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In Reply to: RE: Need software to compare flac and apple lossless tags posted by Goober58 on October 01, 2014 at 08:25:47
Since you've made the FLAC your "official" archive you should be OK with trashing the entire ALAC archive, recreating it from the FLAC archive. This will be safe provided the FLAC album is complete and correct. In suggesting you "trash" it, the point is to think carefully about whether there might be some tracks that you don't have in FLAC or where the ALAC version is somehow better. If you're happy with trashing the ALAC library then here's what I would do:
1. "Trash" the entire ALAC library, perhaps by temporarily renaming it and then ultimately deleting it.
2. Use dBpoweramp bulk converter to convert all the FLAC files to ALAC. This will also copy the tags.
3. Do any directory reorganization as appropriate for iTunes, etc...
4. Vet the new ALAC library.
5. Now really "trash" the old ALAC library that you'd renamed.
There are various ways to set up the dBpoweramp bulk conversion, which means there are various ways to screw this up. I suggest a trial run with a few albums first to make sure that this is going to go well and doing careful vetting before doing the actual bulk conversion. Also, I suggest you take care to make sure you don't run out of disk space...
If your library is huge, there are some more practical considerations. First, you will be moving a lot of data around and shaking things up. So if any of your hardware (e.g. disk drives) are weak, they might fail at this point. So I would take care that you have a complete set of backups prior to beginning. Next, I would use the preliminary run to estimate how long the entire operation is likely to take. If it's more than overnight, then you can batch convert portions of it, doing one portion at a time overnight.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
Follow Ups:
Thanks Tony.
FWIW - both directory trees are identical, confirmed to the song named file ( -extension, thank you Beyond Compare ). The ALAC tags are more complete than the FLACs so I want to preserve the ALAC tags.
I don't want to reconvert and that is the point of my query.
Give me rhythm or give me death!
If the files are all 44/16 just convert all of the ALACs to FLAC. Again, you will have all the same audio samples. The only concern I would have would be if you were to convert 24 bit files. That's because there have been (at least in the past) issues with 24 bit ALAC implementations. (For that matter there were issues with 24 bit FLAC back around 2005.)
Obviously, if there is software that just copies the tags it will take less elapsed time. However, you will have to find and learn this software. I just use dBpoweramp, click and let it go and come back when it's done. I don't care about elapsed time, just how much attention I have to pay to it.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
Yes I have high res files in FLAC that have been down converted in ALAC to maintain compatibility with my devices.
I would rather copy tags than reconvert. I don't have time to do the comparisons manually. There are going to be relatively few differences so if I know where they are I think (I could be wrong) I can do it manually. Yes it will probably take longer but it would be worth it to me to preserve the lineage of each library.
Give me rhythm or give me death!
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