FLAC vs AAC

I am one of those who rips to FLAC, and it is one of the only reasons that I do not own an Ipod. With diskspace at a dollar a gig, I have no problem dropping 25-45 cents per an album to rip my entire collection to a lossless archival format. Do it right the first time - by ripping to FLAC you always have the option to convert to other formats to fit onto your Ipod.

That said, there is no simple way to import FLAC (or SHN, APE or other lossless formats) into an Ipod. There is, however, work arounds.

One option is to write a script (which shouldn't be too hard, I bet someone has done this already - i know there is one for SHN) to batch convert all your FLAC files into MP3 in another directory. Then, just import the MP3's into your Ipod.

There is also a program called dbpoweramp which converts and encodes to many formats. I have tried it and found it extreamly easy to use, although the process is VERY time consuming. Possibly the best thing the program has going for it is that it retains all of the ID3 tag information.

I hope this helps you out. I am going to post this question to sharingthegroove.org to see what the community there has to say. It is full of flac and SHN users.

Originally posted by thenightfly42
I'm too tired to do the math. What bitrate (or range of bitrates, if it isn't constant) does FLAC achieve?
FLAC is variable bitrate. My audio collection encoded with FLAC varies between 600 and 950kbps.

FLAC is highly recommended, to sad it is not supported in iPod! :(