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Adam Matan
Asked: 2012-04-02 02:31:10 +0800 CST

How to convert WMA lossless to FLAC?

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I have some CDs that I want to convert to FLAC. Banshee can't find their metadata, but Windows Media Player can.

I figured there are two workarounds:

  • Rip all CDs using Windows Media Player WMA-lossless, and batch-convert to FLAC with metadata.
  • Tweak Banshee to connect to Windows Media Player metadata sources

Any ideas how to do it? I'm preferably looking for a command-line method.

banshee command-line convert flac wma

3 Answers

  1. I've used avconv with great success. It's a command-line utility and has a vast number of options.

    The avconv utility is provided by the libav-tools Install libav-tools package (starting in Ubuntu 12.04). To install that, click that link or run:

    sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install libav-tools

    I needed only the most basic conversion of WMA to FLAC (the same as you're asking for). To do that with avconv

    avconv -i <input-filename.wma> <output-filename.flac>

    For more information, see man avconv.

    To convert all WMA files inside a directory, you can use the following script:

    for file in *.wma; do avconv -i "${file}" "${file%%.wma}.flac"; done
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  2. Best Answer

    To convert WMA to FLAC, you could try soundconverter, a graphical application, but it allows to add multiple files and directories. It keeps the metadata if the output format supports it. To install it enter into your terminal this: sudo apt-get install soundconverter

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  3. ffmpeg is my tool of choice here.

    # to convert a single file...
ffmpeg -i file.wav -c:a flac file.flac

# ... or all wma files in the current directory (similar to the avconv answer)
for file in *.wma; do ffmpeg -i "${file}" -c:a flac "${file%%.wma}.flac"; done
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