alac VS qaac

Lastly, ALAC hasn't been updated by apple since 2016. FLAC is actively maintained by xiph.org and saw its last update this past October.

Sound quality is the same, but ALAC has poor error correction, no error detection, and hasn't been updated in years. FLAC's last update was three months ago. ALAC's last update was 11 years ago.

ALAC, on the other hand, well... I don't know. I struggled to find an official changelog so who knows? Maybe it was updated recently to include Apple's version of spatial-audio-whatever, but I don't know if that's in the encoder or some other piece of software. Either way, spatial-audio-whatever isn't applicable to iPods and I wouldn't regard it as being part of an encoder's core functionality. ALAC's repository at github shows the last meaningful change was ten years ago. Useful documentation has never been a thing Apple has done, so... meh.

alac is open source and i don’t think they have any proprietary extensions. https://github.com/macosforge/alac

I've been looking around and am still figuring out the perfect solution but alac to flac is possible through a pipe. https://github.com/nu774/qaac/wiki/refalac-usage to convert to wav with specified folder is like this:

Second, you will want to install the foobar encoder pack and set up qaac (here's the qaac wiki). In short, apple's AAC/ALAC encoder in iTunes is the best around (better than Nero, Fraunhoefer, ffmpeg, etc) and ensures full compatibility with iPods. But fuck iTunes, you know, for being difficult. So qaac takes the encoder binaries from your installation of iTunes and sets it up as a standalone program which you can use however and wherever you want. So you set up qaac and then tell foobar to use qaac to do all your AAC/ALAC encodings and you get the benefits of apple's encoder without the nonsense of iTunes being uncooperative.

I use qaac as a CLI wrapper for the iTunes encoder. I don't use foobar, but I'm sure there's the option to set up using an external encoder. Every music manager I've ever used (except iTunes of course) has some way of setting up an external encoder via a command line.

I'm running an ABX test right now between that and a transcode made using qAAC, which is a windows port of Apple's AAC codec. Here is the spectogram of that, as proof.

AAC is still my go-to lossy codec for mobile purposes, although 256kbps is enough for me. it's also worth poiinting out that not all encoders are created equal - Apple's own encoder far superior to FAAC, for example, so Windows or Linux users outside the Apple ecosystem should use qaac instead, as it is a port.

On Github click "Releases" on right, or go here - https://github.com/nu774/qaac/releases

Qaac is the best AAC/ALAC solution as it uses apple's own libraries that are included with iTunes. iPods sometimes don't like files that were made with other encoders, so using apple's own libraries ensures the files will play. Setting it up might look intimidating if you aren't familiar with command line input though. Once set up, you can configure Media Monkey, EAC, etc to use qaac as an external encoder.

By the way, I found a thread from 9 months ago with the same problem, and someone suggested using qaac, which requires Apple software to be installed.

QAAC: https://github.com/nu774/qaac/releases/tag/v2.76

In any case, you'll need to provide the ALAC encoder since it isn't included with either MM or MB, and I'm pretty sure it's the same with the others on that list. Setting up qaac as an external encoder isn't hard, though you do need to follow instructions.