SongKong Jaikoz

SongKong and Jaikoz Music Tagger Community Forum

Preserving tags when re-coding - Apple Lossless to FLAC

#1

Large collection on home server includes 80% my stuff all ripped to FLAC, and 20% wife and son’s stuff, variously in Apple Lossless and MP3.

None of us use iTunes now (Sonos mainly, and Cog and MediaMonkey on individual PCs).

I would like to reduce the number of formats to keep file and metadata management a bit simpler, and thus want to convert the Apple Lossless files to FLAC.

Anyone with advice on how best to do this, and how to preserve tags while doing so? Also, will doing this confuse Jaikoz in any way?

Thanks

#2

I cannot give any particular advise regarding the audio process of converting Apple lossless to Flac, and Im not quite sure what metadata fields may get lost, but Jaikoz can help here.

What I would recommend is

  1. Open your set of apple lossless files before conversion in Jaikoz option
  2. Use Advanced:Export to export the metadata to a spreadsheet format.
  3. Use File:Save Artwork to Filesystem to extract artwork to filesystem (because this not included in step 2)
  4. Close Jaikoz
  5. Convert your files to Flac , saving the files to the same location as the original apple files with the same name (exception the extension)
  6. Make a copy of the spreadsheet file (in case make mistake)
  7. Edit the first column of spreadsheet modifying names of all the files from the .m4a to .flac
  8. Open the new flac files in Jaikoz
  9. Use Advanced:Import to update the fields of these files with the metadata in the spreadsheet
  10. Save changes

Of course if all else fails you can rematch them in Jaikoz or SongKong.

#3

would like to reduce the number of formats to keep file and metadata management a bit simpler, and thus want to convert the Apple Lossless files to FLAC.

#4

If you’re on Linux you can try:
http://legroom.net/software/convtoflac

I haven’t tried this script yet but I’ve done basically the same process manually before with other types.

#5

Worked for me.

#6

Yeah, me too. I got curious shortly after I posted that. I had to install a couple of programs that weren’t already installed but after that it was easy.