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Topic: Searching for product to convert hundreds of APE albums (Read 5565 times) previous topic - next topic
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Searching for product to convert hundreds of APE albums

I'd like to convert my collection of hundreds of albums ripped in Monkey's Audio APE format to Apple Lossless (ALAC). They all exist in folders by artist, then by album name. I'd really like to find a product that lets me just point at my top level folder and just let it rip (so to speak), but I'm having trouble finding one. My primary platform is Mac, but I can do it on Windows too.

XLD on Mac and dbpoweramp on Windows seem to force you to select each album folder in turn, and then select all the tracks to convert, which is just too slow and laborious to do on hundreds of folders. Max on Mac is much better, but doesn't support copying APE album art (it copies the rest of the tags though). Anyone know any other product that will do what I need?

Before you ask, I want to use ALAC because I'm happy with the iTunes model for playing back via Mac Minis, AppleTVs etc. I also rip in high quality LAME for those instances where something doesn't support ALAC.

While I'm here, anyone got any thoughts on any special considerations for converting to/using ALAC? I see dbpoweramp has special options for streaming, putting tags at the front etc, but I don't know what the other products do in this regard.

Appreciate any help. Thanks.

Searching for product to convert hundreds of APE albums

Reply #1 –
dBpoweramp's batch ripper can do that.  i have used it many times on windows xp and vista as well as ubuntu with wine to convert flac files to the latest version of flac, but it can do ape, alac, and many others as well.  there are little boxes that you check on the left side in the folder toolbar thing and you can go from whole drive letters all the way down to individual tracks.  just make sure you are using the batch ripper option and not music converter.

Searching for product to convert hundreds of APE albums

Reply #3 –
Thanks for that! I obviously didn't look far enough into the Start menu...

It looks like dbpoweramp handles ALAC fine, except that the doc says you also have to run m4a utilities over the files to create the "hint files" used by Airport Express (which I'd like to use). Anyone have experience with this? Anything to watch out for?

Thanks again.
 

Searching for product to convert hundreds of APE albums

Reply #4 –
ive used this, and it worked fine for me. no errors whatsoever. about the airport express, im not totally sure though.
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