Apple Lossless Decoding Codec

[Spoon]

Fully released Apple Lossless decoder:

http://www.dbpoweramp.com/codec-central-mp4.htm

[neilh]

Sweet. I just converted an album to mp3 using LAME (alt standard). The audio seems to be fine.

The song title tag is having problems though.
When I open one of the MP3 files in iTunes, the tags are all in tact except for the song title tag. It uses the filename and puts another track number before it: filename "01 Tine Spark" gets "01 01 Tiny Spark" for song title. In Windows Media Player, it just uses the filename for the song title. In JetAudio it shows up as no title. Again, the other tags are all intact. When I look at the source, I see the title in there, but I don't know enough to diagnose it.

thanks Spoon. Neil

[SeeMoreDigital]

Not bad at all Spoon!


Cheers

[Unregistered]

Thank you so much for the Codec! I found the same issue with the song titles but it is nice to be able to drag songs from Itunes into the dBpower power amp CD Writer. I was not able to overburn a CD in itunes and this decoder came in very handy!

[Spoon]

If you convert a apple lossless to mp3 all the id tag is there apart from Song Title? (ie artist, album, genre?)

[Guest]

If you convert a apple lossless to mp3 all the id tag is there apart from Song Title? (ie artist, album, genre?)

I have just tried this and for me the result is the same. Converting to MP3 and playing in Winamp - The artist, album, year, track num and genre work. But the Title tag is blank.

Also. It's not adding any tag to OGG.

[neilh]

If you convert a apple lossless to mp3 all the id tag is there apart from Song Title? (ie artist, album, genre?)

This is true. Artist, Album, Genre, Year, Track all seem to go though fine. Song title causes problems.

Also, a minor thing: when converting one song, the statrus bar doesn't work for me. It just goes from 0 to 100% when it's done. This isn't the case with other formats. Is this b/c you use quicktime?

cheers. Neil

[Spoon]

I will have to look into it.

[Unregistered]

Just got started with dbpowerAMP and am very happy to have found it although all things considered, I should have just not upgraded to iTunes 4.6. :)

I'm using hymn to convert my m4p files to m4a. Hymn keeps all the tags including album art. As the beta Apple Losless codec progresses, do you think album art will be included in the conversion? Thank you very much for your work on this tool.

Daniel

[Spoon]

I don't think it would, there are very patchy standards for album artwork across formats.

[Spoon]

Updated today (same download link above), fixed Title tag, and percentage works in Music Converter.

[Unregistered]

I decoded a Dave Matthews Album into FLAC format and all everything has been preserved.

[Unregistered]

I've also been able to successfully convert apple lossless files to other lossless and lossy formats. The title problem and progress bar issue are no more.

2 questions:

- When apple releases the source(or technical papers) on the format, will you rwrite this so it doesn't require quicktime.

- It is a shame about the cover art. I often see software (mp3 and htpc software) that is able to dispay cover art, so it seems like there is some sort of a general standard. Ypu wouldn't have to manipulkate the actual image data, would you - couldn't you just pass it through.

[Spoon]

I don't think apple will release anything on it (see the recent news about Apple attacking Real because Real use their m4p container...), Apple are pretty much a scum company (they have had the ipod out for years, but have released nothing to the 3rd party developers about the database format).

[Unregistered]

Converting other lossless formats TO Apple Lossless (for example, I want to convert the Monkey's Audio files on my PC to Apple Lossless format to play on my iPod), are tags working or no? If not, is it because of a bug you are planning on fixing or is it becuase Apple is being difficult? :)

[Spoon]

Your best bet is to convert to WMA Lossless - then import into iTunes and it will convert to Apple Lossless (all with tags).

[Unregistered]

Thanks for the advice Spoon. Are you planning on coming out with a codec that can encode as well or is that going to be impossible because of Apple's secrecy?

[Zathras]

I bow before the great Spoon... Nice one buddy.

Zath.

[Spoon]

Just not motivated enough to create such (it would require too much time, which other things need).

[Daeken]

It'd be fantastic if you'd release the source, release details, or point to documentation on it :)

Nice work :)

[Spoon]

Codec Now Released (no changes from Beta), visit Codec Central to download.

[matjans]

there seems to be a small problem with the apple lossless decoder. On my system, when I wanted to convert a whole lot of .m4a files to monkeys audio for use with foobar, I ran into a strange problem. When converting some files, i got an error moessage stating that file 'filename' could not be opened.

When i copied these files to a new location and renamed them to something like 'test.m4a' dbpoweramp had no problem converting them.

I have found that if the filename is longer than 59 characters (before the dot, extension not included) dbpoweramp refuses to open the file.

This is only a problem with the apple lossless decoder, when converting an mp3 with a ~100 character filename to the monkeys audio format no problems occurred.

Hope this helps and I hope you'll fix this soon, i have a lot of m4a files waiting to be converted to ape files but i'm not really planning on renaming all of the too-long files. ;)

[Spoon]

Perhaps apples quicktime libraries is not able to open those files with that length, I am 100% my code is ok to 260 chars.

[matjans]

ok so i'll have to live with it :( . Might be handy if you'd mention this in a readme or something. It would probably save you a lot of questions.

btw, are you able to reproduce it? if not, which version of quicktime are you using? ;)

Thanks,
Matti

[Spoon]

Just switched PC and don't have QuickTime installed ATM.

[Spoon]

Read the documentation, quicktime is only 63 characters or less.