Another helpful file conversion tip.

FLAC is a lossless audio codec that is very popular on Linux and on Windows.  However, it’s virtually non-existant on the Mac, which is a problem if you have a library of music that you have encoded in FLAC and you want to upload to your iTunes library.

There are various command-line solutions out there on Windows, but very few available for Mac OS X.

XLD is the answer.

The “X Lossless Decoder” offers super fast conversion of various lossless formats on the Mac, with a decent GUI, and better yet, drag-and-drop conversion.

XLD supports the following formats:

• (Ogg) FLAC (.flac/.ogg)
• Monkey’s Audio (.ape)
• Wavpack (.wv)
• TTA (.tta)
• Apple Lossless (.m4a) [10.4 and later]
• AIFF, WAV, etc

Other formats supported by Libsndfile are also decodable. XLD uses not decoder frontend but library to decode, so no intermediate files are generated. All of the supported formats can be directly split with the cue sheet. XLD also supports so-called ’embedded’ or ‘internal’ cue sheet.

Currently you can choose output format from WAVE,AIFF and Raw PCM. In addition, you can choose Ogg Vorbis (aoTuV), MPEG-4 AAC (QuickTime/CoreAudio), MP3 (LAME), Apple Lossless, FLAC and HE-AAC (aacPlus v1/v2) in the GUI version.

Hope this helps you audiophiles out there converting to the Mac.  I converted entire albums from FLAC to Apple Lossless in just minutes on a PowerMac G5.