AIFF-C not supported

Support
1

Core Machine (Operating system/System info/Roon build number)

MacOS Cataline v.10.15.7/Mac Pro (2019)/Roon v1.7 (build 710)

Description Of Issue

Hello, being a mac user for many years I have ended up with many dozens of albums in AIFF-C which Roon does not support. I was using Max (https://sbooth.org/Max) in the past for many of the conversions and as a better ripper than iTunes. It must be noted that as a matter of principle I would never select any “compressed” type of format, including FLAC, in the first place. So I’m not even sure how I ended up with so many AIFF-C albums. Anyway these files were and still are perfectly playable in iTunes, Amarra and Audirvana.

Although I have tried with various converters to convert AIFF-C files to “regular” AIFF they all turn up as AIFF-C again in spite of specifically selecting AIFF as the output format. Even with more complex converters such as XLD (which I don’t feel comfortable using because of their endless options that I don’t even know what they mean).

Is Roon planning on supporting AIFF-C anytime soon? Can you offer any advice on how to make them playable in Roon which I otherwise absolutely love?

Thanks in advance for your reply!

2

have you thought about converting them to WAV?

3

Just an FYI, at least with dbpweramp, you can choose different levels of compression to use for FLAC, including NO compression (level 0). :+1:

5

There is is still compression at FLAC encoding lossless “Level 0”. You need to select “Lossless uncompressed”.

6

Thank you for the correction. :slightly_smiling_face::+1:

Personally, I use compression level 5 and there’s no SQ loss that I can detect.

2 Likes
8

This may be a dumb question, but did you preserve the filenames when converting and have you tried the new files with Roon? Check the file sizes; are they they same? What happens if you change the extension from .aifc to .aiff?

The DBPowerAmp batch converter certainly has the option to convert AIFF-C to any other supported format.

Edit: Just checked DBPowerAmp and it does not support AIFF-C conversion.

9

I’ve done a little reading on this an you may not need to do the conversion because AIFF-C on Mac OS X are in fact uncompressed. Music CDs ripped to AIFF in iTunes or copied to the Mac desktop are stored in the AIFF-C/sowt format, which is not compressed. The “sowt,” which stands for “twos” in reverse, refers to the little endian byte order of the Intel architecture, i.e. the architecture of modern Macs.

You could try renaming a sample file or if you’re still stuck download Switch as thhis does support AIFF-C as an input file.

11

Hi Martin,
Thanks for your reply.
I tried renaming the files from actual .aif to .aiff but that didn’t help.
However, when converting with Switch, as you suggested, the tracks became visible and playable in Roon!
Interestingly, Finder still sees them as “AIFF-C audio”.
However, if Roon is planning on supporting AIFF-C in the future it would save me the tedious work of converting hundreds of files.
Kind regards and thanks again!

12

I think it is highly unlikely that this format will be supported since it is rarely used. However, I’m pleased to hear that Switch worked for you!

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