A simple sound converter application for the GNOME environment. It reads anything the GStreamer library can read, and writes Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, Wave, MP3 and M4A files.

This application is somewhat less fast than various command line tools. Not a whole lot, however, and not enough to make me worry about performance for the foreseeable future. If you want ultimate performance, the command line tools are always going to be preferable.

Ubuntu and Arch packages exist in the official repositories.

Installing from source requires meson.

git clone https://github.com/kassoulet/soundconverter.git
cd soundconverter
git checkout main
meson setup builddir && meson install -C builddir

soundconverter

For command line args, see

soundconverter --help
gst-launch-1.0 --help-gst

and https://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/documentation/application-development/appendix/checklist-element.html

To start unittests, use

meson setup builddir && meson install -C builddir
meson test -C builddir

Before submitting patches or merge requests, please make sure the source code is well formatted and do not trigger lint errors:

ruff format soundconverter bin/soundconverter 
ruff check  soundconverter bin/soundconverter 

You can also use the black formatter and pylint of course.

Copyright 2004 Lars Wirzenius

Copyright 2005-2025 Gautier Portet

Copyright 2020-2025 Sezanzeb

Thanks to: Guillaume Bedot, Dominik Zabłotny, Noa Resare, Nil Gradisnik, Elias Autio, Thom Pischke, Qball Cow, Janis Blechert, Brendan Martens, Jason Martens, Wouter Stomp, Joe Wrigley, Jonh Wendell, Regis Floret, Toni Fiz, Seketeli Apelete, Cristiano Canguçu, Adolfo González Blázquez, Marc E., Tobias Kral, Hanno Böck, Pedro Alejandro López-Valencia, James Lee, Christopher Barrington-Leigh, Thomas Schwing, Remi Grolleau, Julien Gascard, Kamil Páral, Stefano Luciani, Martin Seifert, Claudio Saavedra, Ken Harris, Jon Arnold, Major Kong, Uwe Bugla

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; version 3 of the License.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA