Converting Music Files
I have been searching for a musical holy grail for a number of years (well what I would call a holy grail). Converting music files from one format to another is something I have been doing for years but I have always had trouble reformatting .iso files into high quality FLAC files.
I recently downloaded a Thelonious Monk album in .iso format and tried to load it into Foobar 2000, my music player of choice. It wouldn’t play so I did a search for .iso to Flac converters. The first thing I found was a way to play .iso files in Foobar 2000. There are a couple of Foobar components that can be downloaded from Sourceforge that will allow me to play .iso files.
I installed the two components, foo_input_sacd.fb2k and foo_dsd_processor.fb2k and was able to play my .iso file in Foobar. I am also able to convert the individual .iso tracks into Flack format and got really excited until I realised they were only 44 Mhz tracks, not the 88 Mhz SACD format files.
I could stop right there and be happy that I can play .iso files but there is a hard disk hit with the size of the .iso file at 1.8 Gb which brings me back to why I want to compress the tracks to high quality compressed Flac files.
Some more reading had me downloading another open source utility named Sonore, a Java based GUI that converts the .iso file into individual Phillips format DDISDFF tracks. It is nice to create individual tracks that can also be played in Foobar but once again I am hit with 1.8 Gb of files.
This is the Sonore interface with the settings I use to create .dff files:
I have found one method of converting from .dff to high quality Flac that works really well but unfortunately it is not freeware and is priced at $116 US and that is too much in my book.
I am back a square one with no method of converting to Flac but at least I can play .iso files in Foobar for the time being.
Added notes
I ended up buying DBPowerAmp which was the software I mentioned above. I am now able to convert .dff files into high quality Flac files using the Music Converter.
Usage notes
Convert the Audio DVD .iso to .dff files using Sonore as described above.
In DBPowerAmp click on Music Converter and select the .dff files you want to convert and the following screen appears.
Click Convert>> and it takes seconds to convert the files into uncompressed Flac files.