FLAC to MP3/AAC Convertor

[Gmanuk101]

hi

I wish to convert (copy and convert the copy to) my FLAC to a format that will play on my iPod touch (for the car) and my iPhone for the gym.

Can anyone recommend a decent piece of software (Windows7 platform) that will do this for me?

Thanks in advance.

G

[bobbasrah]

hi

I wish to convert (copy and convert the copy to) my FLAC to a format that will play on my iPod touch (for the car) and my iPhone for the gym.

Can anyone recommend a decent piece of software (Windows7 platform) that will do this for me?

Thanks in advance.

G

Foobar - piece of cake :cool:

[Gmanuk101]

cheers Bob!

[AlexM]

DBPoweramp is my favourite batch converter.

It has a range of DSP functions that can be applied such as normalisation, high-quality downsampling with dithering, replaygain calculation etc.

It is also multithreaded so it is a lot quicker for multi-core/hyperthreaded CPUs, and contains the best CD ripper available IMHO.

Regards,
Alex

[Gmanuk101]

DBPoweramp is my favourite batch converter.

It has a range of DSP functions that can be applied such as normalisation, high-quality downsampling with dithering, replaygain calculation etc.

It is also multithreaded so it is a lot quicker for multi-core/hyperthreaded CPUs, and contains the best CD ripper available IMHO.

Regards,
Alex

hi Alex is that a freeware or paid app?

[Stratmangler]

dbPoweramp is a paid for app.
You can download a fully fledged, no restrictions trial version for free - works for 30 days.

I use dbPoweramp myself.

[AlfaGTV]

And i recommend Easy CD-DA Extractor. A paid application, but one of the most useful tools i have encountered in Windows environment.

It is available as a trial version from http://www.poikosoft.com

Handles all relevant formats, converts, rips, manages your music library.

BR /Mike

[Stratmangler]

And i recommend Easy CD-DA Extractor. A paid application, but one of the most useful tools i have encountered in Windows environment.

It is available as a trial version from http://www.poikosoft.com

Handles all relevant formats, converts, rips, manages your music library.

BR /Mike

I've used Easy CD-DA in the past, and IIRC correctly it doesn't do secure rips.

[AlfaGTV]

After spending a few minutes contemplating what f**k IIRC meant :scratch: i decided to contradict that:
http://www.ollars.net/hififorum/ECDDAE_Rip_Options.jpg
It uses AccurateRIPCDDB to compare checksums etc.
Perhaps not as paranoid as Exact Audio Copy but most likely fully satifying rip quality for most of us! :)

I mostly use XLD on the Mac nowadays but i still use Easy CDDA for editing tags and converting files (i have my collection on a NAS in AIFF but regularly convert to MP3 and FLAC for transport, piece of cake when profiles are created, only converts newly added fils also)

Br Mike

[Gmanuk101]

am trying foobar right now, cpu intensive and ive got quad core, mind you i am converting 126gb :)

[dave2010]

How does Audacity compare for AAC encoding? I haven't done much with this, but I've just been surprised to note that saving in to m4a (aac) can take much longer than either to 16 or 24 bit FLAC. Admittedly, FLAC might not work on some portable devices, but it's fairly easy to convert FLAC to ALAC which should at least work on more recent iPods etc.

My guess is that foobar will probably do as well as any - but I thought I'd try anyway with Audacity. Time to do FLAC on my file around 7 mins - to do AAC over 20 (it's still going now ...).

[bobbasrah]

am trying foobar right now, cpu intensive and ive got quad core, mind you i am converting 126gb :)

:eek:
What portable rig are you going to store that lot on Graeme? Or is this a case of converting a library from which to select files for the device?

I only use Foobar these days for file conversions which it seems to do quite fuss-free, although usually end up checking the tags using mp3tag....;) Only got the classical section of Lossless to resolve now....:doh: to complete the library rebuild.

For some reason it sticks in mind that you had to manually adjust the mp3 bitrate in Foobar from it's default to get the highest quality, but it has been a while since I used it for that....

Enjoy..........:cool:

[Gmanuk101]

:eek:
What portable rig are you going to store that lot on Graeme? Or is this a case of converting a library from which to select files for the device?

I only use Foobar these days for file conversions which it seems to do quite fuss-free, although usually end up checking the tags using mp3tag....;) Only got the classical section of Lossless to resolve now....:doh: to complete the library rebuild.

For some reason it sticks in mind that you had to manually adjust the mp3 bitrate in Foobar from it's default to get the highest quality, but it has been a while since I used it for that....

