Grateful Dead Music Forum

i learned how to use torrents but now i have all these flacs, through what program do i play them????

There is a converter called "FLAC Frontend" that you can download for free.

darkhorse

Please stop using all capital letters in the subject of your post.

Flac codecs/frontend can be dl'd here:

http://flac.sourceforge.net/

Either you can do that or you can use Winamp to play flac files...I don't often do that simply because of the size of the files.

Flac is a lossless formatting allowing for the best possible sound of the show.

Using FlacFrontEnd to convert to MP3 will convert it to a loss format.

Sadly, most portable music players either cannot support FLAC format or the HardDrive isn't large enough to store enough shows...

Ya, but there is the whole hard drive space thing. Flac and Shn hog it big time.

bodiddley wrote:Ya, but there is the whole hard drive space thing. Flac and Shn hog it big time.

Of course many have cost constraints but disk drives have really come down in price.

Here is a 500Gig HD for under $160:
http://www.neutronexpress.com/prod.cfm/ ... I_7200_RPM

That is like 600 shows!

I thought it was all about the quality with us heads. If (like me) you don't have the disc space to store many shows, surely you can burn your shows to CD to retain the original sound.

I'm lucky enough to have an OS that came with FLAC codecs in a player but also to burn straight to CD.

I just bought a 160gb external. Its great. Definitely worth it. And you can just unplug it and store it or w/e

I know this is an old topic but I am still pretty confused. How do you listen to FLAC files without hurting the sound quality? Can you put FLAC files directly onto a CD-R? Do they work on an Ipod?

Ok, so I am a technodope, I convert most of my shit to WAV. Is that lossy too? How does it compare next to the lossy-ness of MP3?

WAV files are the original file. This is the starting point before compressing to SHN or FLAC. (i.e. the lossless file that you would want to burn to a CD).

I use the winamp plugins to listen to both SHN and FLAC files. I purchased a 150GB Hard drive a year ago, and i have only filled about 50% of it up at this point. I have an output from my sound card directly to my stereo, so i can play FLAC/SHN files through winamp directly through my stereo.

Unfortunately, the iPod will not work with SHN or FLAC files. Personally, i use the ipod file format. Essentially, i would convert the FLAC/SHN file to a WAV file and then drop it in iTunes. It is still lossy, but the only alternative i know of is putting the WAV files on the ipod directly... And that will really limit the amount of music you can put on the iPod

mikenohio wrote:Unfortunately, the iPod will not work with SHN or FLAC files.

You can try out alternative firmware for playing alternative formates. I've been looking into Rockbox (http://www.rockbox.org/) and it looks to be the easiest to install. It even does MIDI! Ha.

Even with better firmware, you're looking at huge space constraints from using FLAC (fair to say half the size of a WAV?). Why not use FLAC for burning your CDs and convert to medium-quality Ogg for on the road/iPod?

Shorten files were not made to be played back in a compressed format from what I can tell.

That is cool!! I am afraid to mess with the firmware though... I would probably screw it up and wouldn't know how to fix it...

For the most part, i just have 'official' releases on my ipod, and the Apple format seems to be ok....

There is a winamp plugin for SHN files...

I usually convert my flac files but you can play them on the VLC Media Player it can be downloaded free