It's All About the Benjamins

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One of my biggest issues when I switched to macintoshes back in 2006 was my enormous (at least in terms of file size) collection of music. After the high school days of listening to midis and 96kbps napster mp3s in winamp, I had fully committed to make lossless digital backups of all the CDs that had come into my possession. Of course, the best way to that at the time, and even nowadays, is by encoding audio CDs to FLAC. If you’re not in the know, FLAC is sort of like a zip file for raw CD audio² and it’s superior to everything else in every way except it doesn’t play in iTunes.

Or at least it didn’t when I got my mac mini. So, I transcoded some of the music that I liked the best at the time, and threw it into iTunes. The then-egregiously-humongous external HD with all my FLACs on it stayed at home, sitting dormant until the day I could find a way to resurrect them.

Every so often I’d make a trek into the wilds of les Internets to find a cure for these problems. Sure, both of the iPods I’ve owned over the years have been kinda sub-optimal, so maybe I should have dumped iTunes for another media player. In fact, I really hated all this “media library” crap when they added it to winamp, so why was I was I even using iTunes in the first place? Well, because anything else to play music on mac sucked. The only real alternative back that even worked was VLC, and half the time it would pull this really buggy nonsense where it would only play every other second of the audio stream, so that was out of the running. Nowadays there’s Songbird which looks like a worthy replacement except that a.) it’s just as much a “media library” as iTunes and b.) THERE IS NO DANA OSX-NATIVE FONT RENDERING, ONLY ZUUL XUL. And seriously, eff that. At this point, there are four reasons why I use a macintosh:

• Pages is so, so much better than Word
• The user interface is so much more consistent and less nasty than windows, especially when it comes to typefaces
• It’s a UNIX system, I know this
• Oh crap, all my graduate work is formatted in .pages so I can’t really get out of it anyway.

So why would I give up point number two just to listen to flacs, especially since my decent speaker system was, by then, totally trashed? This font thing also the reason why I used safari over firefox even back in the days when the former was crashtastic. I mean really mozilla, would it kill you to at least have the option to use the OS’s font rendering malarkey? Anyhow.

After FLAC got absorbed by Xiph (aka the ogg vorbis/vogg orbis/wuagh gorbis people), there were some rumblings about a FLAC quicktime component, but it was buggy and never really worked with iTunes etc., so my external HD of FLACs got left in the US while I went to Italy to listen to music on the tinniest laptop speakers ever created by humans.

At some point, I found out about some work a person did that actually makes flacs work in iTunes in a quasi-native way. But, when I got a chance to plug in my external HDD, which in the ensuing years had become decidedly less enormous, it didn’t boot. Nothing. Turns out somebody had placed my brother’s old POS laptop, running, on top of the HD enclosure for months. It was a nice big 3.5″ aluminum heatsink. Now that I had all the ability to listen to all my precious lossless music for the first time in ages, it was all gone. Gone! Except some concert bootlegs I had stashed elsewhere. But those are boring.

Well fast forward to today when I got the first CD I’ve bought it ages, and decided to give Dimitry Kichenko’s Fluke a try. After dealing with my beleaguered laptop’s optical drive (which only works with the laptop upside-down), I ripped and FLACked² all the tracks to MGMT’s new album Congratulations. Didn’t bother tagging them or anything, in part because xACT is really crappy compared to what I used to use to rip on windows (Easy CD-DA extractor, which is great by the way), and also I wanted witness the power of this fully-operational battle plugin.

After a quick DL and install of Fluke Beta 2.5 I was able to import and tag those bad boys. All I had to do was launch iTunes, and then drag the FLACs to the Fluke application icon in /Applications (not the iTunes icon in the dock or whatever). Boom.

Now the question was Album Art. When iTunes started auto-play of the first track (serendipitously entitled “It’s Working”), I noticed that the art viewport was blank with an “Album Art Not Modifiable” message. Hrmph. Well, then again, I realized that I didn’t even know if FLAC files could embed album art – certainly back in the height of my FLAC usage I wasn’t doing any album art embedding; cover art was just .jpgs in the album folder as far as I was concerned. The seventh google hit for “flac artwork” was a comment bitchfest over on macupdate, about Fluke no less, and how people weren’t able to get their embedded artwork to work. But hey, guess what, one of the posters said that using iTunes’ “Find Artwork” did the job. I guess its a good thing that I didn’t bother trying to tag the flacs in xACT because I would have been fighting a losing battle with the artwork otherwise. So here’s a screenshot for proof, you macupdate crybabies.


So, uh, special thanks to the author, who you should follow at http://twitter.com/imissmyjuno even if you don’t use macs or flacs.


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1. But the very best thing of all is that there’s a counter on this ball.
2. This isn’t entirely true. FLACs are a bunch of (functionally-identical) calculus approximations the original waveform; the older SHN format was in fact basically a zip file for audio data.
3. I have now unilaterally decreed that the past participle of FLAC is FLACked, like trafficked or hilarious Samuel Johnson-era stuff. I don’t care what I’ve used in the past or maybe even earlier in this blog post.