flac2mp3 is a Python wrapper around several tools used for encoding FLAC and MP3 files, namely flac, metaflac, and lame (all of which it assumes are installed). It uses multiple cores to simultaneously re-encode FLAC files as MP3 files while preserving any id3 tags found.

flac2mp3 has been tested on Snow Leopard and Ubuntu Linux, but should work on any environment that interfaces with Python's subprocess module and exposes the required programs to the script.

The utility walks the given files and/or directories and collects all the FLAC files it finds, then passes them through flac to decode them, piping the output through lame to re-encode them, and stores them in the output directory intelligently using the nearest common ancestor directory as a template to ensure they don't end up lumped illogically in the output directory.

python flac2mp3.py [-i INPUT_DIR]

Creates an MP3/ directory inside the input folder, where it saves copies of all the converted FLAC files as .mp3 files.

Currently, there's no way to set the lame encoding options from the command line, and they're hardcoded to -m s --vbr-new -V2. To change them, edit the lame_args list in the transcode method.