'k, so apparently i have a mac now. I've transferred my music over but it's a mix of mp3 and flac.

I'd like to transcode the FLAC to Apple Lossless, while keeping my tags. Is this possible with a tool avaliable for OS X? (would like to use my iMac as it's way more powerful than my pc...) - terminal-based tools are fine.

Thanks for any help.

you need Max

Yep, Max to the rescue.

My advise would be to try the unstable as the stable is getting pretty old now. Just ignore the update window on startup for now as the stable-update is round the corner, just not available yet.

Hm.. max appears to be great but I can't see an apple lossless encoder in its list.

(sorry, os x newbie here)

edit: kay, got that working but i can't see an easy way to recursively select only .flac files in my music directory...

Omni Encoder will do it... i'm releasing it really-soon-now! (This week - honest! Watch for a news item.)

Edit: Doh! I should read more carefully... Not a mac program.

FLAC support on OSX leaves a LOT to be desired...

Max >will< be absolutely perfect, but right now I can only just add my whole music directory which includes MP3s too... I just need a way to filter out the flacs into Max

Have you checked to Max help forum? It may have been asked before or someone can answer you.

I've never had such advanced wishes myself, I just drag and drop. For the things you want you might need Applescripting.

By the way, are you aware the next version of OS X (out next spring) is said to come with native FLAC support? You could decide to keep the files as FLAC awaiting that.

Apple put ALAC in an mp4 container, one of the AAC options in the Max encoder list has Apple Lossless as a configuration option.

I don't think there is a good way to just select .flac files for transcoding in Max. However it's dead easy to copy them all into a separate folder from the terminal using find.

Bring up a terminal and cd into your music directory then something like

find . -name \*flac -exec cp {} <path to destination folder> \;

Will copy all the flac files into the destination folder

Chelgrian: Indeed, I'll probably do that as iTunes will move them into the right directories again anyway when I import them to iTunes.

Indeed, I know about the good things leopard will bring (up-to-date ruby+rails, FLAC support) hopefully, but I don't really want to wait till 2007 to listen to music on my mac (or indeed until I get that music player written)

If it's just playback on OS X (not the iPod), Cog, Play and VLC play FLAC natively. The only way to have iTunes play FLAC is to turn them into oggFLAC and use this plugin.