I am trying to get my library compatible with iTunes and need to convert a large number of FLAC and other file types to ALAC. I have been struggling with this for days now because the file converter sometimes works but often fails for no discernible reason. This evening it looked like it was working great when I went to bed but checking it a few hours later I see that after the first few thousand (out of about 15,000) successful conversions it began failing again.
I have tried converting to all the different file formats to see if it was just ALAC but they all fail. I have tried converting 1, 3 or 4 files at a time but that made no difference. I restarted the program and I restarted the computer but that didn't help. As of right now it is failing every time no matter what I do.
The files are on an hdd in an external drive enclosure connected with e-SATA, in case that makes any difference. I saw one post that theorized the issue may be"due to multi thread contention on file accesses" and that "The issue may be exacerbated on slower HDDs (particularly USB HDD and NAS) where either the device or the OS may extend the duration of file locks (lock caching) for performance reasons." However since in did work successfully for quite a few (around 3000) conversions in a row this evening I don't think that's the issue.
