Hi.


Forgive the dumb dumb question but...what is the difference between FLAC and OggFLAC?

I have discovered that iTunes 7 with the Xiph Ogg/FLAC plugin will now display tags for Ogg and OggFLAC (iTunes 6 wouldnt) and convert to MP3 (for my daughter's iPod). A lot of my music collection is in pure FLAC (which the plugin wont support). Any reasons why I should not convert my FLACs to OggFLAC?

Ta

The time, slight size increase, and potential problems with tagging.

Old programs couldn't handle Ogg FLAC tagging. (foobar2000 was one of the first to support it, AFAIK.) I'm not sure if it's widely supported now, but if it is, then I wish you luck.

Any suggestions how I do the conversion?

you can pipe the flac output to... flac

...or use a GUI program that preserves tags, like foobar2000. just edit the flac config to include "--ogg"

(for CLI, it would be something like: flac -dc file.flac|flac --ogg - -o otherfile.flac)

you CAN use metaflac to parse the tag info of the source flac files, but it will require a bit of scripting


later

The audio stream are placed in two different file containers.
* FLAC -> Use the "native" FLAC container.
* Ogg FLAC -> Use the Ogg container, which is most known as the Vorbis container.

The Ogg container support streaming, and muxing audio with video. But thats the only big difference I can think of.
Read more here: http://flac.sourceforge.net/faq.html#general__native_vs_ogg

Ogg FLAC have less software and hardware support than "native" FLAC files.
But since that obviously dont matter in your case, I see no reason not to convert. Especially since it allow you to play FLAC encoded files in iTunes.

I recommend Max for the conversion process (if you run Mac OS 10.4 that is...).

Hello!

I did the conversion from commandline on WinXP, using the command

for %T in (*.flac) do flac -dc "%T"|flac --ogg - -o "%~nT.ogg"

The file sizes where not that bigger:

66.285.741 01 Babi-Yar (Adagio).ogg
47.815.107 02 Humour (Allegreto).ogg
46.757.496 03 In the store (Adagio).ogg
43.544.105 04 Fears (Largo).ogg
49.508.056 05 A Career (Allegretto).ogg
5 files 253.910.505 bytes

65.251.408 01 Babi-Yar (Adagio).flac
47.162.014 02 Humour (Allegreto).flac
46.022.180 03 In the store (Adagio).flac
42.821.131 04 Fears (Largo).flac
48.778.142 05 A Career (Allegretto).flac
5 files 250.034.875 bytes


And it played nicely on iTunes. I tested converting the ogg files in iTunes to aiff, and back to flac, got the same checknumber, so I assume it is converting lossless.

Now the real problem is to add the comment to the ogg files: tag won't do it, vorbiscomment won't do it, and mp3tag won't do it either!
The only way to tag the files, that I found, is on foobar2000. You have to load the flac and the ogg files, right click, tagging, copy info from files.
To load the tag info on iTunes 6, I used the scritp on
http://www.skorfulose.de/2006/05/11/itunes...etadata-import/

Now if only it would allow to transfer the files to iPod... I'll try iTunes 7 and see if it works...

Edit:

Tested on itunes, 7, it reads the metadata...

Hi, the new FLAC 1.1.3 supports .flac as input and it will copy all metadata from the original file.

FLAC 1.1.3 is currently in beta stage, but it seems OK to use it for military purposes as Josh carefully tests FLAC before any public release or pre-release.

Currently, you need to download flac-1.1.3-beta2-win.zip from sf.net.