Moving from Apple Lossless to FLAC: Avoiding the Apple Lock-in

If you’re an audiophile or you simply don’t want less-than-CD-quality sound, you’ve been encoding your CDs in iTunes with the Apple Lossless Audio Codec. That is the only option in iTunes if you want CD quality sound (apart from completely uncompressed, hard-drive-eating formats like WAV and AIFF). Ideally, iTunes would allow you to plug-in codecs of your choosing. One common format that is an open standard is FLAC. If you’re in the midst of switching to Linux or making the move to open source software, you may be wondering how to liberate your music library from the Apple dominion.

If you’re using iTunes on Windows, there is an option for converting Apple Lossless to FLAC (or any other format you’d care to convert to). It’s called Poikosoft Easy CD-DA Extractor. This application has been around since 1998, and it keeps getting better and better. The new 12.0 version (as of 3 November) includes the capability to encode and convert files to and from Apple Lossless. Easy CD-DA Extractor supports the following audio formats:

3G2, 3GP, MP1, MP2, MP3, Windows Media Audio (WMA), Ogg Vorbis (OGG), MP4, M4A (iPod AAC and Apple Lossless), AAC, aacPlus (AAC+ and eAAC+), FLAC, Musepack (MPC), WavPack (WV), WAV, AIFF, Monkey’s Audio (APE), CUE and M3U

It’s not free software, but it’s one of the best engineered audio adapters out there. It’s a simple tool that works exceptionally well. So Easy CD-DA Extractor is one option for breaking out of the Apple mode.

My audio collection is completely converted from ALAC to FLAC. Rhythmbox on Ubuntu loves these FLAC files. It’s a great way to go. In my experience, using AAC audio files generated in iTunes tends to crash Linux multimedia players. FLAC though is well supported, and of course is the best option for CD-quality sound.

What is lossless you may be asking? It simply means that it is a compression format that doesn’t lose any information. So if you rip a CD in a lossless format to your hard drive, it’ll take 50% as much space, but is identical in data to the original CD.