Convert FLAC and SHN Files with the X Audio Compression Toolkit (xACT)

So, you’ve gone to bt.etree.org or archive.org (or one of the many spots on the Internet where you can legally download live concerts from bands who allow “tape” trading), but unfortunately you found that the files aren’t the typical MP3 or WMA formats you’re used to. Most likely, the files are FLAC or SHN, but what are those?

More importantly, what do you do with those? All you want is to convert the files to MP3 so that you can put the show on your iPod or Zune. Is there a way?

Absolutely. In fact, there are a couple different ways.

If you want to do things the hard way, you’ll need a bunch of different programs – Shorten, FLAC, shntool, Monkey’s Audio, LAME, md5sum and cdda2wav. Some of those programs will convert the SHN or FLAC files to WAV files, and some will make sure the files were converted correctly, and still others will convert the new WAV files to MP3. Now, that’s an awful lot of programs, and most of them are run right from the terminal, which means there’s no fancy GUI, with buttons and sliders.

As I said, that’s the hard way. There is also an easy way (and it’s the one I’d recommend).

Fortunately for just about everyone involved, a developer named Scott Brown has gathered up all those programs and compiled them into something called xACT (the most recent version can be downloaded here), which stands for X Audio Compression Toolkit. It is basically a front end application written in AppleScript that allows users to use all those programs, and all without having to use the terminal once!

Depending on your needs, xACT can pretty much do it all. Those FLAC or SHN files you downloaded? It can convert them to AIFF or WAV, if you want to burn an audio CD, but it can also convert them to MP3 (either constant or variable bitrate) as well. If you’ve ripped an audio CD to WAV (which xACT can do as well), then xACT can take those files and convert them to something smaller, such as FLAC, Monkey’s Audio, WavPack or Shorten (for archiving, as those are lossless files), or – as mentioned – to MP3 for playing on your iPod, other portable device or computer.

To encode FLAC or SHN to something else, simply open xACT, and either drag a folder full of FLAC files into the window (or hit the ADD button and select the files through the standard Mac file picker). Then choose whether to encode to AIFF or WAV (if you intend to eventually burn an audio CD), whether or not you want xACT to delete the original files after converting, and click the DECODE button.

If you want to convert FLAC or SHN to MP3, you’ll first need to click on the tab labeled “lossy” and then do everything the same way (as far as adding files to the encoding queue. With this aspect, of course, you’ll need to decide what bitrate to use (128 kbps being considered “standard” and up to 320 which is typically hard to tell from the original audio), as well as constant or variable bitrate.

There are other aspects to xACT, such as the ability to rip CDs to WAV (as mentioned), to batch rename files, to add tags to FLAC files, and more. As far as I’m concerned, this open source project is a prime example of a must-have piece of software (assuming this is something you need!). It’s fast, easy to understand, full of features, and does what it says it does… and does it well.