[chadh]

Over Christmas, Santa turned some of my home computing resources into apples.  My wife and kids are anxious to use itunes.  Having devoted weeks of my life to converting our CD collection into a huge flac library, I feel cheated that it is useless on the apple machines. So, I need to know the absolute best way to convert THE WHOLE LIBRARY to mp3 files so that the wife and kids can use them.  I'm also imagining a day will come when I turn my back on windows forever.  The music server will turn into an apple, and then I will need to convert all the flac files to apple lossless.

I don't want this process to take weeks.  So a disc-by-disc approach, or one that won't import all of the tagging information I've put in there, is less than desirable.  Complicating matters: I'm feeling more and more like a technological dinosaur these days, and am becoming more and more committed to embracing this as one of the defining elements of my personality.  So, if I can convert the files simply by dragging whole folders of material across my screen and letting some application go to work, I'd be truly thrilled.  If you've got a fantastic solution for me that involves "batch mode", I'll more than likely be asking a thousand questions about what everything means, so I apologize in advance.

I'm sure I could do some of this with EAC (which is what I used originally to generate the flac files).  But I'm not at all sure how I would get EAC to mess with the whole library. 

Finally, I am happy to investigate solutions using software on the apple or on the windows machine.

Many thanks for your suggestions.

Chad

[jparkhur]

Make two libraries, one with your flac, and one with the other low end kind for the family.  I'll explain next post down

[kc8apf]

Use Songbird on the Mac to play FLAC.

[jparkhur]

If you option click itunes you can pick what library you want to listen too.  Now, you will need two drives to place them on as I assume that they are large.  Now you should copy yours to an external drive and then convert the music to OTHER format for the family.  You can let it run at night or whatever works.  Copy your flac to a new drive first, because when you convert, you will have to go back in and DELETE the flac flies from the new library.  I have just done this my self, and it took my 100 discs a day to AIFF, and a good two weeks non stop.  A PITA....

Jon

[jparkhur]

If you have two libraries, then the songs can go on the other electronic stuff...

[gerchin]

Found this with a Google search:  https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/flactunes-flac-converter/id517984121?mt=12.

"It converts them into Apple's own lossless audio format. In the process, no data is lost: iTunes gets an identical, Apple-friendly version of your songs to play or load onto your iOS device."

I can't vouch for it because I have not used it.

[jparkhur]

Found this with a Google search:  https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/flactunes-flac-converter/id517984121?mt=12.

"It converts them into Apple's own lossless audio format. In the process, no data is lost: iTunes gets an identical, Apple-friendly version of your songs to play or load onto your iOS device."

Keep two libraries, its cleaner, and yes the Apple Lossless is nice, but .....  is anything truely lossless? 

[gerchin]

... yes the Apple Lossless is nice, but .....  is anything truely lossless?

Yes, otherwise your computer wouldn't work.

[jparkhur]

Yes, otherwise your computer wouldn't work.

Just referencing JND on the sensation perception side... 

[jparkhur]

Read this....   It may present more questions than answers but its good knowledge background.. 

http://flac.sourceforge.net/comparison.html

[woodsyi]

http://www.dbpoweramp.com/dmc.htm  will batch process your whole collection.  Just select everything and run convert.  It will ask what format to convert to.

I just converted 60 GB of classical music from FLAC to ALAC  in one process (took 3 hours).  I directed the ALAC files to a new folder.  Thus I have the same tunes in different formats. I refuse to do MP3 on philosophical ground and I only allow lossless on my daughter's ipod.  I don't let her use in ear phones either to protect her hearing but that's another story.   I used itunes on my PC to sync with the ipod to load everything on it.  I got an ipod/dock for my mom as a Christmas present as her CD changer died in her sitting room.  It sounds much better than her old 6-CD changer.  You get 21 day full feature grace period before you have to buy it.  I guess you could get all your work done and be done but it's such an excellent product that you end up buying it. 

[gerchin]

Just referencing JND on the sensation perception side... 

If you play exactly the same bits but they sound different, then you have a playback problem, not a compression problem.

[jparkhur]

If you play exactly the same bits but they sound different, then you have a playback problem, not a compression problem.

So we should just do straight AIFF, no compression to solve any possible issues.   Then it would never be a question.

[gerchin]

So we should just do straight AIFF, no compression to solve any possible issues.   Then it would never be a question.

That's one way to solve the problem. There are other possibilities.

[jarcher]

I'm about to do this, but in the opposite direction (ALAC to FLAC) as my home theater processor supports FLAC but not ALAC.  The free program I'm using is XLD.  Its for Mac and you can get it at : http://tmkk.undo.jp/xld/index_e.html

Obviously it also works for converting FLAC to ALAC (as well as to MP3 & other formats).

You "open" the album folder & direct the output to the drive / folder of your choice.  Unfortunately I can't seem to get it to choose the overall music folder in itunes.  So have to do it album by album.  Perhaps someone else knows how better to do that.

Otherwise it's a good program because it works well & quickly & it's free. And you don't have to re-rip / convert the original cd - though it does have that functionality as well.

Once you've finished converting everything, then you can choose the "add to library" function in Itunes.

[jparkhur]

I think Trung T said there was a batch process in it as well as saying he liked it too

[toddbagwell]

http://www.dbpoweramp.com/dmc.htm  will batch process your whole collection.  Just select everything and run convert.  It will ask what format to convert to.

I just switched all my files from AIFF to FLAC with dbpower amp, ~20,000 in all.

 The only hicups was me not setting length limits for some clasical track names which bumped into windows 255 character limit for pathnames...

Todd

[jarcher]

Found this with a Google search:  https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/flactunes-flac-converter/id517984121?mt=12.

"It converts them into Apple's own lossless audio format. In the process, no data is lost: iTunes gets an identical, Apple-friendly version of your songs to play or load onto your iOS device."

I can't vouch for it because I have not used it.

Come to think of it - this is probably a better option for what you need vs XLD, even paying the $4.  Or maybe even dbpoweramp that woodsyi mentions if you have a windows pc.

[chadh]

Many thanks for the suggestions.

Chad

[howburger]

I ended up using http://www.freac.org/ to convert all of my flac files to MP3 for use in Itunes. I looked long and hard to find a converter that was not a trial, but totally free and also free of piggybacked downloads of useless stuff. Completely open source and no catches.

Harold