Converting WMA Lossless to Apple AAC Lossless
:: Wednesday, September 13th, 2006 @ 11:32:32 am
:: Tags: Computers, Music
I’ve also been migrating of my music library from WMV Lossless to AAC Lossless.
I initially tried to drag a big folder full of nested album folders containing WMV Lossless media from a networked drive (SMB) over to iTunes on the Mac, but it did… absolutely nothing. So now, my $700 Dell is cranking away at 95% CPU on both cores, converting a list of more than 5,000 songs, many of which are long, classical tracks. It is maintaining a conversion rate of 11.8x, which Victor says is pretty fast.
At 3am this morning, iTunes had converted more than 3,000 songs in 26 hours when Windows forced a reboot due to software updates. ARGH! So I had to dig around to find the 2,000 songs hadn’t been converted yet and drag them over again. Needless to say, I have disabled Automatic Updates.
Keeping both lossless and compressed versions of music is not easy. I was telling Victor last night that I wished iTunes supported “stacking” of music not unlike what Aperture does with photos. My main music library should be able to track compressed versions alongside lossless versions, or at the very least, have an option to auto-compress when sharing music or transferring music to portable devices (like what iTunes does when you attach a Shuffle). What I want to do is to have access to my lossless media at home and my compressed music on the road.
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how often do you hear a difference between lossless and AAC? what do you play through at home to hear it, and what music do you hear it in most?
I second your comment about having a player that can deal with lossless and compressed. I am just about to do what you have done. So I guess you are runing iTunes on the PC and on your Mac if you are doing the conversion on your Dell… I also have ~6000 songs in WMA lossless now, but this is just a quarter of my collection and my Dell is choking badly, so I’m buying a Mac Pro with 1.5 tera to convert ALL my music. Right now I’m using a squeezebox into my conrad johnson tube gear - sounds quite good but not as good as vinyl or my wadia cd player, but I love the convenience of having it ripped. Have you checked if/when iTunes will support your request?
jc - As far as I know, iTunes on the Mac doesn’t support conversion from WMA to AAC, which is why I did WMA->AAC Lossless on the Dell. I’m now backing up the WMA to DVD, and am in the process of converting AAC Lossless -> AAC 192 and 160 (depending on genre). I did a trial convert to AAC 256 VBR, and it sounds quite good. But in doing that I broke the 80 GB barrier and can’t sync all my music, so I’m going to try 192. I hear it’s pretty good.
I currently have 8,118 tracks in AAC Lossless. At 6-8 seconds per conversion to AAC 256, it took just under 16 hours to convert the batch on my Mac Pro 3Ghz. The thing is FAST! :)