If you want to crunch those large FLAC files to mp3 and are looking for a quality audio converter, try ftransc. The advantage to ftransc is its ease of use from the cmdline. There is no need to be an audio expert. Using presets make ftransc very simple to use. It comes with a Qt based GUI as well. And if you are a Rhythmbox fan then you also have a ftransc plugin. It integrates with Nautilus as well.

ftransc is written in python and uses several audio libraries for conversion and metadata handling: Mutagen (for metadata), ffmpeg/avconv, LAME, FLAC, vorbis tools, faac, Musepack, PyQt, CDparanoia, WavPack.

Features

GUI and cmdline modes

Nautilus and Rhythmbox integration

Supports all common audio formats

Audio presents for all codecs

Preserves metadata

Convert audio files in a directory recursively

Extract audio from videos and convert

Rip audio CDs

Installation

ftransc can be installed very easily on Ubuntu. Run:

$ git clone https://github.com/dopstar/ftransc.git $ cd ftransc $ sudo make uninstall $ sudo make install

CLI-only install

As you’ll see, the last command will pull a lot of dependencies. If you do not want the Qt GUI (ftransc_qt) you can edit the Makefile and remove python-qt4 from the apt-get line. This will download less than 3MB of packages as all Qt related dependencies won’t be installed.

Usage

GUI

Using the GUI is straightforward if you did a complete installation. To run the GUI, issue:

$ ftransc_qt

Right click on any audio file in Nautilus and you’ll find ftransc under Scripts menu.

To integrate into Rhythmbox, enable ftransc Audio Converter in the plugins list, right click on any track and select Convert Songs (ftransc).

Take a look at /etc/ftransc/presets.conf which has the presets for each codec. The following levels are configured (from best to lowest quality): insane, extreme, high, normal, low and tiny.

CLI

The cmdline syntax is:

$ ftransc options files

Help

$ ftransc --help $ man ftransc

Examples

1. Convert all mp3 files to wma using extreme quality

$ ftransc -f wma -q extreme *.mp3

2. Convert all audio inside a directory (non-recursive) to wma

$ ftransc -f aac --directory directory_path/

3. Extract audio from multiple multimedia files and convert to mp3

$ ftransc -q insane -f mp3 file1.avi file2.mpg file3.vob

4. Convert files recursively within a directory and sub-directories using find and xargs

$ find directory_path/ -type f -print0 | xargs -0 ftransc -f aac -q high