Hi!

I have used Toast Titanium 9 to encode about 25000 FLAC files to apple lossless. Now I found out that these files will only play on iTunes and iPods, not on other players that support apple lossless (eg. Cowon O2). Grrrr....
Anyway, Toast Titanium has a "Render Quality" setting for apple lossless encoding, with 3 choices (now 5 in toast 10). Fast, normal, best. Lossless is lossless right? I don't understand this function. Btw., I thought apple lossless only has one compression level.
Anyone familiar with the Toast software, and that could share a light on this issue.
Thanks!

I am not familiar with Toast. However, I believe that you can use Max to convert your FLAC files to Apple lossless. It may sound strange but not all Apple lossless encoders are the same. The encoder in dBpowerAMP is a little different than the one Apple implements in iTunes. The same can be said for the one in Toast (unless Roxio actually uses iTunes for the encoding). My guess is that the render quality settings are similar to the different -q values that can be used with FLAC. They all produce lossless results but a higher quality setting uses more CPU power while decoding and encoding.

So I suggest using Max to see if it can produce Apple lossless files that are compatible with the Cowon O2 (I didn't know that the O2 was compatible with Apple lossless until I looked it up on Cowon's website). I am pretty sure that Max can convert files as well as rip CDs. You could also use a script that automates things using iTunes. I used to be familiar with Mac OS X (for about a 6 month period) but have been using Windows XP for the past few years so my knowledge has slipped.

Edit: Yes, Max can convert between file formats. It even uses CoreAudio for AAC and Apple lossless encoding which I believe is basically the same thing that iTunes (QuickTime) uses.

I second the recommendation for Max. I am using XLD, though.

The render quality setting may be linked to Quicktime's sample rate converter precision. It probably does not make a difference in your case.