I made the decision to rip some CDs with Monkey's ape format, and while I am not unhappy about the choice, it was a difficult one between ape and flac. The comfort was that once it is encoded in a lossless format you can always get the original back with any loss, this of course I would not consider transcoding if we were talking about a lossy format.

Anyhow, I wanted to know if I do want to convert an ape to a flac, which program/method would be best? I've encoded the ape files with apev2 tags - would those tags be preserved in the new flac file?

Also I ripped the CDs as an image with cue sheet and so the cue sheet reads something like
file 'pink floyd.ape' - does anyone forsee problems by changing it to pink floyd.flac and still be able to extract the songs properly?

Thanks

I would use foobar2000 to transcode.
Frontah would do the trick also keeping the tags.

and no. it should be no problem changing it to *.flac in the cue sheet.

Yes, I did some of that yesterday, without the cue sheets, and I used foobar.

Would foobar handle the ape2 tags properly?

Maybe on a related note what tagging programs handle ape2 tags now.

I'm preferential to tag&rename for mp3s but they still don't have ape2 :-(

I don't understand why so many people are having a problem choosing between APE and FLAC. What was so difficult? Both are lossless, both get the job done, and both have similar features and results. There are a few differences, but I can't find enough to warrant all the discussion about "which one is better". That's like saying the choice between Pepsi and Coke is difficult to make.

Sorry. This is just my opinion and is not intended to be a rant one way or the other. I'm just a little worn out on the topic and had to vent some steam.

Thanks for reading, and have a great day....

I was with you up until you implied that coke vs pepsi doesn't matter!

Anyhow, I wll kick in another product. dbpoweramp used to hose flac flags, but current versions preserve them. You can convert straight from an explorer window "right click option" or from the program.

Hey Daffy

I know it sounds a little stupid, which one, which one? It is like being in the candy store with $0,05 and trying to decide on the gummy bear or the sucker (remember that feeling).

I have to guess a good porportion of threads are which one ...? It is not a question of which one is better in terms of sound (they are both lossless so it doesn't matter). But for example let say there is no more development on the ape format, would you want to encode in ape if you knew that there would be no more development on it? Since flac is open format it precludes that possiblity. Also for the future hopefully someone will come out with hardware support - will that be ape or flac - while not tradjic about transcoding all your files to get that hardware support.
Also personal choices - do you support open or closed format files, etc, etc. All these add to that "difficult" discission - as I said it was not for the technical parts of the formats but more for the long term objective

Hope this explains it somewhat

Check out this link, you might learn something new about flac or ape

Questions (ok, foobar related):

1) Use dither or not when transcoding using foobar? I assume that it won't do any good even for lossless to lossy.

2) Does 64bit float decoding to 24bit/16bit integer imply any quality loss when reencoding to lossless?