Playing lossless codecs like APE or FLAC in itunes or on your iphone is not so easy as there is no native support for them. Converting them to the Apple equivalent is also quite tricky. Many people recommend installing media players that support this conversion or purchasing a commercial product to do it. However, there is a free and easy way to convert your files in Windows that does not require any installation.

The key to it is the use of the windows port of ffmpeg. It can convert just about anything to anything. However, it is a command line tool and converts one file at a time which means a lot of typing if you want to convert an entire album. I spent a little time the other day figuring out a small batch file that can be used to convert and entire albumn in on go. I thought I’d share it with you. Just create a file called say, convert.bat and place one of the following in it:

For Monkey’s Audio APE files:

for /f "tokens=*" %%a IN ('dir /b *.ape') do call ffmpeg -i "%%~na%%~xa" -acodec alac "%%~na.m4a"

For FLAC files:

for /f "tokens=*" %%a IN ('dir /b *.flac') do call ffmpeg -i "%%~na%%~xa" -acodec alac "%%~na.m4a"

Then all you have to do is place your batch file, along with ffmpeg.exe into the directory that contains the files you want to convert and run the batch file. It will convert every file in the directory to apple lossless. Easy.