FLAC to Apple Lossless on OS X: XLD

I’m a big fan of FLAC, the super-high quality, Free Lossless Audio Codec. I have a bit of my music stored in FLAC. However, my iPod doesn’t support FLAC as it stands: the highest quality format is Apple Lossless, so I’ve been using that for a lot of my modern music.

Even some artists online are selling FLACs of their music for the high-def audiophiles out there. For example, Jonathan Coulton has a FLAC store.

A problem I have is that once I’ve bought said music and want to listen to it, or if I want to listen to my old FLAC files, I am stuck on my computer. What about my iPod?

Well, there are several options, most of which are bad. Most involve hacks, like using the standard FLAC utilities (for example, installed from Fink) to convert it to a WAV and then import it into iTunes. However, with these kinds of methods, you often lose all of your metadata (artist, album, title, etc.), or you have to resort to some fancy shell scripting to convert them.

This is where XLD (X Lossless Decoder) comes in. It supports converting to and from a variety of formats, including FLAC, Apple Lossless, AAC, WAV, MP3, Vorbis, and WavPack. The best feature is that correctly converts the metadata from one format to the other. It’s also dead simple to use: simply set your preferences to what you want, i.e., for Apple Lossless:

Then open the file you wish to convert from whatever (e.g., FLAC) and it pops out as Apple Lossless in just a few seconds. The size difference between the two formats in the test file I just checked was about 1.1% (with Apple Lossless being smaller than FLAC).