flac2mp3 conversion bash script

I recently started buying some music in flac format. Though I’m content on storing it as flac on my NAS I don’t like filling up my phone’s memory and also I have the impression that listening to flac uses more battery on my n900.

So I devised a small script that converts all the flac’s from a folder to mp3. It has some provisions to carry the metadata from one format to the other. It’s based on the one found here, with the following modifications:

  • it encodes as 320kbps stereo (not joint stereo) There’s a whole debate on whether one can hear or not the quality improvement but it’s still less than half the original flac file so I didn’t really care on finding out if I could go lower. Changing the lame parameters is easy enough if you want different output settings
  • instead of id3 it uses id3tag as it’s more current.
  • Dependencies: metaflac, id3tag, [lame][2] (use your distro’s package manager to find out which packages provide those binaries)
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#!/bin/bash
for a in *.flac

do
OUTF=`echo "$a" | sed s/.flac$/.mp3/g`

ARTIST=`metaflac "$a" -show-tag=ARTIST | sed s/.*=//g`
TITLE=`metaflac "$a" -show-tag=TITLE | sed s/.*=//g`
ALBUM=`metaflac "$a" -show-tag=ALBUM | sed s/.*=//g`
GENRE=`metaflac "$a" -show-tag=GENRE | sed s/.*=//g`
TRACKNUMBER=`metaflac "$a" -show-tag=TRACKNUMBER | sed s/.*=//g`
DATE=`metaflac "$a" -show-tag=DATE | sed s/.*=//g`

flac -c -d "$a" | lame -m s -b 320 -s 44.1 - "$OUTF"
id3tag -s"$TITLE" -t"${TRACKNUMBER:-0}" -a"$ARTIST" -A"$ALBUM" -y"$DATE" -g"${GENRE:-12}" "$OUTF"

done