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[darichman]

Hey there...

I'm rather new to lossless encoding. I have some apple lossless (ALAC) files created in iTunes which I want to convert to APE for use in MC.

It seems that MC11 is unable to import/handle ALAC files so I converted them to wav files for importing to MC (unfortunately losing tag info in the process )

A few questions:
1. Is there a better way to do this?
2. There are a few APE encoding settings in MC (Normal, Fast, High etc)... Are all of these lossless? What is the major difference between these settings?
3. Is there any way to get MC to play ALAC files?

Any help would be appreciated

[Yaobing]

Hey there...

I'm rather new to lossless encoding. I have some apple lossless (ALAC) files created in iTunes which I want to convert to APE for use in MC.

It seems that MC11 is unable to import/handle ALAC files so I converted them to wav files for importing to MC (unfortunately losing tag info in the process )

A few questions:
1. Is there a better way to do this?
2. There are a few APE encoding settings in MC (Normal, Fast, High etc)... Are all of these lossless? What is the major difference between these settings?
3. Is there any way to get MC to play ALAC files?

Any help would be appreciated

1. Probably not, unless you can find a set of DirectShow filters that can handle the format. So far I have not found any.

2. They are all lossless. The settings are for amount of compression vs. speed of encoding.

3. MC should play them using Quicktime engine.

[Alex B]

dbPowerAMP can convert from ALAC to APE.

[darichman]

dbPowerAMP can convert from ALAC to APE.

Thanks Alex! Will give it a go.

3. MC should play them using Quicktime engine.

Really? Then I seem to have a problem... I have other m4a files (not lossless) which import and play back fine. But two albums which I encoded a fair while ago (am positive I used ALAC) will not import properly -- sometimes they will not import at all. Sometimes they import as "Unknown" media type and won't play even if I change media type to audio. They play fine in iTunes.

I have ffdshow, MP4 splitter and quicktime pro 7.1 installed on my machine. I also tried 3ivx and that didn't work either.

Am I missing something?

[Yaobing]

I have ffdshow, MP4 splitter and quicktime pro 7.1 installed on my machine. I also tried 3ivx and that didn't work either.

Am I missing something?

There are probably some filters on your computer that pretend to handle m4p ALAC but do not. That tricked MC into DirectShow mode and failed. Did the failure happen before or after 3ivx installation? You might want to try uninstalling 3ivx.

[Alex B]

darichman,

You could try to change file extension from m4a to mp4 (only for ALAC files) and disable the option "Try using DirectShow for playback of mp4 media". That might make the files to play through QT instead of DS. However, then MC's internal volume, DSP and Replay Gain functions are not available so better would be to convert the files to APE. Also, file tagging is not available with m4a/mp4 container formats.

[darichman]

There are probably some filters on your computer that pretend to handle m4p ALAC but do not. That tricked MC into DirectShow mode and failed. Did the failure happen before or after 3ivx installation? You might want to try uninstalling 3ivx.

Whoa. That worked! It's playing them through quicktime now.

This is really strange, however, as the problem existed before 3ivx (that's why I installed 3ivx to begin with).

Thanks Alex, I'll still convert all of these to APE. Just wanted to sort out what the problem was.