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Can someone tell me how to convert a mp3 audio file to flac format using ffmpeg? I Googled extensively, but almost all resources point to converting flac to mp3, something like ffmpeg -i "input.flac" -ab 320k -map_meta_data 0:0 "output.mp3".

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Did you try ffmpeg -i input.mp3 output.flac already? – patrix Aug 4 '12 at 11:52
Ummm, I just tried, and it works! Thanks. I thought that I will always have to put some metadata pertaining to the conversion while converting from one format to another. – Cupidvogel Aug 4 '12 at 12:00
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I'll make an answer out of it then. Metadata might improve the conversion process but is not really required usually. – patrix Aug 4 '12 at 12:10
Converting from mp3 gets you worse quality, because mp3 is a lossy audio codec. – AnonymousLurker Aug 4 '12 at 13:58
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To elaborate on the previous comment: your MP3 file is lossy--meaning that it contains audio artifacts that may or may not be audible to you, but they're there. FLAC is a lossless codec that can preserve the quality of an original recording so that it's exactly as it was e.g. on the CD. But if you convert a poor quality MP3 to Flac, it's garbage in/garbage out--the poor quality doesn't magically get removed by converting to flac. – Rusty Monkey Dec 13 '12 at 18:44
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migrated from stackoverflow.com Aug 4 '12 at 15:32

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Did you try ffmpeg -i input.mp3 output.flac already?

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