the silence and equipment to hear music in best quality, so a little loss of quality through the use of mp3 would not be noticed. But the smaller file sizes (up to factor 10) is recognized by your disc space!

Additionally I want the mp3-files contain the same metadata as the flac-files, so I can search my library comfortable.

As mentioned, this can again done by ffmpeg:

ffmpeg -i inputfile.flac -ab 180k -map_metadata 0 -id3v2_version 3 output.mp3

The two interesting options: - -ab The bitrate - -map_metadata 0 -id3v2_version 3 copy the idv3 tags

But…as lazy as we computer scientist are, we doesn’t want to do this file by file…so, this script may be useful:

#!/bin/bash

RED='\033[0;31m'
NC='\033[0m' # No Color
GREEN='\033[0;32m'


mkdir mp3

for file in ./*.flac; do 
	name=${file##*/}
    base=${name%.flac}
	echo -e "${GREEN} ffmpeg -i $file ./mp3/$base.mp3 ${NC}" 
	ffmpeg -i $file -ab 120k -map_metadata 0 -id3v2_version 3 ./mp3/$base.mp3 
done

This script iterates over every .flac file in the current directory and convert it to mp3 in the created mp3-subdirectory and copies the metadata. Additionally the script do some color in the output to easily follow the progress.

Happy converting!