Enjoy..........:cool:

I've got an external HD at 500GB via usb 2.

I set the bitRate to 320 for the mp3 conversion, uses the LAME.exe command line, was a bit of a fiddle (ok it wasnt just had to suss it out first)

So what I've got now is a library for FLAC, and a copy of that to MP3 320kps.
FLAC for niceness and MP3 for portable (car, gym, etc)

[dave2010]

I've got an external HD at 500GB via usb 2.

I set the bitRate to 320 for the mp3 conversion, uses the LAME.exe command line, was a bit of a fiddle (ok it wasnt just had to suss it out first)

So what I've got now is a library for FLAC, and a copy of that to MP3 320kps.
FLAC for niceness and MP3 for portable (car, gym, etc)Did you get this all done then? How long did it take?

I thought you might go for AAC, but for your application I don't suppose there's much to choose between that and MP3 at 320kbps. If you were really fussed about sound you could convert to AIFF or ALAC, but that's perhaps just a bit harder using Windows, so MP3 which may well be good enough should do the job.

[Gmanuk101]

Did you get this all done then? How long did it take?

I thought you might go for AAC, but for your application I don't suppose there's much to choose between that and MP3 at 320kbps. If you were really fussed about sound you could convert to AIFF or ALAC, but that's perhaps just a bit harder using Windows, so MP3 which may well be good enough should do the job.

I set it away at approx 6pm and it was still going at 10pm..:stalks: a lot of floating point calculations to be performed by Windows,, am sure if I had a unix kernel machine it would have taken 5mins :lol:

yeah, I don't have a hi end system in the car (VW Golf standard Sony) and the headphones I use at the gym are a £20 pair of sony, as long as it drowns out the standard satanic "now that's what I call gym music 100" type tunes it's ok with me.

I leave the sweet stuff for home audio.... unless someone wants to buy me an aston martin of course DB9s please.

[dave2010]

I set it away at approx 6pm and it was still going at 10pm..:stalks: a lot of floating point calculations to be performed by Windows,, am sure if I had a unix kernel machine it would have taken 5mins :lol:

yeah, I don't have a hi end system in the car (VW Golf standard Sony) and the headphones I use at the gym are a £20 pair of sony, as long as it drowns out the standard satanic "now that's what I call gym music 100" type tunes it's ok with me.

I leave the sweet stuff for home audio.... unless someone wants to buy me an aston martin of course DB9s please.Hope it's finished now.

No - it wouldn't have finished with Unix/Linux, but it might overall be faster.

I reminded myself that I can still detect digital compression (and dislike it) today, as I installed Spotify on a new machine at work**. I don't think it (Spotify) normally sounds too bad, but this was horrible. I did spot that it was picking up lower bit rate streams though, and it got better when I tweaked it to use the higher bit rate ones, and turned off the volume normalisation, but the experience reminded me of what I don't like about most digital compression systems once they get down to lower bit rates. Listening on fairly good headphones did not make the experience pleasanter, either.

I do recall that perceived problems do tend to drop off reasonably well with bit rates above 220 kbps with most compression schemes, so aac and mp3 should be rather good at 320 kbps unless you're very sensitive. Spotify uses Ogg-Vorbis. However I think the effects could be worse if the audio has already been compressed with a different codec. This was something that BBC engineers found out the hard way around a decade ago.

The test compression I did last night to 320 kbps aac using Audacity sounds perfectly OK, at least on modest equipment. Maybe I should try mp3 as well, to see how long that takes.

** The new machine at work is unfortunately still Windows based (XP) and slightly noisy, but one thing in its favour is that running at over 3 GHz with an i5 quad core chip it does seem to chew its way through bits at a high rate.
It would get through your conversion job quite a bit more quickly.
Despite that though, I reverted back to the iMac, since it's so much quieter, and probably not much slower. I'd like one of the new iMacs though, with the faster chips.

[Stratmangler]

I reminded myself that I can still detect digital compression (and dislike it) today, as I installed Spotify on a new machine at work**.

Bit of a wide sweeping comment this one.
Compression.
There's a word missing - that word is "lossy".

I defy you to detect lossless compression from FLAC or ALAC files.

I agree with you that the 320 kbps streams sound better on Spotify than the 160 kbps ones do, but your comments need clarification.

[CrashHouse]

Free, frequent updates and works great.
When settings are adjusted properly it automatically imports files to iTunes. From there I use Bitperfect myself. With one smal bug only at this moment, switching between various bitrates automatically. Will be addressed in the next update.
:lol:

Update: My bad, thought XLD was crossplatform, but appears to be Mac OS X only.... sorry.

