flac2alac by Arlindo "Nighto" Pereira (C) 2010
First posted on http://nighto.net/convertendo-flac-para-alac/
Licensed on GPLv3
also modified by Jeffrey Paul <sneak@datavibe.net>

flac2alac is a shell script to convert FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) files to ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec) format, used on iPod/iPhone/iPad.

You can use it to convert a single .flac file to .m4a, like

  flac2alac file.flac

You can use it to convert a directory of files:
 
  flac2alac *.flac

You can use it to remove the original files after successful conversion:

  flac2alac -d *.flac

Users of this program may find the "ppss" (parallel processing shell script) tool useful for converting large batches of files on modern, multi-core machines.

  Download at:  http://code.google.com/p/ppss/

To convert an entire directory using all of your available cores:

  ppss -d . -c 'flac2alac '

Or, to delete after:

  ppss -d . -c 'flac2alac -d '

(One note: ppss by default recurses through all of the subdirectories of the directory specified by the '-d' option.  More info can be found in the ppss docs.)

flac2alac uses flac and ffmpeg to decode/encode the audio files. On Ubuntu, you can install them with

 sudo apt-get install flac ffmpeg

Also required is the mpeg4ip package that includes the mp4tags utility, fetch it from here:

 cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@mpeg4ip.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/mpeg4ip login 
 cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@mpeg4ip.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/mpeg4ip co -P mpeg4ip

(their URL is http://mpeg4ip.sourceforge.net/downloads/index.php but they appear to have removed all tarball downloads.)