I've been downloading a lot of Japanese music lately for listening, and more often than not, recently, all the albums I've been downloading are .flac files. This is pretty frustrating since iTunes doesn't support that, and thus I can't get it on my iPod.

The major problem I have here is, I just downloaded a Greeeen album and the whole thing is one .flac file. So I convert it and bam... now I have a 55 minute file that's the whole album. I want each individual song, damn it! God... flac is so stupid.

But anyway, does anyone know how to fix such a problem? I know this is a little off-topic, but it's about Japanese study materials, no?

Either buy it, or at least download it from better sources.

You can also force iTunes to work with .FLAC, at least on OS X.

Well I can't buy it because I'm currently broke... but I think I have a cuesheet, so I'll try that. Thanks for the suggestion!

Ryuujin27 Wrote:God... flac is so stupid.

Are you kidding? FLAC is very likely the BEST audio format that exists today. You do realize that it's lossless, right...and free (you complained that you are broke)...and flexible...and DRM-free...and supported on nearly every OS? You'd have the exact same 'problem' if you had downloaded a WAV or AIFF. You chose to download the FLAC file, so don't blame it on the format.

Just google for a "shntool" utility for your OS, and then use a tracklist with times to split up your FLAC file. Then if you really want to, convert/rip to wav/mp3/acc/ogg/whatever.

Pardon my question, but why don't they split the whole flac album in the first place? Why do people who downloaded them have to do it? I don't know much about it.

Some people are overly obsessive about retaining the data as close as possible to the original CD. Having it in a single flac /w cue gets rid of slight differences in length due to pre/postgaps (which are just silence anyways).

If you use OSX, XLD is probably THE best tool for switching between various formats. I use it to convert from flac, ape, ttn, shn, wv, etcetc to Apple Lossless (since none of the other formats work well in iTunes, iPod, Finder, Quicklook, or anything else on OSX).

potempkin Wrote:

Ryuujin27 Wrote:God... flac is so stupid.

Are you kidding? FLAC is very likely the BEST audio format that exists today. You do realize that it's lossless, right...and free (you complained that you are broke)...and flexible...and DRM-free...and supported on nearly every OS? You'd have the exact same 'problem' if you had downloaded a WAV or AIFF. You chose to download the FLAC file, so don't blame it on the format.

Just google for a "shntool" utility for your OS, and then use a tracklist with times to split up your FLAC file. Then if you really want to, convert/rip to wav/mp3/acc/ogg/whatever.

Isn't m4a lossless, too? Why not use that? At least I can just simply import it into iTunes. I don't really care about "lossless" audio. I've been listening to ripped mp3s all my life. I'm really not that picky. FLAC is definitely just another thing for the audiophiles; and I think we all know how much they abhor anything but perfection.

M4A is both lossy, and patent-encumbered. 2 good reasons to prefer FLAC over it. By the way, if you use iTunes, there is a flac plugin for it at http://www.xiph.org .

gruikya Wrote:M4A is both lossy, and patent-encumbered. 2 good reasons to prefer FLAC over it. By the way, if you use iTunes, there is a flac plugin for it at http://www.xiph.org .

Wrong, m4a is just a container. You are talking about AAC. Also, the flac plugin is a very messy hack which barely works. You cannot even import into iTunes unless you modify the header of all your FLAC files, metadata reading doesn't work, and you still can't use it on an iPod. There is no reason not to convert to ALAC if you run OS X.