My love of music AND Converting FLAC music files to AAC format (Part Two)

THIRD STEP:  Configuring the fre:ac converter

As mentioned earlier other converters should work.  I am going to outline the process for using fre:ac so if you use another converter you will need to learn how to configure it properly.

To understand why I take the steps I am you need to understand how I keep my music organized.  I use a main folder for my .flac music that is named Lossless.  Next I sort the music by artist, album, track number, and file name. The folder tree for a typical song looks like this: 

C:\LOSSLESS\QUEEN\A NIGHT AT THE OPERA\A NIGHT AT THE OPERA – 04 – YOU’RE MY BEST FRIEND.FLAC

For compilation albums such as collections of 80’s music or soundtracks that have multiple artists I have them sorted into a subfolder named VARIOUS ARTISTS.  

Here’s how to configure fre:ac encoder to produce the results I am leading you towards.

Select the “general settings” menu either from the drop down menu or from the buttons at the top of the screen   Leave settings on all of the tabs at their default except for what I instruct.

ENCODERS tab:

Select the FAAC MP4/AAC Encoder v 1.28  from the drop down list.

Click the CONFIGURE ENCODER button and set the quality to what you desire while on the QUALITY tab.  This is the response from Robert Kausch (a fre:ac developer) in the user forums regarding the quality settings for FLAC to AAC conversion:

“In general, you can keep fre\:ac's default settings for any codec in order to get perceived CD quality sound.

For FAAC, this means choosing the quality option and setting it to 100%. The AAC bandwidth option should be left at 16.000 Hz as higher values do not usually improve perceived quality, but take up bits in the encoded files that could otherwise be used to improve quality of lower frequencies.

The AAC object type should be left at LC (low complexity) which is best optimized and used in 99,99% of AAC files nowadays.”

Under the encoder section clear the “Use input folder if possible” box and browse to select your 

M4A – Temp folder instead. Under the FILENAME PATTERN section I chose:

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My love of music AND Converting FLAC music files to AAC format (Part One)

In case my previous posts have not made this clear I will say it now:  I LOVE MUSIC!  I rarely watch TV but usually have music of some sort playing unless I am listening to news, a talk show, listening to an audio book, or am somewhere that I cannot have a player running. If I am playing a video game I will often turn the game music off and listen to what I choose unless the game has exceptionally good music with it (there aren't many of those I am aware of) or the game music sets the mood for game play. Since I bought my first CD in 1989 my collection has grown to about 900 discs.

Do I need all of this music?  Well...  I could get by without it but why should I have to?  Portable music players and computers make it possible to keep large amounts of music readily available in a very small space.  A few CD wallets don't take up that much room (I learned to ditch the jewel cases a long time ago) and I have a USB hard drive that cost less than $90 that fits in my shirt pocket and would hold seven complete copies of my library in .flac format (which, if you have ever used it, you know the files are huge) and still have a little space left over.  

Something else you need to know about me and music.  If I am not home it is rare for me not to have a portable music player close by.  The only times I don’t are when I am somewhere that it is not appropriate to have one.

A couple of years ago my closest friend convinced me to try out a lossless music player that supported the afore mentioned .flac format and I fell in love with the sound and jumped onto the lossless music bandwagon.  I finally have about 95% of the CD's catalogued and ripped into .flac format. 

Allow me to digress to give a plug for my favorite player since I am discussing lossless music.

There are quite a number of lossless players on the market now that have decent capacity but with the exception of one brand they are too expensive for most people to even consider.   One exception to this is the Chinese company named FiiO.  Their players have a sound quality rivaling that of the other players that start at about $1,000.  I started with their X3 2^nd generation that sold for about $250 but have switched to their most basic current player:  the X1 2^nd generation.  They have more expensive players with more features but at $100 for a solid little player that sounds great it can’t be beat.  It doesn’t have built in storage and relies on micro SD cards but it has Bluetooth and has a touch sensitive scroll wheel that reminds me of the iPod wheel.  A 200GB Sandisk card sells for $80 if you have to pay full price.

Now back to our regularly scheduled blog entry…

The biggest problem with most current music players is storage space, or lack thereof. Between 2000 and 2010 storage capacity on portable players was expanding by leaps and bounds.  Early iPods and Zune players (just to name a couple of the really great lines of players that were available) had real, spinning hard drives in them and had capacities of 10 gigabytes or more.  There were versions with flash memory that had decent capacities but did not come close to the hard drive models.  As far as I know the iPod classic with the largest capacity got to 160 GB and the Zune topped out at 120 GB.  

