If you are lucky the site that you have downloaded the music from is offering it in other formats as well. If not, your best bet is to convert the audio format into a supported one.

I have reviewed more than a dozen audio converters in the past. From Helium Audio Converter over Mobile Media Converter and Media Cope to Quick Media Converter and specialized tools such as Flac to Mp3.

FlicFlac is a free portable audio converter for Windows that supports several popular music formats including mp3, wav, ape, flac and ogg. It lacks support for other popular audio formats like aac on the other hand.

All you need to do to convert audio files is to drag and drop them into the drop area in the application window or click on the area to open a file browser.

Before you do that you may want to change the output format, Flac is selected by default, to another format. A click on the new format makes it the default output format for the conversion. You may also want to click on the settings button to make changes to the audio quality of the output or to integrate the audio converter into the shell to make it accessible in Windows Explorer. The latter allows you to convert audio files right from within the file manager.

Users can furthermore select to delete the input audio files after successful conversions. FlicFlac is definitely not the most complete audio converter but not all users need a program that supports all known audio files or offers editing options.

Portability and ease of use, those two are the biggest strengths of FlicFlac. Windows users can download the latest version of the audio converter from the developer website.

Many users like to keep FLAC files on their desktop computer and mp3 files of the same songs on their portable mp3 player or mobile phone. But how can you convert FLAC to mp3? Lets find out.

There are a lot of tools out there that promise free conversions but do not keep up to the promise. Some convert only 50% of the files while others nag you into buying the full version before they let you convert flac files to mp3.

A free solution is Koyotesoft’s Free Mp3 Wma Converter which supports the FLAC format among others. You need to pay attention to the program’s setup though as it tries to install additional programs that you may not need. This includes a CD Ripper or a trial version of a shareware program. Additionally, it tries to install the Dealio toolbar and change the default search engine to Yahoo. All of those options can be disabled during installation.

You can drag and drop Flac files to the program interface or use the plus icon to add songs from the local hard drive.

Make sure mp3 is selected as the output format. You can change the default quality setting of 128 Kbps up to 320 Kbps there as well. A click on convert converts the FLAC files to mp3.

Please note that you can select a different output format, supported are for instance ogg or wav as well (but not aac). The program uses Lame to encode the music into different formats. A click on the settings button opens the options window with many different settings.

You can add as many FLAC files as you want from the local hard drive, and all of them will be batch converted once you hit the convert button. File names will be retained, only the file extension changes to the selected format.

You can download the program from the developer homepage.

The first thing to do is to get mpg123 installed. This can be done very quickly via command line. One of the following commands will do the trick (depending upon which distribution you use):

apt-get install mpg123

urpmi mpg123

If you are using Fedora Core you will most likely have to stop by rpm.pbone.net, download the correct rpm package and install with the command:

rpm -ivh mpg123-RELEASE_NUMBER.rpm

Where RELEASE_NUMBER is the actual release number you download.

Once installed you are ready to go.

With the wav files located in a directory change to that directory to run the command. The format of the command will be:

mpg123 -w file.wav file.mp3

The “-w” argument tells mpg123 that the output will be in the .wav format. The first file name is the output file name which is user configurable. A word of warning, spaces in file names aren’t always the best choice in the Linux operating system. If you want to separate words in a file name you can use “_” character. So creating a .wav of Rush’s Tom Sawyer you would do something like:

mpg123 -w Rush_Tom_Sawyer.wav “01 – Tom Sawyer.mp3″

Batch Conversion

What about batch conversion? This requires a bit of shell scripting. Create a Music directory (in modern Linux distributions there should be one in ~/) and dump all of your mp3 files into that directory. Next, create a shell script in your favorite text editor. We’ll call that script “batch_conversion”. The contents of the script might look like:

#!/usr/bin/perl
my $dir = “~/Music”;
opendir DH, $dir or die “Can’t open $dir: $!”;
$count2=1;
while ($name = readdir DH) {
next unless $name =~ /\.mp3$/;
$wav=”$count2.wav”;
print “$wav\n”;
system “mpg123 -w $wav \”$name\”";
$count2++;
}

Once you save the file you have to give it executable permissions with the command chmod u+x batch_conversion. To run the command you will issue (from the directory the new file is located) ./batch_conversion. Once you run the file you will have both the mp3 and the wav files located in the ~/Music directory.

Final Thoughts

Converting mp3 files to wav files for burning audio CDs is a simple process with mpg123. There are gui tools for this job but the command line tools make for much more flexible jobs.