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 15, 2011 6 Comments

Synchronize Two iTunes Libraries

iTunes Home Sharing feature is a great way to listen to content in other iTunes libraries around your house. It’s also pretty simple to copy individual songs. In my case though neither of these options are quite good enough.

I am a multiple Mac household. I have a MacBook Pro for work, my wife has a MacBook and my kids and I share an iMac as the family computer. I was keeping my iTunes library on my iMac but since I’ve begun using my MacBook Pro I’ve wanted to have my music there.

What I really want to do is have an easy way to keep both the iTunes library on my iMac and MacBook Pro synchronized. After doing some searching around I found that it’s pretty easy to do with some features built right into Mac OS X.

At the end of this article you should be able to sync your iTunes library from one Mac to another. [Read more...]

by on September 30, 2009 2 Comments

Use iTunes With Other Devices

If you have a portable media player that isn’t an iPod, you know how frustrating it can be if you own a Mac. Apple has done a great job creating an iTunes, iTunes Music Store ecosystem. This is great if you have an iPod or iPhone but it is really frustrating for the millions of other people who own Blackberrys, PSP, Android and other devices.

Now, new software is availalble from a company called doubleTwist which will let you use your devices on your Mac, in iTunes.

A quick video demonstration of it’s capabilities are below.

The software was developed by Jon Lech Johansen (aka DVD Jon). He is the same guy who cracked the DVD copy protection scheme. If anyone can figure out the interoperability problem, it’s him.

by on September 11, 2009 1 Comment

Share your songs around the house with iTunes 9

People have had a love hate relationship with iTunes since it’s inception. If you own an iPod you are pretty much tethered to using iTunes. If it didn’t have features you wanted too bad.

One feature that was missing for years is the ability to share files among multiple computers on your machine. Let me explain the scenario. If you and your wife have a Mac or in my case, you have three Macs in your house you may want to share songs on your iTunes library with her and vice-versa. To do this you had to share the appropriate music folders on the network, find the file, copy it to the new machine and import it into iTunes. Not an easy process.

With iTunes 9, Apple has finally offered a feature that should have been there since version 1.0, the ability to easily sync files between computers on your home network. This feature called Home Sharing is super easy to setup as you will see in this video from engadget.

by on September 11, 2009 Leave a Comment

iTunes 9 Changes

I came across a couple of interesting posts about iTunes 9

This blogger did a great job with screenshots on the differences between iTunes 8 and 9.

Here someone dissected a cool new feature that I didn’t know about, the ability to reorganize your media into a cleaner hierarchy.