Step forward to 2017 and the players with large capacities are mostly gone.  The portable music player market has dried up and most "mp3" players you find have four or eight gigs of storage, have very few features, and support fewer file formats than the older players.  Some of the better ones you can find at large electronic stores like Best Buy might have thirty two gigs.  The Zune is gone.  Kaput.  iPods other than the small flash players aren't on the shelves but can be ordered.  None of them have hard drives anymore.   I just checked Apple's site and found that the largest iPod Touch (which is basically an iPone without cellular capabilities) has 128GB of flash memory storage and costs $400! I did not check to see if it supports the Apple Lossless music format but imagine that it does. 

Despite the player capacity limitations I have not regretted diving into lossless music. My FiiO was great and I still couldn’t carry everything with me but I was used to that.  Even my Zune 80 and iPod Classic 120 that I still use can’t hold all of my MP3’s. Factor in lossless music and you will get an understanding of my problem.  Like I said earlier.flac files are huge:  nearly five times the size of a “CD quality” MP3.  My main digital music folder has 272 gigabytes of .flac music as of the time I posted this.  I probably have another 20 gigs ripped into a folder that I haven't catalogued and merged into the main one yet.   

My dilemma has just been solved.

The same friend who convinced me to get my first FiiO and loves music as much as I do (a lot of our discussions are music related) recently learned that an AAC format music file encoded at (I think) 200kbps is indistinguishable to the human ear from a lossless FLAC file and is about 1/5 the size.  The research he read spoke of experts not being able to tell the difference in blind tests.  

So where does this leave me?  Scrambling to find a way to convert my lossless files to AAC and overjoyed at the thought of being able to carry the music I want with me.    I have not found a one step process yet but have developed one that is not too complex. I decided to help my friend since he doesn't really have the time to be experimenting with developing a workable process by writing out the instructions step by step.  I guess a bit of OCD kicked in and I decided write out instructions that are much more detailed for someone who hasn't had the conversations he and I have.  

So for your reading pleasure (or should that be displeasure?)  here is the set of instructions.  No one else has proofread this or used the process at this point so there are likely to be mistakes I have overlooked.  There are instructions at the bottom on how to contact me and let me know of them.

Converting from .FLAC to .M4A

The purpose of this is to show the process I have used to convert my high bit rate music collection down to a manageable size for a portable player while still maintaining the best possible sound quality.  Anyone converting their music needs to make sure the files they are working from are at a higher quality than the ones they are converting to.  Converting a 128kbps .MP3 to a higher quality file will not improve the music.  The parts of the sounds eliminated in the compression to .mp3 cannot be recovered from the file and it will not better any better when converted.

A few background notes and my reasons for converting:

About two years ago a friend convinced me to get a lossless music player.  He had purchased a FiiO X3 (second generation) and was absolutely loving the higher quality sound.  After a month or two of calling him crazy (I still do, but for a different reason:  I am nuttier than The Mad Hatter and it takes someone just as nutty to be able to put up with me) I broke down and ordered one myself.  I have never regretted the decision.  I ripped all of my CD’s into .flac format and began listening to the clearest, best sounding recorded music I’ve ever heard.  There was only one problem:  .flac files are large.  Very large.  For reference, Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody in 128kbps .mp3 (supposed CD quality) is about 5 ½ megabytes.  The same file in .flac is 34 megabytes (more than six times the size!)  Even on a player with capacity of 200 GB it is not possible to get a large collection like mine on it so I had to choose which albums to take with me and which to only listen to on my computer.

Recently my friend was doing some reading and found some interesting research into digital music formats and what the limits a person with normal hearing can discern.  He found that, while it is a lossy format, at 192kbps .AAC file is indistinguishable to the human ear from a .FLAC file.  Yes, with very high end equipment I would imagine that the harmonic vibrations outside of our range of hearing might add something but I am not concerned about that.  When I have several thousand dollars to spend on a sound system rather than on a new car or a brain transplant for my ex I might change my mind.

In case you are not familiar with the particulars of the .M4A format:  .M4A is the Apple .AAC format in a different container.  You convert to it using the .AAC codec but using  the .M4A shell is necessary because the .AAC files are considered to be a RAW format and tagging them properly is next to impossible and many players (both portable and on a PC) that support .M4A files will not play .AAC files.

