Converting to ALAC from APE or FLAC

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njkyle

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Please choose the appropriate forum for this topic. Thank you. I am a WIndows XP user who has just bought a MAC Mini. I have 5000 tracks in lossless APE and FLAC formats.

I want to convert these tracks to ALAC and store them on an external drive attached to the MAC Mini.

On the Windows platform there are numerous tools to convert from format x to format y, but I can't find anything that will convert from APE or FLAC to ALAC on either platform.

The files are tagged, and the files names are all [Artist] - [Tiltle] - [Album] - [Track No]. So I could re-tag at least that much info based on the file names.

Any ideas?

(And yes, chose the apps before you chose the hardware, I know...)
 

njkyle

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Well, (if anyone is interested) the solution to this problem is to:

1. Convert Flac or Ape to Windows Media Lossless on the Windows platform
2. Use Windows version of iTunes to convert WMA lossless to ALAC (m4a lossless)
3. Move the ALAC to a mac-formated drive, either across a network with both PC and MAC, or use a windows-formated external drive which can be plugged in to a MAC with OSX. MAC OS X can read the windows drive and copy over to the MAC formated drive.

THEN, the MAC version of iTunes can actually start and do some work by creating the library.

This work is necessary because iTunes on the MAC won't recognize any lossless formats other than ALAC, and iTunes on Windows will only recognize WMA and ALAC for lossless formats.

For my librbary of 5000 tracks (about 14 days worth of music) the conversion to WMA took about 35+ hours and the conversion from WMA to ALAC took about 44 hours. Copying 100GB+ to disks across USB and firewire took a couple of hours each time.

I estimate it generally takes 260 trillion hertz for an average conversion of 5000 tracks from one lossless to another (given that the CPU is pegged at 100% full time, and I was using a little 1.8Ghtz processor.

Edit May 16th: More correctly I should say "cycles" and not "hertz"
 
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anadefeliz

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Hi!

Now there's a program that does the job on a mac:
X Lossless Decoder for Mac (xld)
And if you use windows, here's the option:
xrecode II
As a new member I cannot post links. Do a google search to find them. Both are freeware.
 

kornchild2002

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Was there any need to bump a 6 year old thread with this information? Even back before XLD (in 2005 even), there was MAX for Mac OS X. Either way, people have figured things out over the period of 6 years.
 

anadefeliz

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Was there any need to bump a 6 year old thread with this information? Even back before XLD (in 2005 even), there was MAX for Mac OS X. Either way, people have figured things out over the period of 6 years.
I'm not bumping. I just want to share the information. And not ALL the people "have figured things out". I know some mac users and new mac users (those who formely were windows users) that don't now about transcoders on mac.

I came to this forum through a google search, looking for alternatives to windows software on mac (you can see that I'm a new mac user, but not a novice on computers). And the reason for signing in this site was to share some of my modest knowledge. Remember, prejudices tend to fail. Last, it's not pleasant to be treated like this in my first post.
Edit: I know I made a mistake posting in two similar threads, but I didn't know about this as a new user. Another mistake not to read all of your rules. Anyway I leave.
 
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