converting alac to wav and flac and vice versa

[shantiq]

Got a few alac files off the net and looked around for converting solutions. Might be of use to some.



Players which handle alac

VLC plays them
QMMP (right-click on player/settings/plugins/FFmpeg plugin/highlight/Preferences/Tick alac )
deadbeef
aqualung
xine
audacious

Personally i love alac but if you need/want to convert them here goes...



to batch convert quickly to flac/wav

cd (change directory) to you alac files in your terminal then enter


for f in *.m4a; do ffmpeg -i "$f" "${f%.m4a}.flac"; done



To decompress to wav use same as above just change word flac for wav

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and wav to alac


for f in *.wav; do ffmpeg -i "$f" -acodec alac "${f%.wav}.m4a"; done




ALSO now ffmpeg handles converting to alac (http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=11737536&postcount=24)




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or for single file with FFMPEG
============= ==============

wav to m4a ==>



ffmpeg -i <input> -acodec alac <output>.m4a


and to convert from alac (m4a) to wav or flac



ffmpeg -i <input>.m4a <output>.wav




ffmpeg -i <input>.m4a <output>.flac



there is also a way to do this with shntool would anyone know how to?

[shantiq]

alac files also play straight off in the player called xine which is in synaptic


also deadbeef (http://deadbeef.sourceforge.net/download.html) plays alac

[cascade9]

Or, you can just forget the comandline stuff and use sounconverter. As long as you have the right gstreamer package installed (I cant remember if alac is under good, bad or ugly) soundconverter wil transcode them to whatever formaty you cwant. Also, and gstreamer media player should play them. List of teh gstreamer media players here-

http://www.gstreamer.net/apps/

[shantiq]

As long as you have the right gstreamer package installed (I cant remember if alac is under good, bad or ugly)


hi there cascade not been able to get that going so far soundkonverter does not pick up the info from alac-decoder
probably not the one it picks it up from truth is i do not see one can install alac onto ubuntu



sudo apt-get install alac goes nowhere


not sure what one has to do to get it going it would be handy since soundkonverter is so good got shorten and tta going there but not as yet alac



oh sorry you said soundconverter not soundKonverter well that one has AAC m4a but i do not think that is lossless alac

[cascade9]

Soundconverter does do alac-


SoundConverter is the leading sound conversion application for the GNOME Desktop. It reads anything the GStreamer library can read (Ogg Vorbis, AAC, MP3, FLAC, WAV, AVI, MPEG, MOV, M4A, AC3, DTS, ALAC, MPC, Shorten, APE, SID, MOD, XM, S3M, etc...), and writes WAV, FLAC, MP3, AAC, and Ogg Vorbis files.

http://soundconverter.berlios.de/

Checked, it appears that alac support is in gstreamer-bad-


qtmux: add support for ALAC, SVQ3, IMA ADPCM; improve j2k handling

http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/releases/gst-plugins-bad/0.10.18.html

I *think* that all you would need to do to get gstreamer-bad witrh ubuntu is -

sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad

http://packages.ubuntu.com/lucid/gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad

"sudo apt-get install alac" wont work because there is no "alac" package. Close though, there is "alac-decoder".

http://packages.ubuntu.com/lucid/alac-decoder

[shantiq]

well i did


sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad



and it says i am already up to date

and when i go to soundconverter no alac just AAC m4a up to 320kbps


BUT it will convert from alac to anything else maybe that is what you meant from alac to but not the other way


no shorten either although it is picked up by soundKonverter


have i missed something?

[cascade9]

Yes, I meant convert from ALAC to other formats.

As far as shorten goes, it should be possible to transcode from one format into .shn. But I dont know any way to do it offhand, .shn is old and totally outclassed by newer lossless codecs so developers wouldnt be btoerhed adding .shn encoding support.

Yes, I did read on your other thread that you think shn is the best sounding lossless fomat, but I disagree, apart from lame 'maybe' lossless (like wma-lossless) and decoder issues, they should all sound the same ......

