Step 1.3 of the “MP3 Manufacturing” Workflow : Converting FLAC file format to MP3 file format.
FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec, an audio format similar to MP3, but lossless, meaning that audio is compressed in FLAC without any loss in quality. Compared to APE, there are a lot of more portable media players that support this format.
Update in Jan 2013: while most of Chinese and Cantonese music on the internet are still in APE format, i am finding more and more are using FLAC. I have also started to convert my whole collection of APE to FLAC too. Finally my Synology Audio Station plays FLAC so I need to convert my APE collection to FLAC. Since about a year ago, i have been using the dBpoweramp CD ripper ans music converter. The idea is still the same.
In any case, for my iPod, I usually use MP3 so this article is about converting FLAC to MP3. After our (long) article on converting APE to MP3, this is much easier 🙂
FLAC also seemed to be a format that are more favoured by Western songs so for today, we are going to convert an English album, X&Y by ColdPlay

Typically the FLAC files are already split up into individual FLAC files. So for my example, these are the FLAC files in my folder:

Again we are going to use Foobar 2000. Load the individual FLAC files to foobar by going to the menu and then choose FILE > ADD FILES and then select all the FLAC files.
Right click all the files and select CONVERT:

As usual, the progress bar will appear:

When completed, the files are in MP3 format and in my favourite 320kbps format:

Add the correct ID tags and add in the brilliant album art cover and it is ready for you to load into iTunes.
 

Related posts:

Converting APE file to MP3 format EAC : Ripping Chinese CDs to MP3 format FLAC and APE formats and Album Art