AIFF files? Any media players for Pandora support them?

[Blue Protoman]

First, context. My dad recently got me a gift; the OST for Tron: Legacy. So I loaded the CD into my school-given Mac, and copied/pasted all the files successfully onto a folder. At one point, I wanna transfer these to my Pandora. Do any media players on the Pandora (I use Deadbeef for music) allow .AIFF files, or do I have to convert them/rip them? As I understand, AIFFs are proprietary Apple formats, but with the Community Codec Pack taken into account...


Oh, and I'd really prefer not to mess with the clusterfuck people call iTunes.

 

[Prometheus]

Your biggest problem here is that AIFFs are equivalent to the WAV files used on Microsoft Windows. That is to say, they're enormous!


If you're able to install software on your school-supplied Macintosh, your best bet would be to use Audacity along with the LAME ("LAME Ain't an MP3 Encoder") plugin to convert them to MP3s.


Once you've got Audacity and LAME set up, drop Audacity on the dock so that it stays there, and then drop an AIFF file on it in order to open it there. After that, simply click on the File menu, and then click on "Export as MP3".


Note that there's an issue in the Mac OS X version of Audacity, whereby keystrokes meant for the file naming dialogue-box (but mercifully not the ID3 tagging one) are also sent to the main Audacity window itself, which causes edits to be applied to the audio. The way I use to avoid this is to simply give the MP3 a filename of c (do not press any other keys, just "C", followed by enter - the "C" key doesn't seem to do anything to the main Audacity window), tag it as normal (you'll want the CD case to hand for this, obviously), and correctly rename the file within Finder *after it has finished encoding*, before moving onto the next one.


Hopefully that should see you right.


The Tron Legacy soundtrack is excellent, by the by - great stuff.

 

[Asiyura]

If you really don't want to loose sound quality, another option is FLAC.


It should be available on pandora even without the codec pack since it's a free codec (flac stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec).


But if you're using iTunes on your mac, it can't play Flac.


I don't know why apple is dumb enough to not include an open source codec …

 

[DaMummy]

actually, apple has their own flac format not, its called alac, just exchange the free with apple, (as bad as this sounds, im actually being serious), and BP, prometheus told you exactly what we've been trying to tell you in irc, and if you cant figure out how to rip/encode a cd into mp3 file format on anything that has an OS and a cd drive, then you should just stick to listening to CDs, also, its really not that hard to find the mp3 of the cd on the internet...

 

[Blue Protoman]

The reason I'm not simply pirating it this time is because this was a gift; what would be the point if I pirated what my dad gave me when I already own it? And I do not ever plan on listening to this on my Mac or even my home PC; this is Pandora-only territory.


Might I be able to convert these on my home PC (which I will hopefully get access to in a day or two) with WinFF? Despite the name, it's available for Linux as well. http://winff.org/html_new/

 

[Caine]

VLC seems to plays AIFF files.

 

[Blue Protoman]

Do Deadbeef or Audacious?

 

[WizardStan]

Might I be able to convert these on my home PC (which I will hopefully get access to in a day or two) with WinFF?

Don't bother converting. Put the CD back in the drive and use one of the already recommended programs to rerip it as MP3 or FLAC.

 

[Prometheus]

Those instructions I gave should have taken only as long to deal with as it takes to encode each already-copied AIFF track and type its tagging information, and I come back here to see that you're still dawdling? Good gravy.


I could have given you even shorter ones, but you specifically said that you didn't want to mess with iTunes, and that you had already copied off the uncompressed tracks. For the record, though, those shorter instructions are;


1: Put CD in drive.


2: Open iTunes


2b (Optional): Set iTunes preferences to rip as MP3 instead of AAC, or just leave it as AAC - I'm pretty sure that the community codec pack covers this.


3: Click the "Import" button.


4: Wait until it's finished.


5: Locate the folder containing the rip in whatever directory you have set for your iTunes music folder.


You really should already have been able to finish dealing with converting the tracks by now, though.

 

[Blue Protoman]

Access to my laptop and video games is still restricted; I don't have time to do such things in school. Though I think I'm about to have a one-hour limit per day, except on weekends. I shouldn't even be posting this right now.


But, thanks Prometheus! I'll see about getting to that sometime soon, then.

 

[Prometheus]

Don't get yourself in trouble over ripping some music and all that. You'll understand the value of that one-hour limit when you're older, no doubt.

 

[Blue Protoman]

Don't get yourself in trouble over ripping some music and all that. You'll understand the value of that one-hour limit when you're older, no doubt.

Even now I understand it. Doesn't mean I like it, but hey.

 

[CFWhitman]

One of the things I really hate about Apple is that they insist on using their own proprietary formats even more than Microsoft does.


I stick to ogg vorbis and FLAC files for my music, unless there is something that I can only seem to obtain as an mp3 file. FLAC is of course very high quality because it is lossless. Lossless codecs, however, (even compressible ones like FLAC) also take up more room than lossy codecs like ogg and mp3. I find that ogg vorbis files have a better quality to size ratio than mp3 files, so I use them a lot. Some hardware players can't read ogg vorbis or FLAC, though, but all the really high quality ones seem to be able to.


There are tools for ripping/converting to ogg vorbis for Windows, OS X, and (of course) Linux, so if you want to use that format, it's certainly possible.