Howdy,
I have recently purchased a Rio Karma and now would like to convert my 3000+ APE's to FLAC. What is the easiest way to do this? A program where I could just dump my APE's and it outputs a FLAC would be the best

I am really weary of doing this, but need to do it.

Cheers,
Burgerings

Foobar2000 will do this. You may need to obtain some plugins from Rarewares. dbPoweramp might also do it, but I have always used Foobar2000 for this.

I would recommend dBpowerAMP with the file selector plugin. Just choose a directory and it will recursively convert.

Howdy,
I have tried dBpowerAMP it works but is kinds slow and dosen't compress as well as using the FLAC frontend, even tho I have ti set to MAX.

The other annoying thing is that is dosen't copy the source file date/time. Is there a way to make it copy the source files date/time?
Cheers

Hi!

Frontah has my highest recommendations. It's easy to use, and can do convertion on-the-fly.

I also has a option to keep the dates from the original files. And the original directory structure.

Just download the program and the files for the formats you want to convert.

Good luck!

For battery life (on the Karma) you are best compressing to Normal, not to mention it is many times faster at compressing.

...flac decodes the same at all compression levels (but i usually get fed up after -6 due to the wait without much - if any - compression gan)


later

I feel inclined to question that statement, if these independent test results by Speek and Hans Heijden clearly indicate that there is hardly any, if not to say no correlation whatsoever between decoding time and compression level in FLAC. From which one might infer that compression won't have any significant influence on power consumption either.
Encoding time is indeed extended when compressing @ -7 or -8, but since we're talking about a portable device, implying limited storage space and file transfer over USB, compression level, in my view, is an issue here. I've never considered encoding speed to be a factor of overriding importance, since encoding is usually only done once. It's the fluent decoding, playing and searching that matters, as far as I'm concerned. Which is why I value FLAC so much.

Since we are talking about a portable device, why bother with lossless at all? Lame at preset extreme will provide three times the compression. Can you hear the difference on normal music, not just some problem sample that represents less than .2% of your music library?

Well, I suppose that's really a matter of taste. And, as the saying goes, de gustibus et coloribus ... Some people, like me, just don't settle for anything less than lossless anymore.

Please translate the foreign (Latin?) saying for poor tin-eared me.

Howdy,
Well there is some tracks I want to keep lossless and play on my Karma when I get it. I also, want to move my audio over to a completly open source project. MA hasen't had a new version in over a year....I'm not stating that this isn't a bad thing, but i would have more piece of mind with FLAC...(You don't need to challenge this, this is my opinion )

I like Frontah, it seemed really promosing but no matter what I do it decodes the APE, then won''t encode the FLAC. It throws up a Error 1 or 2 message.

I'll keep playing with it. With FooBar, I can't select FLAC as a output source, only WAV. I am using Foobar 0.8.1 Special.

Cheers
Scott

You need foo_clienc.dll in your \Components folder, and flac.exe in your foobar2000 root folder!
The needed component is included in the installer, but you need to choose it during installation!

Solaris

If you still wanna keep trying to get Frontah to work, try this:
Used the on-the-fly-fixed version of mac.exe found here: http://members.home.nl/w.speek/download/mac397.zip

Note: If you are using 3.98Beta MAC it's a bit more tricky to get things going. But full instructions are on the Frontah page (in the Guides section).

Howdy,
I have got Frontah worked out. It is converting my APE's to FLAC's really well, while preseving all tags and file/dates. Thanks guys
It's going to take a while to chew through my 1054 APE tracks lol
Cheers
Burgerings

The full proverb goes "De gustibus et coloribus non disputandum est" and it means, roughly translated (from Latin to Spanish to English): "Don't argue about tastes and colors", i.e.: it's fruitless to argue about personal opinions.

I'm trying to do the same thing, only in linux.

Will MAC 3.96b8 even correctly decode files created with 3.97 and 3.98a?
Where the heck can I find a tool to copy over the APE tag information?


:frustrated:

I second the motion on Frontah, it absolutely rules! If only it did mp4