What is the best flac to mp3 converter working on Windows and Mac?

LAME is a high-quality, open-source MP3 audio encoder that has become the de facto standard for creating MP3 files due to its excellent balance of compression and sound quality. It is a command-line tool that allows fine-grained control over MP3 encoding parameters, such as bitrate, stereo mode, and psychoacoustic settings. 

LAME itself does not decode FLAC files, so it is often paired with a FLAC decoder (like the official flac tool to first convert FLAC to WAV/PCM audio before encoding it into MP3. This combination is widely used in audio conversion scripts and pipelines for its reliability and flexibility.

The FLAC decoder is responsible for losslessly decompressing FLAC files into raw PCM audio, which can then be piped into LAME for MP3 encoding.

flac -d input.flac -c | lame -b 320 - output.mp3

This flac to mp3 converter decoder extracts the audio data and sends it directly to LAME, which then applies MP3 compression. This method ensures minimal quality loss in the decoding stage while leveraging LAME’s advanced MP3 encoding capabilities. Together, these tools provide a lightweight, scriptable way to easily convert FLAC to MP3 without intermediate files.