Hi - I'm a bit of a newbie here and hope that I've posted this in the right place. If not feel free to move. So basically my questions is this. I've decided to backup my CD collection on to my machine as FLAC files. These sit in a file structure that looks something like this FLAC_music/artist_name/album_name/*tracks*.

In anticipation of actually buying an MP3 player - yes I'm that far behind the times - I'd like to convert the whole lot to MP3 (or whatever). Trouble is I don't want to go through the whole lot selecting folders one by one. I really just want to select the top folder (i.e. FLAC music) and convert everything below it to MP3 at the same time creating a parallel set of folders to hold all the new MP3 files (i.e. something like this MP3_music/artist_name/album_name/*tracks*. Hopefully you get the general idea.

I've tried dbPowerAmp but as far as I can tell it will not allow me to convert a whole load of folders at the same time. We're talking a few hundred folders here so I really really don't want to have to do them one by one. So does anyone have any ideas how I can do this? At the moment I want to convert all the files to MP3 but I guess in the future I might want to pull the same trick and change the to OGG or something.

Thanks!

Check out the Foobar2000 player. Besides of being a kick-ass player it can also mass-convert files while preserving the tags and create directories automatically.

Ah cheers SebastianG. I've had a bit of a look around and think foobar might be just what I need. Incidentally, having searched for foobar conversion (or something like that) I came across another post from this forum (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/lofiversion/index.php/t35949.html) in which someone else was asking a similar question. I'll let you know how it goes.

>ve tried dbPowerAmp but as far as I can tell it will not allow me to convert a whole load of folders at the same time.

Start >> Programs >> dBpowerAMP Music Converter >> File Selector

put a tick mark in the box next to the folder in question, click convert and all files in folders + sub-folders are converted.

You sir, are a star! This is exactly what I was after. I some how though dBpowerAMP should do something like this but even after much Googling couldn't find out how to do it. In fact I've come across quite a lot of threads in various places of people asking exactly the same question of me - none of them seem to have found the file selector in db though. Thanks very much.

Just out of curiosity what's the sound quality like when transcoding from FLAC to mp3. I've always thought that transcoding will lead to inferior files. I'm guessing that its considered bad when transcoding a lossey format to another lossey format and might not apply when transcoding lossless to lossey. But for whatever reason I'm still a bit squemish about backing my CDs to FLAC so that I can later transcode them.
J

The "lossless" in "lossless compression" implies that the lossless file is an exact copy of the original CD (ignoring gaps and read offsets, etc). The quality you get from converting FLAC to MP3 will be exactly the same as when you rip straight from CD to MP3.

Please do not be. I suppose a poll is in order as to the current situation. But everybody here seems to use one lossless and one lossy codec for archiving and portable player/torrenting respectively :-)