[Konig]

Is there a loss of quality during the conversion of ape to flac? And what is the level of flac that is recommended?

 

[nuhi]

No loss.
Be sure to extract it to wav without any processing, then convert to flac of course.
Foobar2000 recommended, right click convert.
I use level 8 and cpu usage while playing is 0, 2 and 5%, changing slowly. Amd 3500+ single core.

 

[Konig]

But right now im using dbpoweramp that can convert directly. In that case do I have to switch?

 

[JaGWiRE]

The simplest way I can see to do this is to decode the wavpack files into .wavs and encode the wavs to flac, but if you have a program doing it for you that's probably fine as well.

 

[Febs]

There is no need to convert to .wav first. The only thing that will do is cause you to lose your tags. It won't affect quality of the resulting file.

 

[edb]

I use jetAudio, which is free with many features. JetAudio can help you convert music in several formats including APE to FLAC directly.

 

[nuhi]

Ok, you're right regarding the tags.
But all programs convert to wav first, at least on the fly.

Any program will do since those are losless codecs.

 

[Febs]

Quote:

Originally Posted by nuhi Ok, you're right regarding the tags. But all programs convert to wav first, at least on the fly.

Right, and that's why there is no reason to convert to .wav as a separate step.

 

[LeChuck]

Like everyone has been saying, there's no reason to covert to wav first because most programs automatically do this on the fly. In my opinion, the easiest way to convert files is to use right click converting in Foobar - all tag information is retained and and it takes maybe two steps.

 

[nuhi]

Well if you want to be sure that no processing was done on the song you're best to do it on your own. However after you confirm that application is not doing anything wrong and has it all automated then by all means do it...but I'll stick to Foobar2000 for wav and Flac Frontend for flac.

 

[LeChuck]

Unless you have DSP features enabled for the converter, no processing is going to happen. Anyway, you can do it how you like as long as you're satisfied with the result

.

 

[thomaspf]

I regularly do that for converting for my portable player.


In the past I used DBpoweramp and it worked just fine. I recently found out that I can simply on the fly transcoding with Jriver Media Center as well.

Tags are preserved in both cases.

Cheers

Thomas

 

[JACK5ON]

Quote:

Originally Posted by nuhi Well if you want to be sure that no processing was done on the song you're best to do it on your own. However after you confirm that application is not doing anything wrong and has it all automated then by all means do it...but I'll stick to Foobar2000 for wav and Flac Frontend for flac.

the developers of foobar2000 are not idiots. when it performs lossless > lossless conversions, you can be sure no 'processing' was done to the song, unless you have the DSP box checked, which is on the conversion screen, so you can't miss it. and even if you don't trust it, just use foobar to bit-compare the audio data in each track... you can't go wrong with foobar.

why on earth you would voluntarily throw away your tags and take extra steps just for a lossless to lossless conversion is beyond me

 

[nuhi]

JACK5ON, what are you saying, I am using Foobar2k so that means it's my favorite player slash converter.
You missunderstood what I'm saying, and what Foo2k does is just scripted same thing I do manually. I was reffering to other software which is not transparent as F2k.
You probably needed flac codec to copy in it, same thing Flac Frontend does...so all I do extra is pulling WAV files so get of my back already

 

[stefan]

When you convert, keep a backup of the original APEs until you are certain no errors were introduced during conversion. This can be caused by bad memory sticks, interface dropouts with HDDs (especially external ones).