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I have a pretty large music library in FLAC, and I need to import it to my iTunes library somehow. I want to use the ALAC format to keep everything lossless so I can transcode to different lossy formats later if I need to.

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  • @ShaneHsu Obviously you did not read the question.
    – Adam Lassek
    May 31 '13 at 3:08
  • It was quite dark. LOL My bad.
    – Shane Hsu
    May 31 '13 at 3:10
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Have a look at Max. Freeware and Open source. Has a GUI.

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  • Glad it worked for you. YW
    – Martin Marconcini
    Sep 21 '10 at 2:00
  • You may run into issues with Max crashing if you don't have Growl installed. Last time I had to install this, I had to get the source and compile it myself, but it may be fixed in the "dev" version (or even the "stable") by now. Just a heads up if you're getting any crashes.
    – Bryson
    Mar 28 '12 at 19:56
  • 2018 Update: I still use Max for this exact job. It's very buggy under new OS's but luckily for me I do my compression work on a Mac Pro that can also boot 10.7. Max works great under that.
    – l008com
    Oct 8 '18 at 4:00
  • 2021 Update: Download the beta to run on a current version of macOS.
    – orkoden
    Nov 10 '21 at 16:45
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I'm a fan of XLD and since the original question was posed it gained the drag-and-drop folder capabilities that the person asking the question as after. No need to install Growl to get it to work. It also handles embedded images in FLAC files when doing the conversion and will keep them in the ALAC output files.

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  • This works (easily) for me on 10.15.7 while Max didn’t.
    – Robert Atkins
    Jan 16 at 15:27
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You could also use ffmpeg:

for f in *.flac; do ffmpeg -i "$f" -c:a alac "${f%flac}m4a"; done
find . -name \*.flac | parallel ffmpeg -i {} -c:a alac {.}.m4a

It preserves common tags, but it doesn't currently preserve artwork.

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