How to convert a flac-extracted album to aac? this will lose quality but aac files are more compact and I don’t need the super extra audiophile quality.

Assume there’s a .flac file and corresponding .cue file for the entire album.

shnsplit can do it in one fell swoop, just ensure you have shnsplit and fdkaac installed and then:

shnsplit -f file.cue -t %n-%t file.flac -o 'cust ext=m4a fdkaac -I -m 5 - -o %f'