IMPORTANT:, Do not delete your FLAC files when the conversion is complete.  The  files are archival quality and if you ever need to convert them to a new format you will need them so you don’t lose quality.  Converting again, is much, much faster than ripping them from CD again.  Move them to an external drive or wherever they will be out of your way on your system drive but keep them around.

The intro is done.  Time to get cracking, or converting, or whatever!

Programs used for the process I’ve settled on:

Tag&Rename  

fre:ac

Windows Explorer

Apple iTunes

That’s it.  Nothing more.  I am using a Windows machine to do my converting.

I know Tag&Rename is only available for Windows so if you are on a Mac or Linux box you will need to find another tag editing program but as long as the results are what you desire it doesn’t matter.  Tag&Rename is not freeware but there are powerful freeware editors available. I use it because I already own a copy, know it well, and am used to it.   I have tried this with Mp3tag (which is free) and it works well.

fre:ac is a powerful, open source converter. Download the latest snapshot version rather than the core files.  As I understand it the developers make changes as they see fit and provide a “snapshot” of that but still leave the core source code available for download.

If you already have a converter you use and are comfortable with keep using it.  As long as it lets you set output folders and file name patterns these steps should work with it. 

Apple iTunes is not a part of the conversion process you will use but the AAC encoder in it is necessary.  According to the developer fre:ac will use that encoder.  I have not tested which to install first but I would suggest having the latest version of iTunes installed and setup BEFORE you install fre:ac just to make sure the fre:ac installer can detect the encoder.

The process I will line out assumes you have ample free disk space to keep multiple copies of your music around for as long as it takes to complete your conversion.  You may need to modify the process a bit if you don’t have enough hard drive space.   I would suggest that as much of the work as possible be done on internal hard drives.  If you will be using a USB drive be prepared for this process to take much longer since copying large amounts of data is a frequent part of my method.

I would also suggest that before you start this process you make a complete backup of your music library.  As careful as I have been I have made a couple of mistakes that would have forced me to re-rip or download a CD again if I didn’t have a backup from before I started.

FIRST STEP:  Properly tagging your music

Properly tagged music files are important…   No.  Properly tagged music files are VITAL for converting your music and having them placed in the proper folders by the converter.  A good case could be made for my collection being tagged at an OCD level but at least for this process you need to have tags for album, track number, and song title correct.  Depending on how you listen to your music I would suggest that you go ahead and get the rest of the fields correct but whatever you do, do it before converting.  If you don’t, you will wind up with two sets of music with different tags.

I won’t go into the tagging process more than this.  Use whatever method you prefer for your tagging.  The converter works from the Id3 tag so the file name before conversion does not matter.

SECOND STEP:  Setting up the folders for the conversion process

I have set up five separate folders on the drive I am using for the conversion process.  The actual name is not important but it is vital that you use names that you will not get confused with one another.  I would, however, suggest that you keep them all together in a main folder or at least start them with the same prefix so they are all together in your directory tree.  Having to hunt for a folder when moving files would make it easy to accidentally drop files in the wrong location or would at least slow you down.  

The folders I used are:

M4A – Backup           for the files to be converted

M4A – Conversion     for the files opened by the converter (I will explain the difference soon)        

M4A – Converted       for the files after conversion is completed

M4A – Combined       a necessary temporary folder used for sorting after first conversion step

M4A – Temp               the location where the converter places the files it creates.

Remember the backup folder I suggested to work from?  M4A – Backup is it.  Copy the entire collection to be converted into this.  Don’t worry about the space it takes having a long term effect on your storage.  It will be empty when you are finished.

The M4A – Conversion is used to place the files the converter will work from.  Since there is some manual sorting with this process I move a portion of the files from the M4A – Backup folder to this folder and only convert what is in here.

The M4A – Converted folder is the place for all of your finished files after they are converted at sorted.  The converter is not set to access this folder and until you put your new collection where you need it you will only be dropping your files into here.

The M4A – Combined folder is used for sorting.  fre:ac has a limitation on export locations and will scramble albums with multiple artists if you have it export by artist name.  The exporting process will be explained shortly and I don’t want to jump too much ahead and cause confusion.  This location and a step in the process could be unnecessary if you use a different converter that doesn’t have this limitation.

The M4A – Temp folder is where the converter needs to place the files it creates.  These files will be moved to the combined directory later.

Continued in next post due to Blogspot limitation on length.