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Nov 24, 2018

How to convert flac files to mp3 on Mac

I have found converting flac to mp3 on Mac to be a recurring challenge. It occurred to me today that ffmpeg could probably handle this. It can do – as it turns out – very nicely.

Doing a large group of files seemed like a bit of a pain though, and being a Ruby developer my first thought was to write a Ruby command line app that could iterate through a group of files, convert them, and then optionally delete the flac files.

This was my solution: https://github.com/gordonbisnor/flac-converter/

It requires that Ruby and ffmpeg be installed. Usage can be as simple as running flac-converter if the script is placed within your directory of flac files. It does accept arguments though, to account for specifying:

  • source directory
  • target directory
  • deleting flac files
  • bit rate
  • audio channels
  • sample rate
  • codec

It is open source under the MIT license. Contributions welcomed.


I am available for Ruby consulting work – get in touch to learn more.

Gordon B. Isnor

Gordon B. Isnor writes about Ruby on Rails, Ember.js, Elm, Elixir, Phoenix, React, Vue and the web.
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