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.
3 Answers
Have a look at Max. Freeware and Open source. Has a GUI.
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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.– BrysonMar 28, 2012 at 19:56
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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.– l008comOct 8, 2018 at 4:00
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2021 Update: Download the beta to run on a current version of macOS.– orkodenNov 10, 2021 at 16:45
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.
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.