FLAC to Audio CD - technical question

[Mikeh]

Bearing in mind that I am a complete thickie when it comes to techincal things....I have downlaoded some EC shows in FLAC format. Can anyone tell me how to convert to audio files which I can burn onto a CD to play on an ordinary CD player? Thanks in advance!

[migdd]

There's a great program called Switch that works for me. . .

http://www.nch.com.au/switch/

[Otis Westinghouse]

Switch is excellent. Convert to WAV files for regular CD quality. or MP3 for decent 192 kps iPod use.

[Mikeh]

Many thanks for your help - Switch works a treat!

[DrSpooky]

How does Switch compare to Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net)? I notice it added support for FLAC a while back.

FWIW I have used Audacity to trim songs down to snippets to use as ring tones.

[Otis Westinghouse]

Useful for editing of sound files, e.g. to make ringtones, or converting one long file into smaller ones, whereas Switch is just for file conversion. I used xACT for quite a while, quite handy, but doesn't convert to MP3, so I spent ages converting FLAC to WAV or AIFF, then importing into iTunes and converting. Switch is far easier in that you can just convert into MP3 in the same folder where you have the FLAC files, then delete those, then put into iTunes. The file conversion is a little slow, but the whole process is way quicker. If I want WAV files, I'll stick with xACT for speed. The only drawback I've found with Switch is it can't handle shn files, so I still use xACT for that.

I imported FLAC files into audacity and it seemed to convert to MP3 straight off, very quickly. I then tried to export as MP3 and it said it didn't use this directly, but used LAME (great name), an MP3 exporting library. It prompted me to locate LAME, which I don't have. Maybe it's easy to download and use, but at this point I gave up and switched back to Switch.

[DrSpooky]

Thanks for the comparison. I knew Audacity was mainly an editor. It seems to be bundled a lot with the USB turntables.

I haven't updated it in a long time but have you looked at CDEX? I used to use it as my primary way of ripping CDs to MP3s. It now supports FLAC. I don't remember doing anything special with it.

[Otis Westinghouse]

Another one to check out!

Audacity say you can use it for converting cassette to digital. Now that would be good news for me. Someone at work was telling me I should do this, but I remain somewhat in the dark as to how to connect a cassette player to the computer! I guess it's a matter of the right cable in the right hole...

[DrSpooky]

This appears to be a decent explanation of what hookups are required.

http://jos.nijmegen.internl.net/HowToConnect.htm

Remember that many turntables required a preamp. I actually had to borrow one a few years ago when I tried to rip a few old LPs. Turned out my fancy front loading Sony turntable. It was really sweet -- direct drive, linear tracking, the tray came out when you pushed a button. Very cool and very archaic at the same time. I wonder if I could still need a needle/cartridge for it. The turntable at the bottom of this stack is the closest looking model I could find on the net but it isn't exactly right. My model year was more silver than black and had a flat face.

[Otis Westinghouse]

Never seen that before! Style!

Thanks for hookups link. I may take this seriously at some point soon...

[DrSpooky]

Never seen that before! Style!

It was an amazingly cool thing to watch. The amp it was hooked to was the last model year before Sony announced a CD player. I am thinking that was about 1982.

Thanks for hookups link. I may take this seriously at some point soon...

I would think a cassette would be easier to deal with than an LP. My experience with LPs->MP3s was tedious. Sounds like a good job for a college intern. Grad student anyone... LOL