fre:ac - A free audio converter

February 07, 2021

What It Does

To pull straight from the website:

fre:ac is a free audio converter and CD ripper with support for various popular formats and encoders. It currently converts between MP3, MP4/M4A, WMA, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, AAC, WAV and Bonk formats.

It supports many audio formats and has binaries for Windows, MacOS, Linux, and FreeBSD. The source code is available here. The interface is very straightforward. There’s not a flashy GUI, but there are plenty of options. It is very customizable and gets the job done nicely.

Why I Tried It

My parents recently each bought a new vehicle. Both vehicles (Honda Accord and Chevrolet Colorado) no longer have a CD player. They have many CDs that they thought they would not be able to use again. I decided to start ripping their CDs so I could put the files on a USB that the vehicle could read as a media device. Side note, the built in software on the Honda is much more user friendly than the Chevy. I have a Mac, so, naturally, I thought I would just use the Music app to rip the CDs. When you do that though, it automatically adds the CD to your library. This created a problem for me as I am a heavy user of the Apple Music subscription service, and I did not want ot mix these CDs in with my library and have them sync across my devices (we’ll come back to this). fre:ac allowed me to simply rip the CDs to any location I wanted on my computer. It queried the CDDB database for info on the CD, so I had all the correct metadata (it also has a very useful way to edit any metadata before you start ripping). Problem solved.

Let’s go back to how I use Apple Music and sync it across my devices. If I didn’t use the Apple Music service, simply using the Music app would probably work just fine. In my case, I could have disabled the Sync Library option under the General setting in the Music app. This would have allowed me to import as much as I wanted and not synced it to my other devices. Once I was done ripping all the CDs, I could simply remove them from my library in the Music app and re-enable the option to Sync Library.

Where to Find It

fre:ac can be downloaded from the project’s website at https://www.freac.org.