Convert ALAC to Flac

Posted by: Iver van de Zand on 21 August 2011

If I would consider to covert my 18.000 ALAC files to FLAC, a number of questions come up with me:

 

- what tool supports batchconversion (I think dbPowerAmp)

- what tool ensure best quality conversion (again dbPowerAmp is in my mind)

- very important: what tool converts my ALAC metadata too ? I have spent evenings and evenings to add album art, genres, groupings, composer names etc ... will a toollike dbPowerAmp convert this too, and how does that work.

- what do I need to take into consideration to have the FLAC's as "ready" as possible to work with a new streamer I might buy ? Any specific format the FLAC's need to be in to work seamlessly with a new streamer ?

Posted on: 21 August 2011 by Richard Dane

Iver, depending upon your choice of upnp server, it may be that you won't need to change your ALAC files.  For example, dbpoweramp's Asset will happily serve ALAc files, although as I discovered, it only recognises album art that has been added in itunes by the user, i.e. not the automatically added artwork.

 

The streamer itself is not usually the item at issue here but rather the upnp server.  Asset works very nicely with Naim's own streamers.

 

However, dbpoweramp itself has a very good batch convertor and while I haven't used it to convert ALAC to FLAC, I have used it to convert FLAC to WAV very successfully.

 

For cleaning up the odd file and to easily fill in missing artwork I have used Mediamonkey successfully

Posted on: 21 August 2011 by Iver van de Zand

Thanks for your advize Ricahrd !!! I have read about dbPowerAmp Asset server. In the future, I'd like ti stream music without my pc/laptop running. That is one of the rasons to look for a dedicated streamer. Would this implicate that dbPowerAmp Asset Server is running on the NAS ?

 

Just guessing, but I think that 60% of the art - work automatically and not by me as user. Will dbPowerAmp have a facility embedded to automatically look for audio art, or am I facing manual work to do ?

 

Tx again for your advize,

Iver (Belgium)

Posted on: 21 August 2011 by Richard Dane

Iver,

 

unfortunately, right now Asset needs to run on Windows, so You'd need a NAS running Windows server at the very least. Unfortunately a lot of the lower cost NAS drives run Linux, so until there's a Linux version of Asset you're limited. What I do is run Asset on a laptop that's pretty much always on, while the music files are held on NAS and attached drives.

 

Certainly for ripping dbpoweramp automatically looks up album art - generally trying to find the best 500 x500 image possible.  Not sure about the conversion because everything I've converted so far has had its own album art.  dbpoweramp is free on trial so why not give it a go.  Also look at Mediamonkey.

Posted on: 21 August 2011 by likesmusic

www.albumart.org is a useful source of missing album art - once found you can use mediamonkey or even good old explorer to tag your FLACs. mediamonkey will also try and find album art if you ask it nicely. It's a pity that dBpoweramp does not have an option to retag existing rips, as the paid version has access to some very good databases.

Posted on: 21 August 2011 by Peter_RN

Hi Iver

Just to add to what Richard has said, Asset can be installed on a WHS (Windows Home Server) box very successfully; so perhaps an alternative to a computer or NAS.

 

I too would recommend dbPoweramp but again have only converted flac to WAV. It includes a built-in tag editor, which makes it simple to add artwork to all files in a folder at once.

 

Peter