I have been ripping my CD’s to FLAC format for some time now. I use FLAC because it is a lossless compression format. But the Sansa Express doesn’t support FLAC. What to do?
I use foobar2000 as a player of FLAC media. Well, come to find out, it can be used to convert FLAC to MP3. Using lame with foobar2000, it is very easy. I first load the FLAC files into foobar2000. It is convenient to load up a directory of files. I use a format of “[artist]/[album]/[track] [song].flac“. This makes it easy to load an album at a time into foobar2000. I select all of the files in foobar2000, right click, select “Convert >”, “Convert to Same Directory”. A status dialog opens up showing the conversion process. When done, it has created “[artist]/[album]/[track] [song].mp3“.
Now I have files to download. This was one of the selling points of the Sansa Express. You just plug it into a USB port. The computer recognizes it as an external drive. I then drag the MP3 files from my hard drive to the Sansa Express. That’s it!