Getting lots of FLAC

I’ve recently been re-ripping my entire CD collection to FLAC. It’s been kind of a pain in the ass, but I will be glad to have everything in a lossless format. It also untethers me from keeping my music collection in iTunes, which is kinda nice. I plan to jailbreak my iTouch and install vlc4iphone – which can read FLAC as well as many other formats – once the conversion is done.

The worst part was finding a decent FLAC ripper for Mac. I started out using xACT, which is an AppleScript frontend to a bunch of audio conversion and manipulation tools. It works okay, but it turned out to be manually intensive to add tag info. And since I’m kinda anal when it comes to tagging my music, I got frustrated by the amount of time each CD took to tag. I tried a couple other programs that turned out not to be much better.

Then I ran across Max. This program effing rules! It does everything you’d expect a good ripper to do: Look up CD info and allow you to edit it, specify default directory structure and filenaming conventions, even eject the CD upon completion of the rip. It took me about a quarter of the time to rip the second half of my CD collection that it took to rip the first half.

Now, on to the jailbreaking. I’m a bit nervous about that, but we’ll see how it goes.

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