I want to rip and encode my CDs to a lossless format and after some deliberation have chosen to go with Apple Lossless. I want to use Exact Audio Copy to rip the discs to WAV files and then compress to ALAC via an external encoder. I first tried iTunesEncode.exe with iTunes 10.3.1.55 but could not get it to work correctly (tagging didn't work and the resulting file had issues). I've messed around with qaac (http://sites.google.com/site/qaacpage/) and it appears to compress to ALAC fine. So, getting to the point, my question is: is qaac using the exact same encoder for ALAC that would be used if I opened the WAV file in iTunes and then chose the "Create Apple Lossless Version" menu option? I want to make sure I encode only with the official Apple encoder since I've read about issues with iPod playback using reverse engineered ALAC encoders.
Also, if there is a better way to encode to ALAC, please let me know.
Thanks in advance!
Your problem with tags is because you are using wav as an intermediate. If your wav files even have tags (which is unlikely), then very few programs will recognize them.
I would look into dBpoweramp. I think that will do exactly what you want in a single step. Or if you insist on using EAC then try another lossless format, such as FLAC, as an intermediate.
Have you seen this?
http://sites.google.com/site/qaacpage/usage (http://sites.google.com/site/qaacpage/usage)
Try Foobar, also
Cheers
Works fine with EAC, and yes, it uses QuickTime to encode (hence the requirement to have QuickTime installed... ).
Here's an example EAC command line with basic tags:
--alac --artist "%a" --title "%t" --genre "%m" --album "%g" --date "%y" --track "%n" %s -o %d
That's for EAC 1.0b1 and earlier - for 1.0b2, you'll need to replace the EAC variables with the new version.
Edit: Heh, read the usage page after posting...so, +1!
I want to rip and encode my CDs to a lossless format and after some deliberation have chosen to go with Apple Lossless. I want to use Exact Audio Copy to rip the discs to WAV files and then compress to ALAC via an external encoder. I first tried iTunesEncode.exe with iTunes 10.3.1.55 but could not get it to work correctly (tagging didn't work and the resulting file had issues). I've messed around with qaac (http://sites.google.com/site/qaacpage/) and it appears to compress to ALAC fine. So, getting to the point, my question is: is qaac using the exact same encoder for ALAC that would be used if I opened the WAV file in iTunes and then chose the "Create Apple Lossless Version" menu option? I want to make sure I encode only with the official Apple encoder since I've read about issues with iPod playback using reverse engineered ALAC encoders.
Also, if there is a better way to encode to ALAC, please let me know.
Thanks in advance!
qaac just pass the audio stream to quicktime, and the real ALAC encoder is still quicktime, as same as iTunes. So they should give the same result in encoding phase. But after encoding, qaac adds an "optimize" phase to improve capacity with some hardware player. This will have no effect in quality, and you can also force qaac to skip this phase by using --no-optimize.