How to convert WMA lossless to FLAC?

Question

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.

Answer 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 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

Answer 2

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

Answer 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