Chuck Carroll

Converting multiple FLAC files to OGG

Published: 2021-08-01
Last Updated: 2022-11-04

A few days ago I wrote out how I split a single FLAC file that contains several tracks, into multiple individual FLAC flies. FLAC is a high quality lossless audio format, but they're also pretty large in size. Personally, I like to convert my FLAC audio files to OGG format which can be considered the open format alternative to MP3s. These are essentially the music files I use for playback on devices with limited storage such as my smartphone.

I used to use Gnome's Sound Converter program for this task, and although I think it's great, I felt like it was a bit overkill to have GUI program do this simple task with too many clicks when it could be done in the terminal with a single command. Note that the package vorbis-tools must be installed on your system.

find . -name "*flac" -exec oggenc -q 9 {} \;

With this command, I'm basically saying to find any file with "flac" in the name and to convert it to OGG with a quality of "9". I've found that "9" put's it in line with an MP3 file at bitrate of 320kbps.

Thanks for reading. Feel free to send comments, questions, or recommendations to hey@chuck.is