Since getting my FIIO X3 I'm obsessing over higher quality sound! Finding older 24bit recordings I made back in 2002 or so not to mention some stuff from the dankseed days. But then I thought about converting some On The Road SCI to flac and the firstCD I opened and looked at is AIFF-C. I thought these CDs were wav files but I guess I'm wrong. Is it worth it to convert these AIFF-C files to wav then to flac? Since these are live recordings is there a correct way to convert so they play gapless?
ffmpeg might be able to achieve this without having to use wav as a detour. It supports a multitude of codecs by default (including aiff and flac).
Only recently, a friend of mine asked me to convert the flac files I sent him to m4a/alac (he uses iTunes).
Via the bash or ksh on Linux, it only takes a short one-liner to convert a batch of files.
(Might work on OS X, too. Use an equivalent batch script or the Powershell, if you're a Windows user.)
flac to m4a:for i in *.flac; do TITLE="$(echo "$i" | sed "s/\.flac$//").m4a"; ffmpeg -i "$i" -acodec alac -map_metadata 0 "$TITLE"; done
So, in your specific case, the equivalent command would be:
for i in *.aiff; do TITLE="$(echo "$i" | sed "s/\.aiff$//").flac"; ffmpeg -i "$i" -acodec flac -compression_level 8 "$TITLE"; done