Previous Thread
Next Thread
Print Thread
Rate Thread
WMA to FLAC
#299097 03/28/10 11:39 PM
Joined: Jul 2006
Posts: 12,077
Likes: 7
C
CV Offline OP
Founder, Axiom Upgrade Club
shareholder in the making
OP Offline
Founder, Axiom Upgrade Club
shareholder in the making
C
Joined: Jul 2006
Posts: 12,077
Likes: 7
Well, considering the grief I'm encountering by having my music in lossless WMA format, can anyone suggest how to convert my collection? I just tried using foobar2000. It started off fast, but then it slowed way down, so I aborted it. None of my cores were being used very much at all, and I'm wondering why. Is there better software out there for this, and if not, is there a better way to do this? Can someone point me to a tutorial, perhaps? It would be nice if I could leverage more of my computer's horsepower so it doesn't take over 20 hours to convert my collection. Also, it's possible to embed album artwork in each FLAC file, right? Does any player software actually utilize the embedded artwork? I notice that the FLAC files I did create did not have artwork that showed up in MediaMonkey. I don't know if this is a limitation of foobar2000's conversion tool or if player software generally doesn't support embedded artwork in FLAC files. I realize cover.jpg or folder.jpg in the same folder are the more common way of doing things, but I sort of prefer to have one artist folder and no subfolders for albums. I just find it easier to browse that way, especially since I have soooooo many releases that aren't full albums, so it would make more steps every time I want to find just one track.

I'm sure there everything could be easier if I simply let some player's music library management feature take over, but I'm resistant to giving up control.

Anyway, if you have any tips, I'd love to hear them. Thanks!

Re: WMA to FLAC
CV #299104 03/29/10 12:04 AM
Joined: Jul 2006
Posts: 12,077
Likes: 7
C
CV Offline OP
Founder, Axiom Upgrade Club
shareholder in the making
OP Offline
Founder, Axiom Upgrade Club
shareholder in the making
C
Joined: Jul 2006
Posts: 12,077
Likes: 7
I figured something out that should work. I'm going to use Easy CD-DA Extractor, that program I love so much, to do the conversion. It's not as easy to select all of the files, so I'll just do a folder at a time, but I can confirm that it retains the album artwork when converting to FLAC, as the resulting file shows the artwork in MediaMonkey. I'm not sure how fast it is at converting compared to foobar2000, but it seemed much faster, and that's without even setting the program priority up to high. I guess I'll report back after I do more converting.

Re: WMA to FLAC
CV #299106 03/29/10 12:13 AM
Joined: Apr 2007
Posts: 4,877
connoisseur
Offline
connoisseur
Joined: Apr 2007
Posts: 4,877
I suggest dbpoweramp. It's not free but you may be able to convert a lot of them through the free trial period and then determine if you like it.

I *think* it will do what you need. I was able to convert Flac to mp3 with it.


-David
Re: WMA to FLAC
terzaghi #299109 03/29/10 12:29 AM
Joined: Jul 2006
Posts: 12,077
Likes: 7
C
CV Offline OP
Founder, Axiom Upgrade Club
shareholder in the making
OP Offline
Founder, Axiom Upgrade Club
shareholder in the making
C
Joined: Jul 2006
Posts: 12,077
Likes: 7
Good call on dBpoweramp. It utilizes the cores even more and also retains the album artwork. Thanks for the suggestion!

Re: WMA to FLAC
CV #299164 03/29/10 07:01 AM
Joined: Jul 2006
Posts: 12,077
Likes: 7
C
CV Offline OP
Founder, Axiom Upgrade Club
shareholder in the making
OP Offline
Founder, Axiom Upgrade Club
shareholder in the making
C
Joined: Jul 2006
Posts: 12,077
Likes: 7
foobar2000 was converting at around 7x speed, Easy CD-DA Extractor was doing much better at around 50x, and dBpoweramp is a bit faster, hovering at 77x, for anyone interested in some numbers. I'm glad I will have my whole collection of WMAs converted so fast. I'll hang on to my WMAs for a short time just to be sure the FLACs are going to work for me, but I don't foresee any issues. It took me a little bit of time to figure out how to stream them to the WD TV Live, but I figured it out, and it looks like it will work well.

Re: WMA to FLAC
CV #299268 03/29/10 11:45 PM
Joined: Apr 2007
Posts: 4,877
connoisseur
Offline
connoisseur
Joined: Apr 2007
Posts: 4,877
Glad to be of assistance. Another feature I liked with dbpoweramp is that all audio files have a box that pops up when you hover over the file showing its bitrate and lots of other neat stuff.


-David
Re: WMA to FLAC
terzaghi #299269 03/29/10 11:56 PM
Joined: Jul 2004
Posts: 4,444
Likes: 16
M
connoisseur
Offline
connoisseur
M
Joined: Jul 2004
Posts: 4,444
Likes: 16
I use DBpoweramp too. Great program. Make sure you take the time to set it up correctly first. You can also do simultaneous rips which I find very useful. IE: it will rip to two different formats and drop the files into different folders. Play with tagging a bit to get that spot on. It will make your sorting / filing chores much easier in the future if you set it up right the first time. It also comes with a batch convertor program. I have not used it, but it may do exactly what you are looking for.

Foobar is the best for fixing tags. (I did not set mine up correctly and learned the hard way why this is so important)

Re: WMA to FLAC
michael_d #299274 03/30/10 12:57 AM
Joined: Apr 2007
Posts: 4,877
connoisseur
Offline
connoisseur
Joined: Apr 2007
Posts: 4,877
Yeah the batch converter works great.

I use mp3tag for editing all of my tags. I use foobar to play flac files on my PC.


-David
Re: WMA to FLAC
terzaghi #299310 03/30/10 04:09 AM
Joined: Jul 2006
Posts: 12,077
Likes: 7
C
CV Offline OP
Founder, Axiom Upgrade Club
shareholder in the making
OP Offline
Founder, Axiom Upgrade Club
shareholder in the making
C
Joined: Jul 2006
Posts: 12,077
Likes: 7
I had all of the tag info in the WMAs already, so it carried it all over. I still plan on using Easy CD-DA Extractor for my ripping, since it does everything I want and I find it easy to use, but dBpoweramp sure came in handy for converting. Even though I don't really need it past the 21 day trial, I'll still probably pay for it simply to support the developers, and maybe a use will come up again.

And yeah, I used the batch converter after using the normal converter to test it first. It did work very well.

Mike, what formats do you rip to? I think I'll probably end up deleting my WMAs and using strictly FLAC for now, since that's how I'll be listening to my music. I also don't use a portable player, so having my music in another format for that isn't important to me. I'm curious how other people have their music collections set up, though.


Moderated by  alan, Amie, Andrew, axiomadmin, Brent, Debbie, Ian, Jc 

Link Copied to Clipboard

Need Help Graphic

Forum Statistics
Forums16
Topics24,940
Posts442,457
Members15,616
Most Online2,082
Jan 22nd, 2020
Top Posters
Ken.C 18,044
pmbuko 16,441
SirQuack 13,840
CV 12,077
MarkSJohnson 11,458
Who's Online Now
0 members (), 558 guests, and 3 robots.
Key: Admin, Global Mod, Mod
Newsletter Signup
Powered by UBB.threads™ PHP Forum Software 7.7.4