I’ve struggled for a while to find a decent lossless converter and ripper for the Mac – X Lossless Decoder (XLD) is finally an answer for those issues. This is a free app that has a very simple front end that will allow conversion from and to:
- (Ogg) FLAC (.flac/.ogg)
- Monkey’s Audio (.ape)
- Wavpack (.wv)
- TTA (.tta)
- Apple Lossless (.mp3) [10.4 and later]
- AIFF, WAV, etc
The conversion from Flac to Apple Lossless was extremely quick. In fact it was so quick I thought it had failed but I was wrong – the quality is excellent too. XLD also rip’s CD’s in to a lossless format of your choosing and again it does this pretty quickly. With support for MusicBrainz and also tags in Flac I’ve been impressed with just how flexible the app is. The front end is functional but to be honest that’s all you really need. XLD – a very handy tool to have installed.