I just went through this after ripping my entire library to ALAC. I strongly counsel against doing the same thing. Fundamentally, ALAC may be lossless, but there are no solid tools for transcoding to other formats. Actually, thats not entirely true, as I did a bunch of work with the author of Max to make it pretty darned useful for transcoding of large libraries, but it took a lot of work. Prior to last week, there was no way to transcode a 500GB library unless you had at least 1000GB of disk space. I added or got Stephen to add features which will delete the source file, leave the transcoded file in the same directory, change the way it queues up tracks needing to be transcoded, and ignore filles whch have already been transcoded (although my hack for that hasn't been integrated, yet, I think). So now, if you have a library in apple lossless, it is at least possible to get out of it. Prior to the changes to Max, that just wasn't possible, at least not without a ton of manual intervention. Incidentally, I did transcode a 500GB lossless library with no trouble whatsoever. All stability issues seem to be worked out (other than a memory leak which requires the occasional restart, but is otherwise harmless).
The reason I abandoned ALAC were two-fold. First, I bought an Infrant ReadyNAS for storing my library. Then I realized that slimserver's support for ALAC is dependent upon the existence of a quicktimne library for decoding at the server, and there was no such thing for the Infrant hardware. In order to use the slimserver that is built into my readynas, I would have to use FLAC. So I looked into transcoding my library, and that's when I got scared. AT the time, there was NOTHING available to do the job. I wrote a python script which could parse the iTunes xml file, grab the audio file, decode to wav via ffmpeg, encode to flac with the flac library, and apply the tags parsed out of the xml file, but the same day I finished my script, I discovered Max. Max was super buggy, especially for transcoding (his focus had been ripping up until that point), but I decided I liked the control that a GUI app would provide over the process. SO I bought a book on Cocoa programming (I am a programmer, but know nothing of Mac programming) and started hacking in fixes to the things I needed in order to transcode my library. In most cases, once I mentioned my needs to the original author by sending him my new code, he would re-implement the fix in a much better integrated way, although the final version I wound up using still had a couple of custom hacks in it. Regardless, the thought that I had 500GB of music that I couldn't get into a format that was more widely supported scared me enough to get me to jump through hoops in order to get out of that bind. Of course, doing so relieved the bind, since it is now relatively painless to transcode ALAC, so you may choose to stay over there. Personally, I'll be using MAX to rip CD's in the future, and Max will happily encode to multiple formats simultaneously, so it outputs FLAC and AAC for my ipod. EVentually, Max will even have a feature which will automatically add AAC rips to the iTunes music library, so you don't have to do so manually. Ripping should be every bit as painless as iTunes, with the added benefit that libraries containing both lossless and AAC versions of the same tracks don't play every track twice when playing an album 'in order,' since only the lossless file is in the iTuns library. Incidentally, One of the more useful features I added to Max was the ability to include the file type as a path element in the output path, so you can either have two separate libraries, one under a 'flac' subdirectory and another one under 'm4a' or you can have a flac and an m4a directory under the artist and album directories. Both are much more pleasing than having them all in one directory, which is what Max used to do. This is particularly annoying because AAC and ALAC use the same damn extension with no way to tell them apart other than metadata or file length, so iTunes would always create 01 - track name.m4a for lossless and then 01 - track name-1.m4a for AAC, in the same directory. With no control to change that. Fundamentally, having an open source ripping and transcoding tool is really useful, since you can always make it do what you want it to do. iTunes will almost certainly never be an open source ripping/transcoding tool, which is reason enough to stay away from it, if you ask me. It has always had obnoxious little deficiences that have bugged me. Max allowed me to fix them. --sam -- ideasculptor ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ideasculptor's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=3305 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=20693 _______________________________________________ ripping mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/ripping