[dave2010]

Bit of a wide sweeping comment this one.
Compression.
There's a word missing - that word is "lossy".

I defy you to detect lossless compression from FLAC or ALAC files.

I agree with you that the 320 kbps streams sound better on Spotify than the 160 kbps ones do, but your comments need clarification.
Quite right. Thanks for the correction.

[dave2010]

Free, frequent updates and works great.
When settings are adjusted properly it automatically imports files to iTunes. From there I use Bitperfect myself. With one smal bug only at this moment, switching between various bitrates automatically. Will be addressed in the next update.
:lol:

Update: My bad, thought XLD was crossplatform, but appears to be Mac OS X only.... sorry.
I nearly made the similar mistake of recommending xACT - http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/14246/xact - another Mac only tool.

Yet another is Max - http://sbooth.org/Max/ - again Mac only.

OTOH I believe Audacity could be fully cross platform.

[AlfaGTV]

I defy you to detect lossless compression from FLAC or ALAC files.

I wouldnt even go there! ;)

I dare you to decode a couple of files into a linear Pulse Code Modulated format such as WAV or AIFF and compare them to the "original" FLAC/ALAC files! If you dont hear any difference, fine for you! But to my ears the difference is not neglible and while pursuing the best possible computer playback without making things absurdly difficult, the increased space requrements is a small sacrifice on the altar of High Fidelity! :)

And as i stated earlier, WAV is immediately dismissed as tags are not exactly established knowledge. Therefore, AIFF is my holy grail in file formats.

But, give it a shot? With an open mind (and ears)?

BR /Mike

[Gmanuk101]

I wouldnt even go there! ;)

I dare you to decode a couple of files into a linear Pulse Code Modulated format such as WAV or AIFF and compare them to the "original" FLAC/ALAC files! If you dont hear any difference, fine for you! But to my ears the difference is not neglible and while pursuing the best possible computer playback without making things absurdly difficult, the increased space requrements is a small sacrifice on the altar of High Fidelity! :)

And as i stated earlier, WAV is immediately dismissed as tags are not exactly established knowledge. Therefore, AIFF is my holy grail in file formats.

But, give it a shot? With an open mind (and ears)?

BR /Mike

Anything that goes through even a minimal amount of compression is going to "lose" something I think.

AIFF being the Holy grail? Perhaps yes, over WAV? Is this not like saying IBM is better than Apple?

[AlfaGTV]

Anything that goes through even a minimal amount of compression is going to "lose" something I think.

AIFF being the Holy grail? Perhaps yes, over WAV? Is this not like saying IBM is better than Apple?

Nah... IBM is not better than Apple or the other way around... :scratch:
I would love to use WAV if it supported tags in a reasonable way, but at the moment most players interpret the tag chunk of WAV files differently.
However, most recently released hardware network players only support WAV as the only non-compressed format. :( (Of course without Tags also..)

About the "losing something" bit, i have tested files converted from one WAV into a lossless compressed format (ALAC and FLAC) and then back again. The encoded/decoded files did exhibit the EXACT same checksums as the original file. That means, same data content!

Please don't confuse that fact with the assumption that playing a FLAC file necessarily sounds the same as playing the same file extracted to WAV. You add a step when playing a compressed file, the real time decoding. If this introduces time related discrepancies or what, i don't know... But to me the SQ is suffering when decoding is involved.

Another test is extracting an MP3 file to WAV and comparing these, the differences are even more obvious than when comparing FLAC to WAV. IMO for the same reasons.

BR /Mike

[Stratmangler]

But, give it a shot? With an open mind (and ears)?

Been there, tried it, can't tell between 'em.

[AlfaGTV]

Well then, that concludes it for your part! :)
And i could live with either, easily, the difference is not bigger than that...
The hardware and software involved could also affect the outcome in this scenario. (Not even taking configuration into consideration)

Br Mike

[Gmanuk101]

Well then, that concludes it for your part! :)
And i could live with either, easily, the difference is not bigger than that...
The hardware and software involved could also affect the outcome in this scenario. (Not even taking configuration into consideration)

Br Mike

Ahhhhh so it's the time step spacial difference between the zeros and ones, like you say if the checksums are indeed the same this would lead one down that path.

[AlfaGTV]

Yup Graeme! It is my theory that all the zeroes and ones comes travelling as they ought, but they might not arrive at the very moment we want them to.
And the reason for delays and bursts could very well be the fact that the processor needs to schedual decoding of the stream in real time.

Not only does the DAC need the correct data, it needs it at the correct time.

Br Mike