I just want to convert it from FLAC to Mp3 and possibly burn it to a disc for a permanent copy

flac -d -c infile.flac | lame --preset standard - outfile.mp3

Under Windows I've used poikosoft's Easy CD-DA Extractor to do conversions. Works well for me, including burning to disc. Not free though...

...and while we're discussing transcoding...

I regularly now record some of our favourite CBC Radio shows off the net for later listening. But they annoyingly are transmitted in 32kb/s Microsoft streaming audio (.asf), which the Empeg doesn't grok.

So here's my transcoding script:

#!/bin/sh

while [ "$1" != "" ]; do
wma="$1"
fname="${wma%.*}"
wav="${fname}.wav"
mp3="${fname}.mp3"
echo "Transcoding \"${wma}\" to \"${wav}\":"
/usr/bin/mplayer -vo null -vc dummy -ao pcm:waveheader "${wma}" -ao pcm:file="${wav}" || exit $?
echo "Transcoding \"${wav}\" to \"${mp3}\":"
lame --preset 64 "${wav}" "${mp3}" || exit $?
echo "Transcoding done, removing \"${wav}\""
rm -f "${wav}"
shift
done


If anyone is interested, Randy Bachman ("American Woman", "Takin' Care of Business", etc..) has a Saturday show from 7:05pm through 9pm. Great show.

Cheers

I didn't realize that The Guess Who was a Randy Bachman band.

But that's not the point of my post. In finding out, I went to the All Music Guide and looked at the entry on Randy Bachman. Amongst the list of similar artists are a number of bands you'd expect, like Three Dog Night, but then there's a whole list of things you wouldn't, like Pigface, KMFDM, My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult, and Ministry. WTF?

Thanks for the Bachman reminder! Sirius now carries the CBC I've forgotten to record his show! I'm going to the Sirius tuner now...

Foobar2k works quite well under Windows for that sort of thing.

I also like dbPowerAmp, but be careful about using the latest LAME. If you want to use the latest LAME, you have to use the LAME.exe plugin instead of the LAME.dll since the latest dbPowerAmp doesn't know the latest command switches. I like to run multiple instances of dbPowerAmp at the same time, but if you try this with the LAME.exe plugin, you get corrupted files. I found that I can only run one instance at a time.

dbPowerAMP is good for me too, converts anything to anything and actually points you to the right codecs if you need them.