[shantiq]

Yes, I did read on your other thread that you think shn is the best sounding lossless format, but I disagree, apart from lame 'maybe' lossless (like wma-lossless) and decoder issues, they should all sound the same ......i know they should but they really do not in my experience i once read a long article on shorten which explained how it had been designed for speech for conferences at cambridge university hey here i found it (ftp://svr-ftp.eng.cam.ac.uk/pub/reports/robinson_tr156.ps.Z)

and it always has sounded clearer to me on windows or ubuntu maybe i am mad but i think not give a a whirl mayhaps?soundkonverter will happily oblige once you have installed it

xmms is the only player i know which handles it on linux also audacious does now the best of all player to my mind the KISS principle i read somewhere (keep it simple stupid) i love solid systems


anyway

[shantiq]

and if you want to rip a disc to alac using rubyripper here is howto (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1533534&page=2) scroll to bottom of page


external encoding is
ffmpeg -i %i -acodec alac "%o".m4a

[shantiq]

also there is a program designed by david hammerton called alac-decoder which is really efficient but only works one way

still worth using

install



sudo apt-get install alac-decoder



alac-decoder -h
Usage: alac [options] [--] file
Decompresses the ALAC file specified

Options:
-f output.wav outputs the decompressed data to the
specified file, in WAV format. Default
is stdout.
-r write output as raw PCM data. Default
is in WAV format.
-v verbose output.
-t test that file is ALAC, also tests for
other m4a file types.

This software is Copyright (c) 2005 David Hammerton
All rights reserved
http://crazney.net/


if you file is named 24


alac-decoder -f 24.wav 24.m4a

[shantiq]

also just found out you can record your voice with a microphone directly to alac using ffmpeg




ffmpeg -f alsa -ac 2 -i pulse -acodec alac -y ./Desktop/RecordingMYvoice.m4a

[jamesisin]

You might be interested in this conversion script I recently finished:

http://www.soundunreason.com/InkWell/?p=2485

[shantiq]

looking around finally found a way (http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=5441422&postcount=3) to batch decompress a whole lot of alac to wave


having saved the script


for f in *.m4a; do ffmpeg -i "$f" "${f%.m4a}.wav"; done




as m4a2wav-ffmpeg.sh in your home folder and made it executable rightclick/properties/permissions/make executable


OR
sudo chmod +x


go into your m4a file folder then enter
~/./m4a2wav-ffmpeg.sh



brilliant thank you guys


ps of course this works with all formats supported by ffmpeg simply substitute m4a for other format extension and do the same process

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and to batch convert from wav to alac use this script instead and the same process



for f in *.wav; do ffmpeg -i "$f" -acodec alac "${f%.wav}.m4a"; done



save as wav2m4a-ffmpeg.sh



then cd to you music files and do



~/./wav2m4a-ffmpeg.sh

[shantiq]

actually thinking about it a more likely scenario for a linux user encountering a bunch of alac files would be to turn them into flacs



so here



for f in *.m4a; do ffmpeg -i "$f" "${f%.m4a}.flac"; done


save as m4a2flac-ffmpeg.sh


make executable as mentioned earlier


cd to your folder of alac files and run




~/./m4a2flac-ffmpeg.sh



all conversion scripts zipped below

[jamesisin]

Just a little heads-up to anyone who may be new to this kind of conversion: when you convert ALAC files into WAVE files you will lose all of your tagging data. WAVE files have no mechanism for storing tag data in the way that other audio formats do. (FLAC of course retains tag data.)

[shantiq]

fair point james


and i really wonder why that is?


does anyone know? is there a built-in problem with wave or was it a choice that was made when it was designed?

[jamesisin]

Wave was designed long before id3 tagging existed. There is some room in the header for a small amount of information (like artist and title) but it's really not a very good format for doing so. Now that we have formats like FLAC which use id3 tagging there really seems no point in altering waves:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WAV

But, really, use FLAC.

[atca]

To add to this in case any one else is interested
I've pulled together a script which converts a CD to FLAC and ALAC transcribing the meta data between FLAC and ALAC since they ue slightly different formats. Takes the whole process from rip to FLAC/ALAC rip with 2 clicks and in under 15 minutes, it can also be used to batch CD rips.

See here (http://confoundedtech.blogspot.com/2011/11/ubuntu-automatically-rip-cd-to-flac-and.html)