I refuse to do DRM. If there’s an album I want, I buy the CD. The first thing I do after opening a new disc is to rip the disc to FLAC. The second thing I do is to copy the disc so that the loader in my car doesn’t do permanent damage to the master copy. The third thing I do is to put the album on my MP3 player. Now, my player runs Rockbox, so I can play FLAC files, but they eat up too much space. However, I hate to keep both an MP3 and a FLAC laying around when I only need access to the MP3 once. Enter MP3FS - a fuse filesystem that converts FLAC to MP3 on the fly. It’s a beautiful thing. I keep all my FLAC files on my NAS, which is exported via NFS to all my systems. On my laptop, I have my FLAC export mounted at /mnt/FLAC. I have MP3FS configured to convert /mnt/FLAC, and it’s mounted at ~/MP3. I plug in my MP3 player, and browse all my MP3’s on ~/MP3 (they don’t really exist). When I copy the MP3 from ~/MP3 to my MP3 player, MP3FS transcodes the FLAC files to MP3 on the fly. It even adds ID3 tags to the MP3! Here’s how you can setup the same thing.

Download and install MP3FS

Most distro’s don’t include MP3FS as a package, but pretty much any modern distro supplies the prerequisite packages. On Ubuntu, run the following to satisfy the prerequisites:

sudo apt-get install build-
essential fuse fuse-utils liblame-dev libflac-dev libfuse-dev libid3tag0-dev

Next download MP3FS from http://mp3fs.sourceforge.net/, extract the file, change into the new directory, and do the normal GNU thing:

tar -xzvf mp3fs-0.12.tar.gz cd mp3fs-0.12 ./configure
make sudo make install

Test

Before we mount this thing via fstab, we’ll get it working first. First, create the mountpoint - in my example, it’s ~/MP3.

mkdir
~/MP3

Now, if your FLAC files are at /mnt/FLAC, and you want 192K MP3’s, run this command:

mp3fs /mnt/FLAC/,192
~/MP3/ -o ro

Now, browse the new MP3 directory using Nautilus, ls, or whatever. Cool ‘eh? Note the file isn’t actually transcoded until you try to access the contents of the file. Just doing directory listings doesn’t transcode. Go ahead, pick an MP3 to play in your favorite player. You’ll likely find that transcoding happens pretty quickly.

Set it and forget it

Now, we can setup this mount in /etc/fstab and configure it to mount on bootup, so it’s there waiting for you all the time. Unmount the directory, add the entry to fstab, and mount it.

sudo umount
/home/justintime/MP3/ sudo sh -c "umount /home/justintime/MP3; echo
'mp3fs#/mnt/FLAC,192 /home/justintime/MP3 fuse ro 0 0' >> /etc/fstab" mount
~/MP3 ls ~/MP3

At this point, you are ready to go. If you don’t like to brag about your uptime, go ahead and reboot and make sure the mountpoint is there. Otherwise, trust me ;-) Hope you enjoy MP3FS as much as I do!