Referencing my old post about FLAC, and how I was fascinated by the great sound quality it offers. Also mentioned that I had the ability to play them in my old Nokia N70 using oggplay. Unfortunately, I have changed my mobile, and oggplay is not supported !, so I have either ways to go, convert my existing FLAC files to mp3, or find another alternative to oggplay.

As for the first option

you can try this on Ubuntu,

flac -cd "infile.flac" | lame -h - "outfile.mp3"

But of course, you must have both packages flac and lame installed, if not try this

sudo apt-get install flac
sudo apt-get install lame

as for the first command flac -cd

"d" to decode the FLAC file
"c" to write the output to stdout

and the second command lame -h,

"h" defines the sound quality for the output file, and can be replaced by -q {0-9} where 0 is the best quality. and Afaik is not related to the bitrate!

"-" which refers to the other dash, tells lame to take the input from the stdin. This clarifies the need for the "|" piping.

And regarding the second option

Actually, I tried to google for it a while ago but in vain, but while i was writing this post, i thought i might give it another try, and I found this post !! which mentions this open source project FolderPlay which enables you to browse your files and play them (*.FLAC included).

This not only eliminated the need to convert back to mp3 and sacrifice the sound quality but also eliminated the need to generate a playlist for each album, as I had to do with Nokia Music Player and Symbian Oggplay.

Viva Open Source :)