If you are a big music lover, you probably have a large collection of digital audio on your hard drive. If your collection consist mainly of FLAC files, you have probably ran into some trouble when some piece of software doesn't understand the audio format or the files are simply too big for certain usage like mobile audio players. This is where mp3fs can help you out.

mp3fs is a read-only FUSE filesystem which transcodes between audio formats (currently FLAC to MP3) on the fly when files are opened and read.

It can let you use a FLAC collection with software and/or hardware which only understands the MP3 format, or transcode files through simple drag-and-drop in a file browser.

The big advantages of this wonderful piece of software is that your don't have to manually sync your audio collection twice (once for each format) and that your don't have to sacrifice hard drive space for lossy MP3 files. You can just use or copy the MP3 files like you would with regular files which are then created on the fly for you. As far as your programs are concerned, they are just regular files.

After installation of mp3fs you only have to add one line to /etc/fstab.

mp3fs#/map/to/flac/files /media/mp3 fuse allow_other,ro,quality=2,bitrate=320,gainmode=1 0 0

Now you can mount the virtual filesystem and access your music library in MP3 format.

sudo mount /media/mp3

Some simple steps to install/recover Grub with a Linux Live CD/USB after installating another operating systems or when Grub doesn't load. It has been tested with Ubuntu and Debian.

First of all boot your Linux Live CD/USB, open Terminal and enter following commands:

1. This command for root permissions:

   sudo -i
   

2. Check the drives number in Partition Manager:

   fdisk -l
   

3. Select the drive where your Linux installation resides. Change sda with your hard drive (it can be sdb, sdc, etc) and the 1 with your drive number:

   mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
   mount --bind /dev /mnt/dev/
   mount --bind /sys /mnt/sys/
   

4. This command will chroot into your installation:

   chroot /mnt
   

5. Install Grub and change sda with the hard drive where you want to install Grub:

   grub-install /dev/sda
   

6. Optionally you might want or need to rebuild the Grub menu:

   update-grub
   

Now the installation is finished. Reboot your pc and Grub is back. That's it!