How good would it be if your iPod or your favorite portable MP3 player can support FLAC format? Unfortunately not. If you have a bunch of FLAC music files that you want to bring along in your journey, the best way is to convert them into MP3 format. Luckily, this is an easy task in Ubuntu, using SoundConverter.

SoundConverter is an application for GNOME that can take in most audio format (Ogg Vorbis, AAC, MP3, FLAC, WAV, AVI, MPEG, MOV, M4A, AC3, DTS, ALAC, MPC, Shorten, APE, SID, etc…) and convert them to WAV, FLAC, MP3, AAC and Ogg Vorbis format.

Installing SoundConverter

SoundConverter requires the gstreamer ugly library to encode audio files into MP3 format. If you have not installed it, click here to install.

Install SoundConverter here. Alternatively, you can install via the terminal:

sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse soundconverter

Converting audio files

Go to Applications -> Sound & Video -> SoundConverter

Go to Edit -> Preferences.

Under Type of result?, click on MP3. Choose Variable (VBR) – Best quality for Bitrate mode.

Other options that you can configure in the Preferences page include the location to store the converted files and the labeling format of the files.

Once you are done, click Close to return to the main menu.

Click on the Add File to add the FLAC (or any other audio format) file that you want to convert.

If you have a bunch of audio files that need to be converted, you can place them all in one folder and use the Add Folder to select them all.

Alternatively, you can also drag and drop your audio files to the SoundConverter main window.

Once ready, click the Convert button to start the conversion

The time taken to perform the conversion is dependent on the number of files you include. On average, a 4 minutes audio in FLAC format will take about 20s to convert to MP3 format.

After the conversion, you will be able to find the MP3 files in the folder that you specified earlier.

Enjoy!