Alternatives to fre:ac
A free audio converter and CD ripper that converts between MP3, AAC, FLAC, Opus and more. The listings below can replace it for an important use case. Each note says what changes if you switch.
The original
fre:ac
A free audio converter and CD ripper that converts between MP3, AAC, FLAC, Opus and more.
Replacements
Listings that take over the same core job as fre:ac.
dBpoweramp
A secure CD ripper and batch audio converter for Windows and macOS.
dBpoweramp adds secure ripping verified with AccurateRip and multi-core batch conversion, but it is proprietary and paid after a 21-day trial, with no Linux version.
XLD
A Mac tool for ripping CDs and decoding, converting and splitting lossless audio files.
XLD rips CDs and converts lossless audio with cue sheet splitting, but it is closed source and runs only on macOS.
MediaHuman Audio Converter
A free batch audio converter for macOS, Windows and Linux that also splits CUE-indexed files.
MediaHuman Audio Converter offers simple free batch conversion and CUE splitting on Windows, macOS and Linux, but it is closed source and lacks CD ripping.
Exact Audio Copy
A Windows CD ripper that reads audio CDs precisely and reports any errors it cannot correct.
Exact Audio Copy focuses on accurate CD ripping with multi-read verification and AccurateRip checks, but it runs only on Windows, is closed source and is free only for non-commercial use.
foobar2000
A light, deeply configurable audio player for people who care about their local music library.
foobar2000 combines CD ripping and transcoding with a full music player and tagging on Windows and macOS, though it is closed source and has no Linux build.
FFmpeg Batch AV Converter
A Windows graphical front end for FFmpeg that batch converts audio and video files.
FFmpeg Batch AV Converter is an open-source Windows front end exposing full FFmpeg parameters for batch audio and video conversion, but it has no CD ripping and needs Wine-Mono on Linux.
XMedia Recode
A free Windows converter for video and audio files, DVDs and Blu-rays with GPU acceleration.
XMedia Recode is a free, closed-source Windows converter covering audio, video, DVDs and Blu-rays with GPU acceleration, but it runs only on Windows and cannot convert copy-protected discs.
Convertio
A browser-based file converter that handles documents, images, audio, video, ebooks and archives in over 300 formats.
Convertio runs in the browser with over 300 formats and nothing to install, but files are uploaded to a third-party server with a 1 GB limit and no CD ripping.
Similar software
Related functionality, not a direct replacement.
MusicBrainz Picard
The official MusicBrainz tagger, which identifies music by its audio fingerprint and fills in the tags.
Flacon
Split a full-album audio file into separate tagged tracks.
Videomass
A free, open-source, cross-platform graphical interface for converting and processing media with FFmpeg.
Kid3
Edit audio-file tags individually or in batches.
Spek
Drops an audio file on the window and draws its spectrogram, so you can see where the quality really stops.
Hybrid
A Qt frontend for many encoders that converts video and audio for advanced users.
