Convert FLAC to MP3 on the fly with mp3fs

I’m one of those lunatics who store my music in lovely FLAC lossless format, but sadly enough it’s not supported in many portable music players (aka mp3 players).

That’s where MP3FS comes in. MP3FS is a read-only FUSE file system which transcodes FLAC directly to MP3 on the fly when opened and read. So we simply pick our FLAC source point, and mount it somewhere else (just like mount binding). Last name on files get automagically renamed as .mp3 files. This is perfect when we need to transfer our beloved music over to a portable music player which is only able to handle MP3 files.

Continue to read more about how to fetch mp3fs and install it..

Requirements needed for building mp3fs:

# apt-get install libfuse-dev libflac-dev libmp3lame-dev libid3tag0-dev

Other dependencies you need to build it:

# apt-get install darcs libtool automake1.9 build-essential

# darcs get http://mp3fs.sourceforge.net/mp3fs
Finished getting.
# cd mp3fs/

if your interested in viewing the changelog of the project:

# darcs changes

First we need to make the file autogen.sh executable (chmod +x autogen.sh) and run autogen.sh to make you a configure-script. (-j4 since I have a QUAD, 3 if dual core, 2 if normal). Yes – it is a two hyphen on the prefix, and a single hyphen for the j option. A sweet rule for remembering this is that all single character options is a single hyphen, while every other configure option longer then 1 character is two hyphen

# ./configure –prefix=/usr/local
# make -j4
# make install

We’re done and mp3fs is installed. Quoted from the README of mp3fs, this is how you mount your FLAC source:

mount your filesystem like this:
(you will probably have to be root)

# mp3fs musicdir,bitrate mountpoint [-o fuse_options]

e.g.
# mp3fs /mnt/music,128 /mnt/mp3 -o allow_other,ro

Recent versions of FUSE and mp3fs can be mounted from /etc/fstab using the
following syntax (you must have /sbin/mount.fuse from the fuse-utils package)

mp3fs#/mnt/music,128 /mnt/mp3 fuse ro,allow_other 0  0

Editors note: VLC seems to have issues playing these files when it gets transcoded directly for some odd reason, but then again – who uses VLC to listen to music