Replacement for WMA lossless?

[Grasshopper]

Some years ago I ripped my CD collection to WMA lossless. The files now live on my server and I happily streamed them to PC's, including my Sage Client PC. I've now moved on to an HD100 instead of a client, and have discovered that the HD100 doesn't play WMA lossless files (though it does play regular WMA's).

So, I'm looking for a recommendation for a codec that preserves the quality of the recording but is supported by the HD100. Moreover, it'd be great if I could also still play those files in Windows Media Player, as I still have other PC's that access my collection. And if that isn't a tall enough order, it'd be great if there's some kind of batch processing, so I don't have to process them all by hand.

Any recommendations?

[stanger89]

FLAC. I believe there's a WMP plugin to decode FLAC as well. There are a couple of tools out there that should be able to convert between them.

[sic0048]

Originally Posted by Grasshopper

Some years ago I ripped my CD collection to WMA lossless. The files now live on my server and I happily streamed them to PC's, including my Sage Client PC. I've now moved on to an HD100 instead of a client, and have discovered that the HD100 doesn't play WMA lossless files (though it does play regular WMA's).

Any recommendations?

Wow, I didn't realize that the HD-100 won't play Windows lossless files. Although you may have to find a work around right now, can you please enter a bug report too. I think this can/should be addressed in the long term by Sage. Hopefully they can fix this with a future firmware as I think it is a big oversight on their part. I can't imagine it would be a huge deal to fix.

I have all my music saved to Windows Lossless, but haven't tried (and really don't need to) to use the HD-100 to play those files.

Although, when I think about it, it would be nice to use the HD-100 in placeshifting mode when I am visiting my parents to be able to access all my music....

[Protoman]

A good tool to use to convert them all to FLAC in a big batch process would be dbPoweramp. I used this to rip my music to FLAC, then I converted it all to AAC for my iPod. Sure glad I had Quad core processor too, since dbPoweramp supports multi-core CPUs.

[killervette]

same situation for me...had to convert all my wma to flac lossless.

[Grasshopper]

Filed a tech support request. George's reply was that it's on the list of things to look into adding, but no timeframe right now.

By the way, "FLAC lossless" is acronymically redundant, like "ATM machine".

[korben_dallas]

Fair warning, the directshow flac filter barely works and hasn't been maintained last I checked on it. I am a fan of FLAC, but it is not what I would call Windows-friendly.

I'm a bit surprised the extender does not support WMA-Lossless. While perhaps not as accurate or techie as an EAC+AccurateRip+Mareo setup, ripping CD's in WMP to WMA-Lossless with the built-in CD lookup is dead easy.. very user friendly.

[briands]

Originally Posted by korben_dallas

Fair warning, the directshow flac filter barely works and hasn't been maintained last I checked on it. I am a fan of FLAC, but it is not what I would call Windows-friendly.

I'm a bit surprised the extender does not support WMA-Lossless. While perhaps not as accurate or techie as an EAC+AccurateRip+Mareo setup, ripping CD's in WMP to WMA-Lossless with the built-in CD lookup is dead easy.. very user friendly.

Plus WMA lossless is very friendly for "Play's for Sure" not iPods...

My biggest problem with WMP ripping is that it almost always misses getting the tag info right for the first song on a disc. It's like it starts ripping before it finds the album info, but by then it has already started writing the file into the "unknown artist/ unknown album" folder.