FYI… This comes up from time to time as people want to use their Lossless music for home, but prefer to use Lossy formats in their car, phone, etc., and are searching for an easy way to transcode music to their preferred target format.
TransFLAC is a TUI application available in the Fedora production repository which automates this task.
Additional information can be found on the man page or at the TransFLAC Wiki.
Install from the command line by entering: dnf install transflac
A more effective way to promote such packages would be to write a Fedora Magazine article about them. 
Would you be up to writting something like “5 tools to transcode audio on Fedora Linux”?
Just a suggestion.
Personally I prefer to do my transcoding using ffmpeg, since it is quite flexible, easily scripted, and can handle almost all codecs once installed from rpmfusion.
Unfortunately, Fedora Magazine has been asked not to promote rpmfusion. We can, however, promote the more limited version of ffmpeg that is available in the Fedora repos. I’m also sure it wouldn’t be long before someone mentioned the rpmfusion version in the comments (which we aren’t really responsible for, so that would be OK).
Understood. I’m familiar with ffmpeg. In fact, transflac uses it to transcode to mp3 and aac. This package just simplifies by taking care of the recursive walk, handling of multiple threads, syncing of album art, encoding parameters, etc., and gives you something to watch while it’s doing it’s business.
I would argue that the most effective way to promote TUI app is to record a demo. 
GitHub - charmbracelet/vhs: Your CLI home video recorder 📼
Good idea, however TTBOMK we don’t have a Fedora Video Magazine. I suppose a video could be created and the link placed in a magazine article, but IMHO in this instance it would be a bit of overkill. TransFLAC has only a few options that you can either enter place in a configuration file, enter on the command line, or wait to be prompted. It’s extremely simple to use and not at all complicated. There is a wiki (referenced above) that has screenshots to guide people if needed.
I believe the idea of a magazine article would be to inform people it exists rather than provide an in depth tutorial.
If you review the wiki and/or man page and observe something that is confusing or not easily understandable, please LMK, I will attempt to correct.
I could definitely write an article about transflac, but I’m not a SME on other packages that have transcode capability. The main purpose of transflac is to easily allow either interactive or scheduled synchronization of FLAC libaries to either partial or full lossy libraries. TransFLAC can also handle adhoc type requests but that isn’t it’s primary purpose.
I was just thinking of an article that would consist of quick listing of a few packages (e.g. sox, ffmpeg-free, mplayer, etc.) and a one-line example of their usage, not unlike the “4 packages to try from the COPR repos” articles that Fedora Magazine runs from time to time.
However, if you think you can write enough content for a solo article about transflac, that would be fine too.
I’ll give it a try and see what you think, probably be a week or so. Thanks!
I think Fedora Magazine peeps should take notice. It shouldn’t be the overkill to share videos (or screens) for demonstrating TUI/GUI tools.
As for the content of the article, it would be interesting to know from the start why/when ffmpeg -i some.flac some.opus is not enough. The only compelling reason for me would be a nice TUI interface, but man page is unable to show it off.
I would say that the `man` page` is pretty neat.
Any reason you maintain the repo on that non-open source platform? (as an early Bitbucket adopter it really triggers me what Atlassian did to the community).
For adhoc, one off conversions that would be fine - but although TransFLAC can do those, that is not it’s design purpose. TransFLAC is designed for those who have a FLAC lossless music library they use in their home, but use lossy formats on their phone, car, etc. It allows you to easily keep both libraries in sync, either partial or full, interactively or scheduled. It also handles the synchronization of album art stored in the directory structure, i.e. cover, albumart, folder.
The wiki has screenshots that show how it works. Those can be placed in the magazine article.
The man page has recently been updated to allow the use of different figlet fonts on the banner, it will probably take some time for that to be reflected in mankier.
I started using Bitbucket years ago, because their structure for free accounts was better suited for me than what github was offering at the time. Subsequently there are many new sites that I’ve looked at, but I still prefer the overall offering that Bitbucket provides for free. That may change in the future, but at the moment, there isn’t a compelling reason to switch. As far as what Atlassian may or may not have done (I haven’t followed it and am not aware), I find it hard to believe it could be worse than what Microsoft has done, and there are many many opensource projects that still use Github.
I did create a short video and placed it on youtube here: TransFLAC Demo, but not sure how that would be placed into an article.
There is a widget in the Fedora Magazine WordPress instance that will allow you to inline a YouTube video. I have mixed feelings about sourcing a third-party in the text of the article (if it goes away at some future point, the article will be corrupted). But we’ve done it before, so go ahead and use it (if you want to).
I find it hard to believe it could be worse than what Microsoft has done
It’s a bit offtopic, but just imagine Microsoft removed all projects that were on GitHub before Microsoft acquisition. Without archiving them, and hence without the ability to download the archive. That’s just what Atlassian did. Now there is https://bitbucket-archive.softwareheritage.org/ that community had to do on their own. And I still haven’t converted my old projects to a different forge, because no tools were provided.
The video is private.
Is there really an alternative? Well, AV1 screencasts can be less than 5Mb to be hosted as static resources, the same as way as images.
I have a similar task for converting audio records for film production. Traditional recording devices write into WAV, and WAV has a limitation of 2Gb (which would be about 2 hours 48khz/24bit stereo). When I record lectures about film and sound production, they can easily take more than 5 hours straight, so I need join them without gaps to avoid artifacts before processing further. And FLAC doesn’t have such filesize limitations. And it all needs to be imported and sorted.
It would also be nice to preserve original metadata, such as timestamps, which recorder and format was used. But AFAIK FLAC doesn’t support historical metadata records. I also haven’t found any references to “audio metadata changelog”.