Library audio conversion question

Lexicon Questions & Help
1

Hello Christiaan,
First, I’d like to thank you for your useful tip the other day, it was very straightforward to get all the tags in the comments to be turned into custom tags.
I’m now currently stuck at another point in my journey. I have a bunch of aiff files in my library, i was using this format back in the days on my mac because itunes/apple music don’t support flac and I did not want to use the proprietary apple alac format.
Now that I’ve ditched itunes and mac altogether, I’d like to shrink the size of my library storage-wise, and convert all aiff files to flac while keeping all the metadata, which could allow me to -hopefully- be able to export the whole library to my phone, so I can enjoy the mobile lexicon app.

I understand that, for a number of reasons, lexicon does not have the ability to fulfill my audio conversion needs, but I thought you might have some very useful insights.
In you opinion, what would be the best way -if there’s any- to convert the files, copy the metadata to the new files, and have the aiff ones replaced by their flac equivalents without too much pain in the process ? It seems that the “find duplicate” tool could be helpful, but I’m not quite sure how I can do it with hundreds of songs without going through each and everyone, the added difficulty being that there are also serato beatgrids and cue points involved in all of this, and I fear the beatgrids might be lost in the process…
Thank you in advance, I wish you a great evening

2

This guide might help: Guide: Changing file extension without losing cue points

I would go for AIFF though and not FLAC because FLAC is not as well supported, assuming lossless is important to you. Otherwise mp3 320kbps.

1 Like
3

Hi, thanks a lot for your reply. If you say so, I might then stick to aiff in order to save me from some trouble as having the whole library on phone would have been convenient but is not a top priority at all. So, generally, are you advising against using flac with lexicon at all for compatibility purposes ?
e.g. is it better to either transcode new flac files to be added in Lexicon to aiff or compress them to mp3 320kbps prior to importing them instead of sticking with the flac format ?
Have a great day, best regards

4

FLAC is compatible with Lexicon but some older DJ hardware might not support it and it has fewer ID3 tags though not really an issue I think.
Most compatible is always MP3, it works anywhere and has great ID3 tagging support. So my advice is always MP3 320kbps unless you require losless, then AIFF.

1 Like
5

Alright mate, thank you very much for your insights, I’ll keep as it is then.
Have a great day !