Can anyone recommend me an audio converter which would satisfy all of these requirements? If any such exists - I just can't seem to find it:

- runs under Windows

- command-line control; I would prefer a console application, but it is not required provided that the GUI can start, run and close without user's intervention

- supports wildcards

- converts at least FLAC into MP3

- keeps tags (as many of them as possible, including custom tags if the target format can hold them)

- if it uses temporary files, they should be created in a temp directory and not in the current working directory

I can do almost everything from this list just using batch files + lame + flac, but that means losing tags.

i've been using dBpower AMP music converter for a few years and its never failed me

Quick untested NT Command Script where a source folder is dropped upon:

@echo off
for /r %1 %%g in (*.flac) do flac -dc "%%g" | lame -V5 --noreplaygain - "%%~dpng.mp3"&tag --fromfile "%%g" "%%~dpng.mp3"

TAG.EXE: http://www.synthetic-soul.co.uk/tag/

Thanks - that batch is almost what I need. Unfortunately, Tag doesn't support writing ID3v2 tags, that's about the only thing that bothers me now :-(

Yeah, sorry - i forgot to mention that previously...

As i don't know any console apps which can both copy tags from FLAC to MP3 files and also supports ID3v2 tag writting, then i would recommend sticking to TAG.EXE in a NT Command Script like the one i posted above, and then add an '--ape2' switch to TAG.EXE, which then will write only APEv2 tags to the MP3s, and then afterwards download the freeware app Mp3tag, unpack the NSIS installer with e.g. 7-Zip and run Mp3tag.exe. Then you go into the options by pressing CTRL+O, and under 'Tags > Mpeg' you select 'APE' under 'Read' and unselect 'ID3v1' and 'ID3v2' under 'Remove'.

Then you add your source folder with CTRL+D(it's recursive, so all sub-folders are added to) and then rewrite the tags with CTRL+S(which will add ID3v2 tags) and then finally remove the redundant APEv2 tags with CTRL+R.

Edited May 16, 200917 yr by Martin H