I'm currently archiving a lot of audiobooks, and as always you never know what the future might bring in terms of audio encoding so I even archieve my audiobooks in lossless so they can be re-encoded and converted without going for lossy to lossy in the future.
I also use Apple Lossless, the reason being that I've got several Mac's, iPhone's, iPad's, Apple TV so archiving using ALAC makes much more sense as I can push everything of my file-server on my local network to all computers and devices while listing at home. Using FLAC or any other lossless format would make me require to do some on-the-fly transcoding or converting which is not ideal.
My only problem is that I can't seem to find any solution to combine several ALAC (M4A) tracks into one single track.. Nothing for OS X (Mac) nor for Windows..
There are several ways to join M4A (AAC) tracks together, and I've tried a few of them for both Windows and OS X but none of these seems to only be supporting AAC and not ALAC. I started of with tossing a second DVD-drive into my desktop computer and rip two CD's at the same time using the latest version of iTunes and converting to ALAC, all this went blazing fast but afterwards when I tried to use various Audiobook Builder software they all required me to convert to AAC (M4B) in order to combine and create chapters, none of them even supports VBR encoding which is downright silly if you ask me.
The best thing I can manage is to make iTunes combine each CD into one single file resulting in about 9-25 files per audiobook which is okay, but the ideal thing would be to have one single file for each audiobook with some decent chapter management added to the mix. It's so much easier to manage and have control over one single file per audiobook instead of several ones...
Do anyone know if this is even possible with ALAC as of today? Or do I have to start using dBPowerAMP, ripping to FLAC or WAV, combine then convert to ALAC? That would of course make the whole process painfully slow and inconvenient.
QAAC for windows can do what you want.
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=85135 (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=85135)
https://sites.google.com/site/qaacpage/home (https://sites.google.com/site/qaacpage/home)
command line will be something like this: qaac.exe -A --concat --chapter "ChapterFile.txt" "file1.m4a" "file2.m4a" "file3.m4a" -o "OutputFile.m4a"
I'm on a mobile connection, so I can't add hyperlinks. foobar2000 can encode multiple files into a single stream (google qaac or refalac for an ALAC encoder). You can also try yamb/mp4box to join the files/add the chapters.