by on January 29, 2011 2 Comments

How to Convert FLAC and APE to iTunes and Maintain Your Sanity

Do you have a large collection of FLAC files that you want to use in iTunes or on your iPod? If you do, you’re out of luck because Apple only supports their own lossless format. Of course you know that already which is probably why you are here.

I too have the same problem as you. I spent hours scouring the Internet for instructions on how to convert my FLAC and APE files into something I could bring into iTunes. I found some instructions for doing this in Windows, some plugins that I could hack into Quicktime. Each solution I found seemed to be rather convoluted.

After spending a few hours on searching for this, I was resigned to write some of my own Apple Script to perform this process. Just before I started, I came across a tool that could convert all of my lossless audio files to Apple formats or MP3s. Incredibly, this program was free.

Enter XLD

XLD is an open source application Mac application that will convert audio file formats from one format to another. It’s really simple. It was written by a Japanese Mac developer so it was a bit of a challenge to find on the Internet.

Download XLD from this link and follow the instructions below.

Launch XLD

When you do, you’ll see that not much has really changed. You need to first setup XLD to convert to the format you’re interested in. Select XLD then preferences from the menu bar. This will open the following dialog

XLD Preferences menu

The default output format is WAV. This is another lossless format originally for Windows. We want to change that to either MPEG-4 AAC or Apple Lossless. Click the Output dropdown menu and select the format you want to convert to.

XLD output menu

I generally convert to MPEG-4 AAC. The default settings for this format are not that great so you may want to bump them up a bit. Select Option to the right of the output dropdown list and the make the following adjustments.

You also want to make sure that the track and title information or metadata is preserved when you convert the audio formats. This will ensure that the song titles show up in iTunes properly. Select the Metadata menu and make sure it is setup like the screen shot below.

XLD Metadata

Now you’re ready to convert. Select Open from the XLD File menu, select the File or Files you want to convert, then sit back and relax. It’s that easy. It’s also really fast. You should be finished in a few minutes.

At this point, you can copy the files into iTunes and you’re done.

There you have it a super easy way to convert FLAC files to an iTunes compatible format. You didn’t even need to get your hands dirty.

by on January 9, 2011 4 Comments

50 Killer Ways to Work Faster with LaunchBar

LaunchBar Mac Application LauncherLaunchBar, the super cool application launcher, has saved me hours each year in productivity improvements. At it’s simpliest LaunchBar lets you launch applications on your Mac without you ever having to lift the keyboard. However to call this program a mere application launcher does it a great disservice. Where LaunchBar really shines is in all of the things you can do in addition to launching applications.

I started thinking about all the cool things that I do with LaunchBar and the more I thought about it the more new ideas came my way.
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Below is a list of all the awesome things you can do with LaunchBar that you might not of realized. I describe each item along with the shortcut command to perform the action. Remember for each of these actions you need to first invoke LaunchBar (Option+Space). [Read more...]

by on January 5, 2011 Leave a Comment

DVD Ripping Software Handbrake Get’s Major Update

I’m in love with my new Apple TV so it shouldn’t be too surprising that the last few posts have been video related. I’ve talked about Handbrake before. It’s a great one stop application for ripping and converting your DVD collection to a number of Mac friendly formats. The other day it received a major overhaul.

While not apparent on the Handbrake website this new version adds some great tweaks to the existing feature set including:

  • BluRay disc structure support. (No decryption support)
  • Updated Libraries (x264, ffmpeg)
  • SSA Subtitle support. (Including burn-in)
  • MP3 audio now supported in MP4 files (Note: Limited Player compatibility)
  • VOBSUB subtitle now supported in MP4 files (Note: Limited Player compatibility)
  • Updated Presets for newer devices and better quality
  • AC3 encoding support.
  • Improved DVD Main Feature detection (when using dvdnav)
  • Universal audio downmix support (all audio types can be downmixed)
  • Point*to*Point encoding (second or frame start and end times)
  • Peak framerate option (Capped VFR)

All GUIs

  • Updated x264 Advanced Panel
  • Video Quality Slider drops % value and only shows RF for x264
  • Batch Scan (Scan Multiple files at once. N.B: Does not include multiple VIDEO_TS folders / Image files)
  • Many Bug fixes
  • Many Tweaks to improve usability.
  • Ability to edit queue jobs

