Converting FLAC to itunes

Bond hello,

The best man for this job is busy so I will direct to you to one of his posts on this subject and if you need more click on his user name (NoName) and look through his posts on this subject by clicking on the 'blue' recent posts number in his profile...

NoName, "importing using xACT w/ iTunes" #1, 12:40am Jul 13, 2005 CDT

take care Bond let's know how you get on .... TP

Hi, Bond. I think I can help you with this. If you purchased the album from the Grateful Dead Store online, as I have purchased several items, the FLAC files you download do not come with tags. And even if they did the resulting AIFF files would not retain those tags. At least they have not in my experience.

At any rate, once you get the files uncompressed into AIFF and added to your iTunes library it is very easy to tag the files before you convert them to another format. I convert the uncompressed audio files to Apple Lossless and discard the AIFF files.

I've written a post on my procedure, which you can find here: Michael Allbritton, "Aiff files on HD -> how to get MP3" #5, 01:08am Aug 28, 2005 CDT You might find it useful.

In addition to what I talk about in this post I also use a couple of different AppleScripts to help me with the naming of the songs.

Remove n Characters From Front v1.4
http://www.dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=searchreplacetagtext>Search/ Replace Tag Text

Great post Michael and deserves to be painted blue... well done

take a handful of congrats +++ TP

Thank you.

actually there's a shell script that will convert FLAC directly to MP3 using LAME. It will preserve the FLAC metadata and put them in the MP3 tags if there is metadata.

It does depend on having certain libraries installed, so it can be kind of advanced. But it works well once you get it working.

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20040323004759816

Another version of this idea is here (haven't tried this one):
http://www.gurulabs.com/goodies/downloads.php

You definitely need LAME installed. once you get it working and in your path, you just cd to the directory of the flac files and then type:

flacmp3 *.flac

(I am using a modificaiton of the Chris R's FLACMP3 script to use LAME preset standard encoding. Here is what I'm using.)

#!/bin/sh # # flacmp3 - convert a flac file and its tag data to mp3/id3 format # # Thisscript takes in FLAC files and spits out MP3 files. If youÕve assigned # metadata to a FLAC file (usingvctool, for example), it carries that information over to the MP3: # % flacmp3 *.flac # ThatÕs all it takes to do the job. # other settings for the lame line: #      lame -h -m s -b 192 \ # this also has the lame command deliberately put on one line   if [ "$1" ] then   for file     do     if [ -e "$file" ]     then       flac -c -d "$file" |       lame --preset standard --tt "$(metaflac --show-tag=TITLE "$file" | sed 's/^TITLE=\(.*\)/\1/')" --ta "$(metaflac --show-tag=ARTIST "$file" | sed 's/^ARTIST=\(.*\)/\1/')" --tl "$(metaflac --show-tag=ALBUM "$file" | sed 's/^ALBUM=\(.*\)/\1/')" --ty "$(metaflac --show-tag=DATE "$file" | sed 's/^DATE=\(.*\)/\1/')" --tn "$(metaflac --show-tag=TRACKNUMBER "$file" | sed 's/^TRACKNUMBER=\(.*\)/\1/')" --tg "$(metaflac --show-tag=GENRE "$file" | sed 's/^GENRE=\(.*\)/\1/')" - "$(basename "$file" .flac).mp3"       mv "$file" /.Trashes/501/      else       echo >&2 "No such file: "$file" -- skipping."     fi   done else   echo >&2 "Usage: "$(basename "$0")" FLACFILE [...]"   exit 1 fi

Now that's geeky! 🙂

I found the holly grail...Toast 7!!! Put the .flac files into Toast and export them as aiff's, AAC's, or there are a few other export choices 😉

But that LAME idea looks very interestin as well 😉

The first thing I'd advise is that you DO NOT delete the original FLAC files you've purchased. If you can't spare the hard drive space for them, then just burn the FLAC files to a data CD-R.

If you have Toast 7, it now directly supports FLAC input files for burning audio CDs. No big deal if you don't have Toast 7, because xACT is probably the best tool for OS X for decompressing FLACs to AIFF or WAV for use in other applications such as iTunes.

A word of caution: If the album you've downloaded is a live performance or otherwise contains tracks intended to blend seamlessly into one another, then don't use iTunes to burn your audio CD(s) from the AIFF or WAV files, as you will end up with brief "pops" between the tracks. Instead, use Toast, Discribe, Dragon Burn, X-CD-Roast, or any other software that allows for Disc At Once burning. Make sure that DAO burning is supported and enabled, and set the gap between tracks to 0 seconds and your CD(s) should turn out perfectly.

As far as tagging your files for use in iTunes, there are various (complicated) ways of doing this; I tend to use bash scripts to handle this, but it's really not necessary. What I would recommend for you is to leave the FLAC files open in xACT so you can view all the tag information, open iTunes and have the untagged AIFF or WAV files selected, and then simply copy and paste the tag information from xACT to iTunes. For fields such as Artist, Album, Year, etc., you can write the tags to the iTunes files at the album level, and then the track-specific fields on a track-by-track basis. Keep in mind that when you burn an audio CD, tag information isn't stored anyway, so if that's all you're after, it doesn't even matter if you retag the files--just that you keep the tracks in the correct order.

NoName,

"What I would recommend for you is to leave the FLAC files open in xACT so you can view all the tag information, open iTunes and have the untagged AIFF or WAV files selected, and then simply copy and paste the tag information from xACT to iTunes."


I've never been able to use Copy and Paste in iTunes text fields in the Get Info dialogs. Am I misinterpreting this or just doing it wrong? Probably doing it wrong.

I'm using xACT to convert to AIFF and then converting to mp3 using iTunes. When I Decode the FLAC's I see several extra files in the decoded folder.ending with,

ffp.txt
files.xml
meta.xml
rules.conf

Can I use these to extract the meta data? I don't quite understand how the FLAC tags function works in xACT.