When we talk about multimedia converters, be it video converters, or audio converters as in the case today, there is always a large percentage of applications that, although they are free, are always showing us ads or “bothering” us so that we acquire a paid version.
After all, all these converters are developed by companies and need to recover the investment in some way, so it is understandable. Now, it is also just as respectable to seek a cleaner user experience. In those cases, turning to open source applications can be a great idea.
Fre:ac is one of those basic tools that never hurts to install on your computer. It works with Windows, Linux, and Mac. In addition to being free and open-source, it has a large number of features.
This can also be a double-edged sword, since having so many features, the fre:ac interface can be a bit overwhelming. In any case, let’s see what features this great audio converter has.
Characteristics of fre:ac
- Free conversion between MP3, M4A/AAC, FLAC, WMA, Opus, Ogg Vorbis, Speex, Monkey’s Audio (APE), WavPack, WAV, and other formats.
- It allows extracting the songs from a music CD (what is commonly known as “ripping”) with CDDB/GNUdb database support.
- It is a portable application that you can install on a USB flash drive.
- Optimized multi-core encoding, allows fast conversions on modern PCs.
- Unicode support for tags and filenames.
- Available in 43 languages.
- 100% free and open source.
How to convert a FLAC file to MP3 with fre:ac
To see a little more in-depth how fre:ac works, we are going to see how you can convert a high-quality and very heavy audio file, such as FLAC files, and pass it to a more manageable and lightweight format such as MP3.
Of course, the procedure is the same if you want to convert a WAV file or any other audio format. Let’s see…
The Procedure
- If you still do not have fre:ac, you can download it from its official website.
- Open the program and in the top menu select “ Add -> audio files ”. From here, you can also select multiple folders or files that match a certain pattern (such as the name of an artist or album).
- After adding the audio track or tracks, you can play them by clicking on the “Play” button in the upper right area of the application.
- In the “Show file information” section, you can also edit the song’s metadata, such as the title, track, year, or musical genre. To edit all the labels in detail, click on the “Labels” tab.
- Now go to the “Chosen Compressor” dropdown and choose the output format you want to apply for conversion. In this case, since we want an MP3 file, we will select “ LAME MP3 Encoder v3.100 ”.
- Finally, you only have to choose the output folder where the file will be saved. If you have a Windows PC, by default all files will be saved in the “Music” folder of your user profile. You can choose another output folder by clicking on the “Browse” button on the right.
- When you have everything ready, click on the start button (if you move the mouse over it, it will turn green) that you will see in the upper area along with the rest of the icons. This will start the conversion process.
Conclusion
And ready! After finishing, you will be able to find the compressed audio file in the previously selected format. The time that the conversion process will take will depend on the weight and the number of files in the queue, although in general terms we can say that it is really fast.
In short, an open-source, free, and really versatile audio converter that allows you to work with different formats and compression levels. Highly recommended.
