Flac (short for Free Lossless Audio Codec) are the high quality audio files that reproduce much higher quality sound than some of the other popular audio formats like MP3. Flac format has become more popular in the recent years because of increasing storage capacity of various types of media. This is perhaps due to the fact that unlike in the last few decades when hard disks could carry only 10 GB to 20 GB of data, now we have hard disks that have storage capacity in the order of multiple Terabytes. So now we can afford to store flac files which are usually 4-5 times larger in size than their MP3 counterparts. But even today the mobile devices have limited storage space and people prefer to keep the audio files in the MP3 format on their mobile devices.
In order to manage both your high quality Flac audio collection as well as their MP3 versions, you can use the free FlacSquisher. This software can compress and encode the Flac audio files into MP3 , OGG and Opus file formats quickly. This program can be used to keep your Flac files collection untouched and still manage a mirror collection in the MP3 format.
In the FlacSquisher program, you can choose the folder that contains the Flac audio files and the folder where you want to keep the converted MP3, OGG or Opus files. You can choose one of the encoders from Lame MP3 Encoder, Ogg Vorbis or Opus encoders. If you know a little about the command lines related to any of these encoders, then you can tinker with the command line to change the quality of the output. Finally you can click on the Encode! button to start the conversion of the files.
Although FlacSquisher comes with all the necessary encoders, but you can specify your own encoders in the options for the FlacSquisher. You can choose to hide the command prompt window, select encoding options, choose files to be ignored in the Flac source folder and more.
Conclusion: FlacSquisher is an open-source solution for converting Flac audio files into MP3, Ogg or Opus audio files. This way you can save space on your mobile devices and still enjoy your media collection.
You can download FlacSquisher from http://flacsquisher.sourceforge.net/.