To expand on the answers already provided, xargs can do one cool thing that is becoming increasingly important in today's multicore and distributed computing landscape: it can parallel process jobs.
For example:
find . -type f -name '*.wav' -print0 |xargs -0 -P 3 -n 1 flac -V8
will encode *.wav => *.flac, using three processes at once (-P 3).
Update 2024:
GNU Parallel, initially released 2020-05-22, is another tool that may be better suited to parallelizing processes. Here's the same command as above using parallel instead:
find . -type f -name '*.wav' -exec parallel --jobs=3 flac -V8 ::: {} +
Omit --jobs=3 to auto-utilize all CPU threads at once.