Free online FLAC to XML converter

What the FLAC format is

FLAC, or Free Lossless Audio Codec, stores PCM audio with lossless compression: decoding reproduces the original samples without quality loss. It supports metadata blocks such as Vorbis comments, cover art, cuesheets, and technical properties including sample rate, channel count, bit depth, and duration.

Audio-ripping and recording software such as Exact Audio Copy, fre:ac, Audacity, and FFmpeg can create FLAC files. You commonly encounter them in music archives, CD backups, high-resolution downloads, audio-player libraries, and preservation workflows.

What the XML format is

XML is a text-based markup format for representing hierarchical, machine-readable data. In an audio workflow, XML can describe a FLAC file's filename, codec, duration, sample rate, channels, tags, embedded artwork, and file-level properties.

XML is useful for importing audio records into catalog databases, exchanging metadata between applications, generating reports, and preserving structured descriptions. It is not a standard replacement for the FLAC audio stream; most media players cannot play an XML document containing a metadata report.

How to convert FLAC to XML

First decide whether the XML should contain technical stream information, embedded tags, or both. The following desktop tools create XML reports without changing the original FLAC.

Using MediaInfo

1. Install MediaInfo and open a terminal or command prompt in the folder containing the audio.
2. Run mediainfo --Output=XML input.flac > output.xml.
3. Open output.xml in an XML editor or import it into the cataloging application.

MediaInfo XML includes codec, duration, bitrate, sample rate, channel layout, bit depth, file size, and many available tags. The exact fields depend on the FLAC metadata and the MediaInfo version.

Using FFprobe

FFprobe, included with FFmpeg, is suitable for automated technical reports:

ffprobe -v quiet -print_format xml -show_format -show_streams input.flac > output.xml

-show_streams reports the audio stream, while -show_format reports container-level properties and format tags. FFprobe generally exposes fewer presentation-oriented fields than MediaInfo but is convenient in scripts and batch processing.

Using ExifTool for metadata

To export FLAC tags and file metadata as XML, run:

exiftool -X input.flac > metadata.xml

ExifTool is appropriate when the target system needs artist, album, title, date, genre, track number, comments, or other embedded metadata. It is less focused on a complete media-stream report than MediaInfo or FFprobe.

Using the online converter

You can convert the file on 101convert.com for free without installing software. Select the FLAC file, choose XML as the output, start the conversion, and download the resulting document. Check the generated XML afterward to confirm that it contains the fields required by the receiving application.

Quality, compatibility, and limitations

Exporting metadata or a technical report does not decode and re-encode the audio, so it causes no audio-quality loss. The original FLAC remains unchanged unless a separate application writes updated tags back to it.

There is no single universal XML schema for FLAC audio. MediaInfo, FFprobe, ExifTool, and online converters produce different element names and levels of detail; an importer may require a particular schema, namespace, field order, or track structure.

Cover art may be represented as a large Base64 value, a file reference, or omitted. Cuesheets, ReplayGain values, custom Vorbis comments, and vendor-specific tags may also be unsupported or represented differently. Validate the result with an XML parser such as xmllint --noout output.xml, then compare its fields with the target application's specification.

Encoding the actual PCM samples as XML is technically possible but inefficient: the document becomes very large, slow to parse, and unsuitable for normal playback. Keep the audio in FLAC and use XML for its description unless a specialized interchange schema explicitly requires sample data.