I have been recording some vinyl using Pure Vinyl Recorder on a Mac and it outputs tracks in Apple lossless m4a format at 192k/24bit. When tracks are copied into Media Center 17 on a Win7 PC, they appear and play properly. The library shows them as 192k sample rate and 24 bits wide. However, if I used the library tool in MC17 to convert to FLAC, bad things happen. The FLAC converted files show up in the library as 192k / 16 bit and, indeed, the files are just 16 bits wide and commensurately smaller is file size. Interestingly, the Media Editor program also sees the .m4a files as 192k/16bit. Other programs, such as the Sony Sound Forge 10 app also sees the .m4a's as 16 bit, as well as a few other utilities I have (i.e., you are not alone). I found one program called simply "Audio Transcoder" at
www.audio-transcoder.com that does read the .m4a files at the correct sample rate and bit depth and does the FLAC conversion to the same. I am naming name of programs because the problem is widespread and it might provide a clue. Any ideas as to what is happening with file imports from Apple land? Thanks in advance.
