transcode files from flac and shn to aac or mp3 using OS X?

January 28, 2006 9:04 AM

How to transcode files from flac and shn to aac or mp3 using OS X? What UNIXy tools will help me?

I have a lot of flac and shn files I have downloaded. I want to (a) get them off my hard drive and replace them with something smaller but still decent quality, and (b) put some of the smaller things on my iPod. This means that the something smaller should preferably be AAC, but mp3 will do.

I have OSX 10.3. I found a program called Sound Grinder that will read flac but not shn files and make mp3s with them, but that's not ideal and will cost me $40 when the 15 day demo expires. Max looks like it will do the job, but is 10.4 only.

I have installed fink and browsed the 'sound' section of the package database but ended up bewildered because I find it hard to tell which packages are actual applications and which are libraries and whatnot.

Here's my question: Is there an OSX program I have overlooked that will do what I want? If not, how to do it with either an X11 or command-line program?

posted by nowonmai to computers & internet (7 comments total)

FLACer is free and converts FLAC files to AIFF or WAV, which you can convert to what you like in iTunes.

(Hold down Option/alt and select "Convert to AAC" from the Advanced menu in iTunes to import and convert files at the same time, without first adding the originals to your library).

No idea about SHN.
posted by cillit bang at 9:29 AM on January 28, 2006

I wrote livemp3 to do exactly this. It's very command-line based, but it invokes flac, shorten, and/or lame as required.

It might be a self-link, but I know it works ...
posted by scruss at 9:34 AM on January 28, 2006 [1 favorite]

In fink, have you enabled the unstable tree? Most of the decent audio utilities seem to be in there. Between sox and LAME you should probably be OK.

Also, are you looking here to see what's available? There tend to be at least some minimal desriptions through there.
posted by 31d1 at 10:49 AM on January 28, 2006

Thanks scruss, that does the job, although I feel somewhat ashamed that it took me a couple of hours to get up and running. It was my first (knowing) experience with Perl. I guess I could modify this program to make liveAAC when/if FAAC becomes installable via fink.

Sox looks like I would need a program like scruss's to write the command lines for me, but thanks for the suggestion. It's exactly what I asked for!
posted by nowonmai at 12:39 PM on January 28, 2006

Sorry it took so long to work for you. Please feel free to bug me by email for feature requests/usage questions.

faac is in my fink's repository. I think I'd only need to add one line to support AAC.
posted by scruss at 5:47 PM on January 28, 2006

So, on the same day I asked this question, it would seem that Switch 1.05 was released. Simple, free, GUI transcoding for Mac and Windows. Reads flac but not shn, writes aac or mp3. Scruss's solution, however, remains better as it handles ID3 tags well.

faac is only available for OS X 10.4 at this time.
posted by nowonmai at 3:44 PM on January 30, 2006

Hmm, Switch doesn't say what it uses for encoding MP3. I know that Lame sounds good to me, so I'd rather not install something that uses an unknown codec.
posted by scruss at 9:03 AM on February 4, 2006