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How to convert FLAC files to MP3

Introduction

A short article describing how to convert FLAC audio files to MP3 with the Pazera FLAC to MP3 Converter. This program is completely free, also for commercial use, and you can download it here.

FLAC and MP3

FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) is a very popular codec for lossless audio compression used in audio files with the .flac extension. After decompressing such files is obtained the original audio stream, so quality of audio is exactly the same as in the source material. Therefore FLAC files are great for archiving audio CDs.

Unfortunately, this solution also has its weaknesses – FLAC files are relatively large. FLAC compression reduces the file size by about 40-60% compared to the starting material, while lossy audio compressors (such as MP3, WMA, AAC) usually achieve much higher compression ratio (up to 90%), and with appropriately selected compression parameters the loss of sound quality will be very small.

FLAC files are very common on the Internet: many music services provides the songs stored in FLAC files, also in programs to exchange files over P2P (peer-to-peer) you can find a large number of such files. You can also easily create your own FLAC files, eg. by ripping Audio CD using Exact Audio Copy or another ripper that supports FLAC compression, or by converting audio files to FLAC using Pazera Free Audio Extractor or other audio converter.

FLAC files can be played using almost any modern software player (eg VLC, MPlayer), also more and more fixed and portable players supports FLAC compression. However, if your player does not support FLAC, or you have a limited amount of free space in the memory (hard disk, SD card, etc.), then the best solution is to convert FLAC files to MP3 format. MP3 is currently the most popular audio compression format, supported by almost every software and portable players and most new fixed players.

More information on FLAC compression can be found at https://xiph.org/flac/ and Wikipedia.

Conversion FLAC to MP3 using Pazera FLAC to MP3 Converter