Hi! I have some songs that are encoded in the lossless FLAC format. To be able to play them on my iPod, I convert them with Toast Titanium to AIFF and then in iTunes to AAC 224kbps to save battery time.

My question: does the conversion of FLAC to AIFF cause *any* loss of sound quality?

Why not just FLAC -> WAV -> MP3? o.o

And no.. Lossless is lossless. Think of ZIP -> RAR. The file content doesn't change.

Probably because he's on a mac and the tools for converting to AIFF are more readily available?

if your feeling adventerous take a look at http://www.rockbox.org
it's an open source firmware for portables, I think the iPod implementation supports music playback now, supporting FLAC, WavPack, Ogg and some more

To answer your initial question: Since AIFF is PCM there should be no quality loss when encoding from FLAC to AIFF, you have loss when you encode to AAC of course

Try using max from www.sbooth.org/Max. It is a recent piece of software to the Mac audio scene, but it will let you skip the intermediate step of AIFF. Plus, if you are using embedded tags Max will make sure they are included as well.

I have been very happy with it so far using it to transcode my FLAC library to the lossy format of the month, including AAC and Ogg.

what's the point of asking about "FLAC -> WAV -> MP3?" when he is doing FLAC>AIFF>AAC ?

i don't get it...