I've got an ipod and am considering ripping to a lossless format as well as my usual aps LAME MP3 format. The future my hold an Airport Express. So it would be very cool to be able to stream lossless files to my stereo system from the PC.

My only problem is how to get a fool proof rip into an ALAC file.

How do you guys rate iTunes with the error correction option activated?

Should I even attempt using the newly reverse engineered ALAC CLI encoder with EAC? Use the interface that calls Quicktime to do the work?

or should I forget about ALAC and go with something that I know I will be able to manipulate in the future (FLAC), without Apple interferring?


BAH! This further knowledge of better formats and a million tools is definitely a double edged sword. Of course if I had ripped my collection to lossless the first time I wouldn't be having to rerip everything for the 3rd time in 3 years. It's getting harder and harder to do. It'll be nice when I get this done. Then when a new format comes out I can just do a large batch job and forget about it.

I just have to make sure to make the right choice now.

edit: grammar

Since you have a PC, why bother to use the iTunes ripper? Like you said, you can use EAC with Otto42's iTunesEncode to create ALAC.

As for future compatibility, it doesn't really matter. That's the beauty of lossless formats. As soon as you fear Apple locking up ALAC, you can transcode to FLAC without the need to rerip.

No doubt. Got it all mostly working now. Even got dbpoweramp working with the Apple Lossless properly. Foobar, eac and dbpa are amazing little programs. Same with some of periphery utilities like MAREO and itunesencode. So much good work is done on HA.

The final piece of the puzzle is getting ALAC tags working in foobar. Is there no support for Apple Lossless tags?

I've loaded foo_alac, and can play files which still report this error on opening, but they play.

INFO (CORE) : startup time: 4765 ms
INFO (CORE) : opening file for playback :
INFO (CORE) : location: "file://M:\ALAC\misc\Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.m4a" (0)
ERROR (foo_input_std) : MP4: unable to find correct sound track in the MP4 file.
INFO (foo_input_std) : location: "file://M:\ALAC\misc\Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.m4a" (0)

Anyone have an idea?

Files play after error is displayed just fine.

Will be supported at least in next foobar version.


Standard MP4 library used by foo_input_std doesn't recognize ALAC and thinks there is no audio in the file. This issue too will be gone with next foobar version.

Thanks for the word case!

I'm looking forward to it, my plans for audio domination are almost complete!