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Flac to ALAC w/ tag info

post #1 of 23
3/29/09 at 4:09pm
Thread Starter 
I have a very extensive music collection stored in the flac format. When I want to add these to iTunes I obviously have to decompress the files to wav and then add to iTunes. Then I tag and rename every file manually. All of my flac files are named ARTIST - ALBUM - TRACK# - SONG NAME. Then after everything looks good I will convert to Apple lossless. Is there a better or quicker way to accomplish this rather than right clicking on each and every song in iTunes and typing in all of the tag info? It can get quite tedious and time consuming. It would be nice if iTunes or another program could read the tag info, retain it and apply it to the m4a files in the end.
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post #2 of 23
3/29/09 at 4:11pm
Besides the naming structure of your FLAC files that you mentioned in your post, are the FLACs actually tagged with metadata? Also, which operating system are you using?
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post #3 of 23
3/29/09 at 4:26pm
Max to the rescue.
It allows you to transcode those FLAC files to Apple Lossless, with metadata intact.

Max from sbooth.org
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post #4 of 23
3/29/09 at 5:02pm
Thread Starter 
Sorry...forgot to add that I am using Windows....No Max for me I guess. Yes, all of the flac files do have the tag info.
I was hoping to find some software that would read the naming structure and tag the files or something that could recode to ALAC with the metadata intact.
Even if I get something to convert from the wav to ALAC while keeping the metadat would work.
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post #5 of 23
3/29/09 at 5:04pm
Well, Max is what I use for this, but on Windows I would definitely use dBpoweramp. Just download the program and the necessary codecs and you're good to go.
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post #6 of 23
3/29/09 at 9:04pm
Thread Starter 
Thanks...I'll give it a shot.
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post #7 of 23
3/29/09 at 9:52pm
Any suggestions for those of us who use Linux?
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post #8 of 23
3/29/09 at 10:42pm
I'm not sure there are any ALAC encoders for linux, isn't it closed source by apple?
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post #9 of 23
3/30/09 at 1:44pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by benbrown View Post
Sorry...forgot to add that I am using Windows....No Max for me I guess.
Ok, then Max is out.. But then I suggest you could give dBpoweramp a try.

Quote:
Originally Posted by LostChild1 View Post
Any suggestions for those of us who use Linux?
FFmpeg is supposed to have Apple Lossless encoding.
FFmpeg

Quote:
Originally Posted by craiglester View Post
I'm not sure there are any ALAC encoders for linux, isn't it closed source by apple?
The Apple encoder is closed-source, but the codec have been reverse engineered. dBpoweramp have a reverse engineered encoder (closed-source), while FFmpeg (link above) afaik have an open-source one.
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post #10 of 23
3/30/09 at 3:14pm
I've used dbPowerAmp to do exactly what you want to do. I've read that foobar can do it as well.
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post #11 of 23
3/30/09 at 3:22pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by craiglester View Post
I'm not sure there are any ALAC encoders for linux, isn't it closed source by apple?
dBpoweramp is rather famous for running properly under Wine.
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post #12 of 23
3/30/09 at 5:02pm
x6 for dBpoweramp

This what I do when going from FLAC to ALAC, preserves all the track info including embedded album art I wanna say. Plus I find the included ID3 editor convenient.
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post #13 of 23
3/30/09 at 9:48pm
Thread Starter 
I tried dBpoweramp and it works great! Thanks guys.
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post #14 of 23
3/30/09 at 11:53pm
It's also my favorite tool for ripping, mainly because it looks at more that one DB for the tags. For run of the mill CDs that's not a big deal, but it's great for more obscure CDs. Like EAC, it also uses Accurip to see if you ripped correctly and to set drive offsets.
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post #15 of 23
3/31/09 at 12:32am
Ahh that's interesting. Anyone actually tried ffmpeg's stab at ALAC encoding? Is it any better than dBpoweramp's windows implementation? Is it multi core aware?
I Do like that dBpoweramp's uses all 4 cores at once, Itunes is hopelessly single threaded, but seems to put the start/stop times in more accurately than dBpoweramp..
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