opinion needed on file conversion. alac to flac

[d3athf1sh]

so i've just picked up an older odd ball album that that i thought was flac by the file size of the album, but it came in m4a. looking in the details it was created with apple lossless audio converter (alac) and the bitrate and file size match that conclusion. (but not sure why it wouldn't just be an alac file at that point?) but being i don't like apple and the fact that my dap does not support or play apple formats i'm gonna need to convert to flac. so here's my question, should i convert back to wav first, then transcode to flac which should theoretically give me the best results in the end or do you think it's a waste of time and to just go straight from m4a to flac?

 

[Algrim]

I haven’t tried this but here is something from StackExchange:

ffmpeg -i audio.m4a -c:a flac audio.flac

This is simply a container copy from ALAC to FLAC without translating to a lossless -> lossy -> lossless conversion. M4A is Apple’s default media container. The M4A could also contain DRM which may or may not allow this file to be copied.

Good luck!

Original post link is here: https://superuser.com/questions/329...be-converted-to-flac-with-no-loss-of-fidelity

 

[Nobu]

^^ that should be fine. The m4a container is necessary to carry any metadata that might be associated with the track. You could just pass around raw alac, or flac, but without a container you would need another file to carry the metadata, a toc file for one example. Oh, yeah, drm is another reason they could have used it.

 

[d3athf1sh]

^^ that should be fine. The m4a container is necessary to carry any metadata that might be associated with the track. You could just pass around raw alac, or flac, but without a container you would need another file to carry the metadata, a toc file for one example. Oh, yeah, drm is another reason they could have used it.

yeah i just did it the long way and coverted them back to wav's using "audio transcoder" and re-encoded with the lastest version of flac using flac frontend. and re-tagged with MP3tag. no need in taking any chances being i'm going for top audio quality. i guess it' no big deal being i'm just doing the one album.

still bugs me that apple sells proprietary file formats and at the same time i think it's funny that the EU is forcing them to use standard usb-c for charging and i guess that pissed them off so they removed the wired headphone jack when apple is suppose to be aimed at content creation "profesionals" because anyone in to audio knows that wired gives the best/purest sound quality. but they have their customers hypnotized and most are not even "profesionals" so they really don't care.

 

[uOpt]

Yes, definitely use ffmpeg.