...will be even longer because of this extra step converting FLAC to WAV, and that I need the space anyway to give me the convenience (heaven forbid) of encoding all my mp3's in one hit. UNLESS there is a way to directly encode from FLAC to mp3/mp3pro/wma files, then convenience and WAV files are my requirements.


as wfaulk posted earlier in the thread:

for i in `find . -name \*.flac -print`; do
flac -dc $i | lame -b128 -h - - > ${i%.flac}.mp3
done

No space wasted (all in memory) for wav data. As the flac decoding is far quicker than the mp3/whatever encoding, it'll just pile up the data in the pipe to lame while lame will start encoding as soon as it gets the first data - very little extra time spent compared to encoding directly from wav. Can be run on any level in your archive, from the whole tree to a single directory/album.

If you'd encapsulate the command in a script, it'd even look like it was a single step flac -> mp3 conversion

The above loop is unixy, but it should be possible to do something similar on other platforms (don't recall if you've mentioned what you're running)

/Michael