Hello AAC Gurus.

I'm having a problem and I hope that some of you can help. I've been trying to transcode my FLAC collection directly to iTunes AAC using dBPowerAmp. While I can successfully hear the resulting FLAC -> AAC files in iTunes, my iPod Shuffle has major problems with the newly transcoded files. (I've heard that the Shuffle is very picky about what it will play...)

At any rate, I saw a solution on the forum here that I thought may be a work-around. I transcoded a few FLAC files to WMA Lossless, and then dragged those files into iTunes. iTunes offers to convert to AAC, and presto! The resulting files work with both iTunes and the Shuffle.

Am I losing any quality converting from WMA Lossless to AAC using iTunes? Is iTunes transcoding back to a WAV and then converting to AAC? I've run a few CRC and MD5 checks on files which size are identical, but I don't get a match. (I've stripped out all the tag information for these tests, BTW.) I don't want to transcode my entire music collection to WMA Lossless if I'm not getting a "perfect" convert to AAC.

Thanks for any information you can supply.

Converting FLAC to WMA lossless is a lossless to lossless transcode, scince that is lossless, converting those transcoded WMA lossless files to AAC will be like ripping from the CD and encoding directly to AAC. So it will be a "perfect" convert to AAC.

Does iTunes accomplish "perfect" conversion to AAC by transcoding first to WAV, or does it somehow convert directly from WMA Lossless to AAC? I guess I just don't understand what's going on under the hood.

Thanks for the reply. I'm fairly sure I'm still getting the best possible AAC using this method, but I want to be certain.

Cheers.

yes, lossless encoded files have to be decoded to WAV to be encoded in another format.

Thanks for the info, skelly.

Cheers.

>my iPod Shuffle has major problems with the newly transcoded files

I had the same problem until I updated the firmware on the Shuffle, then it plays any AAC file I throw at it.

Spoon,

Thanks for the tip. I thought that I had the latest Shuffle firmware, but perhaps I don't. I have the latest iPod Updater. Doesn't that also update the firmware?

Thanks again for dBPowerAmp -- it's a great application.

iPod updater should update the firmware.

Why the extra step? Instead of transcoding to WMA lossless, you could also just decode to wav and feed those into iTunes.

This is what I would normally do, but I don't think that my tags would be preserved if I went from FLAC --> WAV --> AAC. I want to make sure that my tags are intact, especially using iTunes.

Cheers.