Suggestions for a batch audio converter?

Any suggestions for a good, free audio converter for Mac? I used to use Max.app but it has long become abandonware and is now super buggy and crashy. I just need something I drop a couple (or 20 thousand) Apple Lossless files into and let it crank away making me some AAC compressed files or some MP3 or whatever.


FFMPEG and a simple bash script will get the job done. FFMPEG is the same set of libraries that are included with products like Handbrake.

The basic syntax is very simple:

ffmpeg -i inputfile outputfile

If you wanted to convert a FLAC to MP4, you would simply enter

ffmpeg -i inputfile.FLAC to outputfile.MP4

To convert a number of files a simple bash script like the one below will convert

for file in /foo/bar/*.mp3
do
    fullfilename=$(basename "${file}")
    filename="${fullfilename%.*}"
    ffmpeg -i "$file" "/foo/bar/converted/$filename.mp4"
done

This basic script parses through a directory, takes the original filename, then removes the extension so a new extension can be added during output.