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I wonder if there's some way to automatically export my Songbird FLAC music library to my iTunes MP3 library.

Did someone know something about?

3 Answers 3

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FLAC files are lossless and need to be converted to a lossy format like MP3 to use in iTunes, unless you convert them to Apple's proprietary lossless format: MP4 AAC (search wikipedia: "FairPlay" for details of this format).

I will not make any suggestions for converting to Apple's format, because I am biased against it. Instead, convert down to MP3 to whatever quality rating you'd like using software listed here: http://flac.sourceforge.net/links.html#software

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  • I'm just looking for some songbird plugin
    – vitto
    Feb 2, 2011 at 11:08
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what OS? you could probably seperate out the flac files and use foobar2000, or a clever little script with ffmpeg to do the conversion en-mass, and output the files to the "add automatically to itunes" folder. Of course, this would not involve songbird at all.

max might work for macs but i've not tested it myself

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  • I'm using iMac with Leopard, unfortunately Foobar2000 don't run on MacOSX
    – vitto
    Feb 11, 2011 at 10:16
  • added a mac option - max apparently works pretty well, and has a gui.
    – Journeyman Geek
    Feb 11, 2011 at 13:51
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You didn't mention the reason for using both software libraries, but converting your entire songbird library to Apple Lossless M4A could be an option. Since SongBird and iTunes can both read them, you could use both software on the same library.

For example if you're looking to use iTunes Home Sharing, you could place a link to your songbird library in iTune's "Automatically Add" folder. (You would then want to disable the copy files and auto-organize options, and manually remove broken links from time to time - I think Doug's Applescripts can do that).

If you're mainly looking for using iTunes to sync iPods, etc., iTunes can downconvert those lossless M4A to AAC on the fly during sync.

Of course M4A is a less elegant format that FLAC, but most modern applications (other than iTunes!) now support both formats. And the beauty of lossless is that you can always convert them back to FLAC if you need.

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