I was going through Fedora Planet stream when I noticed this blog post about converting Flac files to mp3 on Linux. That reminded me of a couple of folders with files that I can’t listen to in my car. So I thought I’d convert them now, especially that I have the guide handy it only consists of a couple of steps. I tried and it worked, except that default options used resulted in the mp3 file of 128 kbps, which is a rather low quality. So I played a bit with it and ended up with the following shell flac2mp3.sh script:
#!/bin/bash
# Convert flac file to mp3 with best quality VBR
for file in *.flac
do
base=`basename "$file" .flac`
# Convert flat to wav
flac -d "$file"
# Convert wav to mp3 with variable bit rate, best quality
lame -V 0 "$base".wav "$base".mp3
done
As mentioned in the comments, it creates variable bit rate (VBR) mp3 files with maximum quality.
Update: The moment I finished this blog post I felt weird. It was almost like I did it before. And indeed. I should have searched my own blog before posting. Here is the post I did five years ago which has pretty much the same script in it.