Looking for the best FLAC to WAV freeware program

I want to convert som flac files to wav, then burn them so that I can play them in my car.

I have Windows Vista.

Any advice?

Thanks,

terry

 

Foobar 2000 will convert quite happily to wav. The actual, standard flac.exe will also do it in a more complex way (command line interface). Both are free/public license.

 

Burrrn will save you the trouble of converting. Just drag and drop the FLAC files onto it and it will convert and burn in one go. Simple and great tool. Can also handle cue sheets and apply ReplayGain (for mix disc) and writes CD text.

 

Terry, I agree with the suggestions above (foobar2000 and/or Burrrn) for most Windows users.

Another free, open-source option for encoding/decoding FLAC is the interface provided with the installer from the FLAC team itself: http://flac.sourceforge.net/download.html (see "FLAC for Windows with installer" in your case).

To be clear, foobar2000 is a media player which can also convert between most formats; Burrrrn is a CD authoring ("burning") program which can also convert from FLAC; and the FLAC tools Mikey and I mention are utilities strictly for converting to or from FLAC if that's all one wants.

 

No need to convert to WAV just to burn them to a CD. In fact, doing so will mean you lose any CD Text information.

Use a CD burning program that can accept FLAC files (like Burrrn, suggested above) to burn your audio CDs.

 

I have been using Burrrn for this for many years now. If I needed a quick tool to decompress FLAC to WAC, I'd probably use FLACdrop from Rarewares.

 

I use Trader's Little Helper.

 

I use CDBurnerXP as that supports FLAC as well.

x2 about leaving them as FLAC for the tagging, if at all possible. @the OP you also want to be careful with WAV transcoding because if your originals are 24/96 FLAC, PCM WAV could be 16/44 depending on the tool. You want to be very careful with how you transcode as you don't want to downsample and then delete your orginal FLAC files.

 

I just downloaded BURNN but when I drag and drop the 24/96 vinyl needledrop files into the program, it only reads a few. Is this a limited program?

Do I need to pay anything to get a full version?

Thanks, Terry

 

When I have FLAC file(s) made with EAC and I want to burn them back to CD with EAC (drive offsets etc.), I'll use FLACdrop as mentioned above - plain and simple.

 

Not that I know of, but I don't think Burrn converts 24/96 down to 16/44.1 Is it possible it is only inserting a few if the lotal data size (pre-downsampling) is exceeding that of a CD-R?

 

CDBurnerXP converts from 24/96 to 16/44 on the fly -- I've made audio CD's using my 24/96 FLAC needle drops like this.

I'm not a shill for the software company, btw - it could do a lot of other things badly. But for what I need it to do (24/96 FLAC to redbook CD), it seems to work well from my experience.

 

Oh, what I want to do is to burn my 24/96 files and keep the quality/resolution. Do I burn them onto a DVD-A disc?

 

That's interesting - I've not used CDBurnerXP for a while. My virus checker flagged up something with it trying to do something once, but I can't remember what it was or whether it would have been a false positive. It continued to work fine when I allowed the checker to block whatever it wanted to block!

 

I believe that you could do that (I've never tried this myself) - but keep in mind that you'll likely lose the ability to play them back in your car unless your optical player supports DVD-A.

Just another idea from left field, btw - does your car have an aux in port? If so, you could use an MP3 player and one that supports FLAC specifically if you want to avoid any transcoding. Or if you have an iPod / iPhone you could transcode the FLAC files to ALAC (no data loss) and play them that way.

 

You can also burn them to a more compatible DVD-Video disc. I believe newer versions of Roxio/Toast and Nero have this option. There's also a free solution called lplex but that gets a bit more involved.

 

Flac itself. There is a free application, flack frontend, to do the conversion.

 

Foobar is an excellent program! I use it for basically everything when it comes to music on my pc

 

If I change the file from a FLAC to a WAV, at a 24/96 resolution will I lose that resolution? I want to keep a high quality as possible. Also, is it possible to build a really high resolution portable player to use at work or while walking?

 

If you use FLAC CLI (command line interface), you shouldn't lose any data back and forth. But for other applications, it depends on the app of course. My guess is that Foobar2000 is likely fine as well as others mentioned here already.

As far as a high-rez DAP, that's trickier. Some DAP's will play back 24/96 FLAC or WAV or ALAC - ie. and iPod Touch or a Cowon player or anything that supports Rockbox. However, whether or not it's true 24/96 or downsampled 16/44 is another matter. I know that my Cowon D3, as an example, is downsampling to 44khz with its native app as well as Rockbox, as I checked this with Spek tests. I haven't tested an iPod however.

If anyone knows of a true 24/96 DAP, I'd like to know as well -- and again I mean one that definitely outputs 24/96 and no downsampling. I haven't really researched this outside of the DAP I currently own and use.

 

+1.

 

+2 This is a lite, easy to use program that is helpful for many things. Worth having!

 

I use Winamp, then burn it to a disc and copy to iTunes

 

From a forum, i found the following:

Now that FLAC and WAV are both lossless audio formats, why still many people want to convert FLAC to WAV? Here lists the two main reasons:

Reason one: FLAC has a lot of advantages; however, it is not supported by Windows Media Player, iTunes, QuickTime and other popular players and devices. It's a pity for both Mac and Windows users. Conversely, WAV has greater compatibility than FLAC, which is not only compatible with Windows portable devices but also with iTunes and QuickTime.

Reason two: Meanwhile, people don't want to loss audio quality in the process of transformation so that they choose to convert FLAC to WAV.

In fact, there are many methods to convert FLAC to WAV on Windows today. Here I'll introduce three of them to help you.

Method one: Some professional audio converters that you can find around nearly all forums. This kind of software are powerful and easy-to-use, but most of them are not free.

Method two: Format Factory. This software is free and supports many video and audio formats, but it crashes suddenly and has poor service.

Method three: Give ffmpeg a try. Here is the command line: ffmpeg -i inputfile.flac output.wav

Hope it's useful to you.

 

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