FLAC to MP3 for Podcasts

FLAC turns up in podcasting in two places: as the lossless master of a recording (some recorders and remote-recording platforms deliver FLAC rather than WAV), and as the format that royalty-free music and sound libraries ship in. Either way, the published episode is an MP3 — every podcast host and app expects one — so the conversion is a step you will make on nearly every episode.

The rule is the same as with any lossless source: convert at the end, not the beginning. Do your editing, levelling, and mixing on the FLAC or on a WAV decoded from it, and encode the MP3 once, from the finished mix. Encoding early and then editing means your edits sit on top of lossy audio, and the final export adds a second lossy generation on top of that.

For the published file, podcast norms are settled and lower than most people expect: 128 kbps stereo is the widely used standard, and 64-96 kbps mono is entirely acceptable for pure speech — it halves your listeners' download size and is what many large speech-only shows actually use. Reserve 192 kbps and above for episodes where music matters. Going higher does not make voices sound better; it just makes the file bigger.

Mono deserves a real thought rather than a default. If your show is voices with no meaningful stereo image, a mono MP3 at 96 kbps sounds identical to a stereo one at 192 and is half the size — meaningful across a back catalogue and for listeners on limited data.

Keep the FLAC master. Once the episode is out you will eventually want a clip for social, a remaster, or a segment for a best-of — and all of those should be cut from the lossless original, not from the published MP3. Convert for publishing; archive lossless.