NeutralAxis

My collection of music in ALAC (Apple Lossless) format has served me well, but I’ve decided to convert it all to FLAC format.  With FLAC it should be easier to do the encoding without iTunes but I think it will still be as playable as ALAC with all the devices I’m using.  The question became, How to do it.

dbPowerAmp is the program I decided to use for the conversion process.  Available for Windows and supported by Linux via Wine, I chose to keep things simple and just install the Windows version on my Windows machine.  It required three downloads to get ready.  The dbPowerAmp music converter, the m4a codec and the m4a utilities.  The batch converter ostensibly will let you pick everything you want to convert and do it all in one step.  Unfortunately, I found it didn’t work reliably with a large collection.  It kept slowing to a crawl and began creating files with a 48kb file size.  To fix that, I’ve had to do the conversion in smaller batches of around 1,400 files.  A batch that size runs in about 3.5 hrs on my system where its pulling the files over a gigabit LAN connection from a homebrew NAS.

As a postscript, I found that from this website, I was able to download a codec that lets Windows Media Player work with FLAC.