[nmatheis]

Hi all,
 
My Fiio X3 seems to recognize FLAC tags consistently, whereas ALAC tags seem to be more hit and miss.  So I've been dropping my ALAC collection into XLD, which is set to transcode directly to FLAC.  I know both are lossless formats and you can convert between the two without loss of quality, but do you need to do this with an intermediate wav file, or am I doing the right thing by just transcoding directly between ALAC and FLAC.  If I'm doing it wrong, I'd rather know now so I can re-rip and re-download my collection before going further.
 
Thanks,
Nikolaus

 

[esldude]

No, both formats are lossless and transcoding via XLD should change none of the actual bits upon playback.  So transcode them and don't worry about it. 
 
http://www.head-fi.org/t/595777/alac-to-flac-conversion-no-loss-of-quality

 

[nmatheis]

Thanks for confirming. That's what I thought but wanted to make sure.

 

[proton007]

  Hi all,
 
My Fiio X3 seems to recognize FLAC tags consistently, whereas ALAC tags seem to be more hit and miss.  So I've been dropping my ALAC collection into XLD, which is set to transcode directly to FLAC.  I know both are lossless formats and you can convert between the two without loss of quality, but do you need to do this with an intermediate wav file, or am I doing the right thing by just transcoding directly between ALAC and FLAC.  If I'm doing it wrong, I'd rather know now so I can re-rip and re-download my collection before going further.
 
Thanks,
Nikolaus

ALAC has never been consistent in my experience. The support isn't as well established as FLAC, especially for players and firmware other than the iPods because it was a closed format until recently.
 
And I believe the rest of the question has been answered.
 
As a suggestion, if your XLD supports multicore processing, it can be much faster.