Free online BIN to FLAC converter

Audio BIN files are often CD image files that cannot be opened directly by music players or editors. Converting the image's audio tracks to FLAC makes them usable for playback, tagging, editing, and lossless archiving.

What the BIN format is

In audio applications, BIN usually means the binary data portion of a CD image, normally accompanied by a .cue sheet. The BIN contains the disc sectors; the CUE file identifies track boundaries, indexes, pregaps, and track types.

CD-ripping and disc-imaging programs such as CDRWin, ImgBurn, and other cue-sheet tools can create BIN/CUE pairs. You may encounter them when downloading or archiving an audio CD image. A BIN file without its matching CUE sheet may still contain audio, but track boundaries and metadata cannot be recovered reliably.

What the FLAC format is

FLAC is a lossless audio format. It reduces the size of uncompressed PCM audio while preserving every sample, supports metadata such as artist, album, and track number, and is supported by many music players, media servers, and editing applications.

FLAC is suitable when you want smaller files than WAV or AIFF without losing CD-quality audio. It does not improve the source: converting lossy audio stored inside a BIN produces a lossless copy of already degraded audio.

How to actually convert BIN to FLAC

For a BIN/CUE CD image, use bchunk to extract WAV tracks, then use the FLAC encoder to compress them.

1. Place the BIN and CUE files in the same directory. Check the CUE file in a text editor and confirm that its FILE entry names the BIN exactly, including capitalization and extension.
2. Install bchunk and the reference flac command-line encoder through your operating system's package manager.
3. Extract the audio tracks as WAV files with:
   bchunk -w album.bin album.cue track
   This normally creates files such as track01.wav and track02.wav. The CUE sheet determines the track split.
4. Encode each extracted WAV file:
   flac --best --verify track01.wav
   Repeat for the remaining tracks. --best changes only compression speed and file size, not audio quality; --verify checks the encoded result.
5. Tag the resulting FLAC files with a tag editor, using the CUE sheet or the original album metadata for track titles, artist, album, dates, and track numbers.

You can also convert the file for free on 101convert.com without installing software. A BIN/CUE pair is preferable to a BIN alone because the CUE sheet supplies the correct audio-track layout.

Quality, compatibility, and limitations

For a standard audio CD image, extraction normally produces 44.1 kHz, 16-bit stereo PCM, and FLAC preserves it exactly. Compare the number and duration of the extracted tracks with the source CUE sheet before deleting the original image.

Not every BIN is a CD image. If the file is raw PCM audio, you must know its sample format, bit depth, sample rate, channel count, and byte order before encoding it. For example, little-endian 16-bit, 44.1 kHz, stereo PCM can be converted with:

ffmpeg -f s16le -ar 44100 -ac 2 -i input.bin output.flac

Using incorrect raw-audio parameters causes noise, incorrect speed, or channel distortion. If the BIN contains non-audio disc sectors, encoding the whole file as FLAC is inappropriate; extract only tracks identified as audio in the CUE sheet.