Mac GUI

  • New Audio Panel supporting >4 Audio Tracks
  • VLC detection in /Applications and ~/Applications
  • Multiple instance support

The ability to read the Blu-ray disc structure. This allows Handbrake to rip Blu-ray discs much easier than it did before. It still won’t decrypt them but there are other tools for that.

by on December 29, 2010 Leave a Comment

Essential Tools for Ripping DVD and Blu-Ray DVDs

There are a number of reasons you would want to rip your DVDs to your Mac. When you rip your collection onto your Mac you can load it into iTunes, copy it to your iPod, iPad or iPhone, play it via Front Row or stream it to your Apple TV. Whatever the reason, before your go and purchase software to help your rip your disks take a look at this list of FREE tools.

VideoLAN – VideoLAN (VLC) is a free media player that can pretty much play every format you throw at it including DVDs. You generally need this as part of your ripping tool chain because other programs like Handbrake and Fairmount use VLC to decrypt DVDs

Fairmount – Fairmount is a free program that will mount DVDs in a way that allows you to rip the content off the disc. Normally if you try to copy files from a DVD it will fail because DVDs are encrypted to prevent you from copying the files. Fairmount uses VLC to “mount” the DVD as an unencrypted disk image.  Fairmount is a free utility that comes with DVDRemaster. You can download the demo and continue to use Fairmount after it expires.

MetaX -MetaX is a tagger for MP4 files. It will allow you to lookup the names of DVDs on multiple websites and import the DVD information as metadata on your MP4 file. This will allow the content to properly show up with artwork and descriptions in Apple TV, and iTunes.

Handbrake – Handbrake is an open source transcoder that will take a video file in one format and convert it to another format. This is typically used to rip a DVD to an Apple compatible video file. If you want to use other tools with Handbrake you may also need to download HandbrakeCLI, a version of Handbrake without the GUI.

MakeMKV – MakeMKV will read and decrypt DVDs and Blu-Ray DVDs.

Elgato Turbo.264- If you are ripping a lot of discs you should invest in this piece of hardware. It’s basically a USB plug that will speed up the conversion of your DVDs to Apple compatible file formats.

Automator – Automator is a scripting tool that comes with OS X. It allows you to build workflows to help you convert video. It basically can be used to tie the various tools together to make the conversion process automated.

If you know of any other tools to rip DVDs that you just can’t live without, let us know in the comments section.

by on December 29, 2010 2 Comments

Easily Rip Episodes from DVDs

I use Handbrake to rip DVDs into the Apple TV version 2 format. For a DVD this is generally a pretty straight forward process. For TV Shows this is a manual process and is quite a pain.

To further complicate things, I’m a fanatic about making sure my files are tagged properly so they show up in the correct categories in iTunes. If you go through this step then finding them in an Apple TV works really well. The problem is that you need to use another set of tools to tag your files. This is yet another manual step and is quite a pain.

I spent some time scouring the Internet for a solution. I knew someone had to have cracked this problem. I found it and it really rocks. There is a tutorial on this over at Mac Rumors. In a nutshell, the solutions is to use Automator to script the process of ripping DVDs, encoding them to the appropriate format and then tagging them. Here is the basic process.

Rip DVD Process with Automator in OS X

I’ve used these Automator workflows to begin ripping my collection and it works really well. I load the DVDs into my system during the day and then I run the encoders at night when I’m not using my Mac. The next morning I have fresh MP4 files ready to go to my media server.

I still have a few more steps to go. I need to write an Automator workflow to copy the files to my Media Server and then automate adding them to iTunes. I’m inspired by the scripts that the author wrote. It really shows how you how you can use Automator to build applications to solve complicated problems.

Note for OS X 10.5 Leopard Users

The author of these scripts built them for 10.6. If you are still using 10.5 you will need to make some changes. Most notably, you will need to move the automator workflows.

The workflows are in ~/Library/Services. They need to move to ~/Library/Workflows/Applications/Finder. Once you do this then you can click on a file or folder in the Finder and have the Batch Rip actions show up in the Automator window.

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