Hello all,

Long time lurker who finally couldn't find something discussed already...

I have several thousand FLAC 1.14b files, all created with the Foobar2000 frontend. I'm very, very happy to have finally made the jump to lossless, thanks of course to the big price drop in storage.

My hope is that someone can direct me in how to convert from old FLAC to new FLAC (1.14b -> 1.21b) while:

*not changing any tags
*not going to wav first (see #1)
*verifies/tests ok, then
*replaces old file

I'd like to do this for my entire library in one shot, overnight, CPU and drives churning. Whether it's a CL script, or preferably something within Foobar0.95b1, I've yet to find anything definitive about using 1.2 in this manner. Your help greatly appreciated.

What would be the point of such transcoding? Even though you're dealing with lossless processes, a simple human error or hardware failure could ruin your collection.

Well, I think there's two reasons --

First, there's a point at which all things are no longer backward-compatible. For example, Foobar0.95 no longer accepts anything less than 1.2.

Second, the compression rate is improving, and I'd like to take advantage of that without any re-ripping or re-tagging.

And besides, no one error or hardware failure will screw it up. It's all properly backed up. You can't just assume that I'll screw it up, either. I'm pretty good at following directions.

Like you said, it's lossless transcoding. Until it's lost as a depricated format...

Can't be. The changelog said that encoder has to be 1.2.0 or newer. FLAC wouldn't be nearly as popular if files were to become unplayable in the future.

For encoding, that's correct. But I now will have FLAC encodes from different versions.

Look, I appreciate you arguing why I might not want to do something, but I want to update them nonetheless and despite your objection. I'm not trying to hurt your feelings, but I understand fully what's going on here. I want them updated if only for the better compression.

So thanks for your concern, but do you know how to do it? That would be much more valuable. Thanks.

flac batch file: http://www.synthetic-soul.co.uk/files/flac-113.bat

flac text document: http://www.synthetic-soul.co.uk/files/flac-113.txt

Now THAT's an answer. Hell ya. Thanks Mr. Footballer!

Check there -> guru_explanation

I use this line for a very long time.
If you don't have shell access try windows version:


of course before any actions you should put in C:\path_to\find.exe

find.exe (windows equivalent to unix command) can be grabbed from
unxutils package here or here

There is one little defect - Windows version doesn't recognize properly unicode filenames
Maybe someone know how to do it right.

Ari

I used this batch file when 1.1.4 was released (which had better compression than previous versions with the -8 option) to recompress my entire collection at the highest settings. It worked wonderfully, although I wish there were an option to preserve file creation dates (it was interesting for me to view my collection in the original order that I had ripped it).