Create iTunes-compatible playlists from existing playlists, converting flac to mp3 as needed
I listen to a lot of music, and it's pretty frustrating trying to maintain both a foobar2000 playlist on my Windows machine and an iTunes playlist for my iPhone sync.
Seeing as iTunes is incompatible with FLAC, and not wanting to convert a decent portion of my music library from a widely supported format to a less widely supported format, I've just dealt with it, manually converting and maintaining them separately.
flac-phobic eases the pain of this, taking an m3u as input, encoding all FLAC files as mp3, and constructing a new playlist containing all of the newly encoded mp3s, as well as all of the existing lossy files. Encoded files are output into a new directory, with all of the original directory structure being maintained beneath it.
flac_phobic [-i INPUT PLAYLIST] [-o OUTPUT DIRECTORY] [-q QUALITY]
{quality} accepts an integer from 0-9 representing the VBR setting, and defaults to 0 (V0).
Make sure your playlists are just lists of files:
Z:\Music\...\...\(...).mp3
Z:\Music\...\(...).flac
Z:\Music\...\...\...\(...).mp3
This script takes every line from the playlist, so any extraneous crap is going to be a problem.
foobar2000 refuses to output non-latin characters (I've really only had issues with Japanese and Chinese) correctly in its exported playlists, but flac-phobic does work with non-latin paths. I've worked around this by just having a secondary iTunes playlist of files with non-latin paths that I manage manually.
flac_phobic also outputs a manifest that can be used to sync the outputted playlist to another computer.
rsync -avP --files-from=flac_phobic/rsync_manifest.txt [SOURCE] [DESTINATION]