Ubuntu – How to convert audio from ogg to mp3

I tested soundconverter 1.4.4-2 using maverick and a sample Apple lossless in the .m4a container from here: http://samples.mplayerhq.hu/A-codecs/lossless/, the metadata is preserved after conversion to .mp3, I verified this with the Banshee media player,Totem and Rhythmbox, I even made copies of the file and tried a batch conversion and all files converted to .mp3 has the original metadata, I converted a .flac lossless to .mp4 also and again the metadata in the .flac was carried over to the .mp4 file, even the cover art from the flac file was there, I then converted the .mp4 audio file to .mp3 and the metadata was still there, I also used Easytag-aac to embed a cover art in the .m4a file and after conversion I was able to see the cover art in the .mp3 file when playing with Banshee.

From my experience here I would say that the loss of metadata after conversion with soundconverter should not be the expected outcome. Even this dated thread http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=138419&page=3 from the Ubuntu forum shows that soundconverter is supposed to retain the tags in the output format.

I'd stick with ffmpeg. You weren't far off. Here's what I've just used to convert a load of 50-meg flacs to 5-meg m4as, complete with metadata:

find -name "*.flac" -exec ffmpeg -ab 192k -i "{}" -map_meta_data "{}.m4a":"{}" "{}.m4a" \;

You could expand that to clean up the original files or save them somewhere else (I was actually struggling with that bit).

For some reason, mine was crawling along at 190kbits/s so there might be a better encoding string (I should hope there is, this is a bit silly).