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User profile for user: dtmark
dtmark Author
User level: Level 1
4 points

Importing lossless and HQ files

Hello,

I have an iPhone and a piece of software called "Media Monkey" which I have used in the past because it can play a wide variety of file formats, including, crucially, FLAC files.


I thought I'd see if I can simplify things by using iTunes as the master program to manage these. I've dragged a copy (not a cut, thankfully) of the 33GB of music files into the "Automatically Add to iTunes" folder and what I least wanted to happen appears to be happening: All the files appear to be being converted to iTunes files.


What I want is to keep the files in their original format: I don't want 96/16 FLAC files being squashed and compressed into m4a files. If it comes to it I don't mind them being converted to WAV format as long as there is no loss of quality. I do not want them resampled e.g. down to 44.1/16.


Which is why I always used Media Monkey before.


Is what I want possible, or, should I continue to use Media Monkey to manage and transfer files and forget about iTunes?


I do have stuff I have purchased from iTunes but this is quite rare as it's all low resolution music so that is the least important set of files. I accept that the iPhone will only play lossy low-res files, which is fine, it's not a piece of audiophile equipment and this suffices when on the move, but I don't want to lose the quality of the originals or end up with two copies of everything - if they need to be converted for the phone, that's fine if it's done "on the fly" as they are sync'ed.


Thanks,

Mark

iPhone 5c, iOS 8.3, null

Posted on May 22, 2015 5:21 PM

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9 replies
User profile for user: dtmark
dtmark Author
User level: Level 1
4 points

May 23, 2015 6:35 AM in response to ed2345

Thanks. I can see 346 FLAC files in the "Not added" folder which I shall have to convert to WAV manually.


I left this running last night as it took a long time.


From what I can see all the files appear to have been converted to m4a files, but the WAV files have been retained.


So for any given album, all the files exist twice in the album's folder - the WAV and the m4a copy. Some of them seem to have been indexed twice (both copies) and some four times (each copy, twice).


I don't need the m4a copies, there was no point in creating them. What I want to do is mass delete all of those, and then "refresh" the library to get rid of all the broken links.


I could swear there used to be a menu option "Clean up Library" or similar but I can't find any such thing. How do you achieve that?


The other problem that I foresee is that for some files, e.g. those bought from iTunes, I only have the m4a copy so searching for m4a files, selecting all and tapping delete is going to lose all of those too 😟 I'd have to go through every single one manually, I think, or write a script to delete the m4a where there is a matching WAV.


Is there an easier way..

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User profile for user: hhgttg27
hhgttg27
User level: Level 5
5,591 points

May 23, 2015 8:26 AM in response to dtmark

I'm not sure why you're seeing media being converted from WAV to M4A - normally when iTunes adds media to its library it doesn't modify the format/encoding. I didn't trust my memory, though, and just ran a test dropping a few WAV files into the Automatically Add to iTunes folder ... as I expected, they were added to the library (and copied to my iTunes Media folders) as WAV files with no conversion/duplication.


"I can see 346 FLAC files in the "Not added" folder which I shall have to convert to WAV manually."


Unless your FLAC files are untagged it is much better to convert to Apple Lossless (ALAC) before importing to iTunes - otherwise you lose all your metadata and everything will end up in iTunes with the song name equal to the file name and no info about artist, album, etc. I use Foobar2000 as my standard tool for FLAC (or other lossless formats such as Shorten or APE) > ALAC conversion. There's a Foobar component (plugin) that enables conversion to Apple Lossless (where "conversion" here is just a change to the file container - the PCM audio data within the original FLAC files is not altered in any way). The big pluses of doing this way (and I'm sure there are other utilities that'll do the same - Foobar happens to be the one I'm familiar with) are:


  • no loss of existing metadata when converting from FLAC to ALAC
  • far more flexible tools for adding/updating metadata where it is absent from the FLAC files
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User profile for user: turingtest2
turingtest2
User level: Level 10
272,821 points

May 23, 2015 8:26 AM in response to dtmark

Apple's official advice on duplicates is here : Find and remove duplicate items in your iTunes library. It is a manual process and the article fails to explain some of the potential pitfalls such as lost ratings and playlist membership, or that sometimes the same file can be represented by multiple entries in the library and that deleting one and recycling the file will break the other.


Use Shift > View > Show Exact Duplicate Items to display duplicates as this is normally a more useful selection. You need to manually select all but one of each group to remove. Sorting the list by Date Added may make it easier to select the appropriate tracks, however this works best when performed immediately after the dupes have been created. If you have multiple entries in iTunes connected to the same file on the hard drive then don't send to the recycle bin.


Use my DeDuper script if you're not sure, don't want to do it by hand, or want to preserve ratings, play counts and playlist membership. See this thread for background, this post for detailed instructions, and please take note of the warning to backup your library before deduping.

(If you don't see the menu bar press ALT to show it temporarily or CTRL+B to keep it displayed.)


The most recent version of the script can tidy dead links as long as there is at least one live duplicate to merge stats and playlist membership to and should cope sensibly when the same file has been added via multiple paths.

Note this process only deals with tracks that are connected to the iTunes library, anything else that happens to be in the same sets of media folders will be ignored. The script also works on properties so may not fare well with recently imported files in .wav format.

Although I talk about WMP rather than MediaMonkey, it might be worth taking a look at Getting iTunes & Windows Media Player to play nicely for some tips on using iTunes alongside other software.

Lastly WMA files don't carry a tag, so aren't the best format for sharing between different media players. AIFF may be a better choice of lossless format.

tt2

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User profile for user: hhgttg27
hhgttg27
User level: Level 5
5,591 points

May 23, 2015 9:11 AM in response to turingtest2

"AIFF may be a better choice of lossless format."


Only for very specific scenarios ... although AIFF has a multitude of options the one that iTunes uses is uncompressed, i.e., just a wrapper around PCM audio. Apple Lossless (aka ALAC) is in most cases preferable, since it preserves the same audio quality as AIFF but employs lossless compression so that files are typically 60% the size of the corresponding WAV or AIFF.

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User profile for user: dtmark
dtmark Author
User level: Level 1
4 points

May 27, 2015 4:02 PM in response to dtmark

Thanks guys, you've all been really helpful. In the end I've elected to keep Media Monkey and ditch iTunes. It's just more trouble that it's worth. That duplicates issue is a shambles.


I think that iTunes is basically designed for people whose lifestyle involves sync'ing their entire library to their phone, or very large portions of it (the phone is the primary listening device), and where sound quality is not important and favours convenience and file size over quality, but that's not me.


So it does the job for those people, but for me, I think Media Monkey is the right tool, and it can happily scan and pick up m4a low resolution files from the iTunes folder, so I'll stick with that approach and endure the faff of having to add files to iTunes as one-offs to sync them to the iPhone.

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Importing lossless and HQ files

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