I stumbled across this FUSE module that converts you use to transparently convert your FLAC files to MP3’s. The module does not decode your music and make copies of it, it does however convert the FLAC to MP3 when the files are accessed.
Why I wouldn’t I just encode the files to MP3 in the first place? Well that has been a great point of discussion I have had with lots of my friends and it requires the understanding of lossless vs lossy compression algorithms. I will admit I am a little bit of an audiophile and I like my music to stay in the highest quality and MP3’s just do not do that. A few people out there would argue you cant tell the difference, I would agree when listening to an iPod, but when listening on a high end home audio system there is a huge difference. Flac lets me keep my music on my file server to be played when ever I want at CD quality and now with MP3FS i don’t have to reconvert those files to MP3 to put them on my iPod.
Heres the link if you are interested.
http://mp3fs.sourceforge.net/