I recently stumbled upon some old hard to find albums in FLAC format (open-source, Creative Commons types of things I can assure you). Roughly 3.75 gigs worth of music. The beautiful thing about it was that it was all properly tagged and had album art. A beautiful find indeed.
The problem came when I wanted to add these albums to iTunes so I could then add them to my iPod. This of course meant that I would have to not only convert the files to a format playable by iTunes (AAC or MP3 or WAV, Apple Lossless or AIFF if I want to be fancy) but also add tags and album art all over again when using my usual method of choice.
Prior to this, I had been using the shareware version of
Switch, a pretty good program even in its shareware version. I was hitting a snag however: Switch would keep crashing on some of the files. Plus I still had all these files that I would have to tag all over again. Thus the Google search began. My criteria, as a Poor Mac, was that the software I needed should be free, possibly open-source, and that it should look good and just work.
A quick Google search turned up XLD - X Lossless Decoder. It is free (donations encouraged, and I will donate when I am not-so-Poor), you can take a look through the source code if you're into that sort of thing, and it works really really well. I took 17 tracks (about half a gig worth) and outputted all to 320 kbps AAC in under 2 minutes. A LOT faster than my previous method. Oh and it kept all tags and album art. There isn't much to the UI. If you're using it, it's there, if not it isn't (which you could either love or hate but works well in this context). You only see the necessary progress bars for the files as they are being converted and when it's all done the windows disappear. There are lots of preferences and output formats (MP3, AAC, WAV, FLAC, OGG, Apple Lossless to name a few). You can rip CDs, export wavs and flacs with .cue files to CD, batch change, edit metadata, output to several formats and add to iTunes.
XLD is awesome. It's fast. It has features I haven't played with yet, but so far, everything has been working flawlessly. The only caveat I have encountered is that there is no support for Windows Media Audio, which I am sure there is some Mac user out there that will be thoroughly pissed. Not this one though, I can easily over-look this short-coming. Did I mention XLD is free? Oh and it works with Mac OS 10.3 and up. So for all you Poor Macs out there, you can run this on your G3. Huzzah!
A parting thought: John Cage when quoting Sri Ramakrishna said "...music is a means of rapid transportation to life everlasting". XLD is a means of rapid conversion and decoding for your music, so make of that what you wish.
Get it here:
XLD
I love infographics. I just do. Maybe because I'm an information sponge, maybe because I have too much time on my hands; but whatever the case is the Cosmic 140 by InformationArchitects (or iA) is nothing short of amazing. IA compiled the 140 most influential people on Twitter and charted their position in the twitterverse. It's really nothing short of breath-taking.
