k .. just a pedantic situation about specifics & terms. It was an education to me because I did not know there was a difference, only that FLAC had 'some' tag limitations. Thus I referred to them as ID3 tags when they should have been referred to differently. Thank you for educating me about the difference with FLAC & that some devices or/& software is highly sensitive to FLAC comments or ID3 tags.

About time such software updated to the 'real' flac of today huh!? Sounds like they are way behind in definitions of flac; probably working with older flac library definitions. As I hinted earlier, not such great programming on 'their' part. BTW I didn't see Foobar2000 mentioned at FLAC site.

Back on topic; Direct Connect was the next best p2p for me. Unfortunately it seems all such development for the Mac OSX platform ceased several years ago. Even on OSX 10.3 it didn't function that well, & didn't work in 10.4 on my older G4. But it was great because of course, there were both private & public hubs, similar to torrents in that respect. Also the DC programs did not carry their shares on their shoulders like some gnutella programs so could share literally 100,000+ files. I used to share from an external drive. The only p2p program that has truely succeeded with that on a (my) mac.
I ended up using DC++ & off-shoot variations on Virtual PC running windows to overcome the OSX issues.

Since this thread got so way off topic anyways and into the world of FLAC, tags and players, I might as well add this.

When we get into the really insane encodes, like 24bit 48kHz or even 96kHz FLAC Vinyl rips, most players will not be able to decode those. Including but not limited to the ever popular VLC, iTunes, MPC and older versions of Foobar2000.

You will need to have the never versions of Foobar2000 or other players with FLAC decoding options, which will notice the 24bit depth. I am guessing the same goes for 32bit, although I had nothing to test that with.

The FLAC tester will say they are corrupt, even with the newest FLAClib. But it will both decode to .wav and encode back to the same exact FLAC.

I almost deleted a few albums last night thinking they were corrupt. Thanks God I did some Googling before I did. Especially considering the size of the albums. Like the 24bit 96kHz copy of the limited edition double album of ...And Justice For All is over 1.3GB in size for just over 65 minutes of music. You don't have to edit that because I own the Original.

But it's all worth it. The CD sounds like crap compared to the Vinyl. There is just something about Vinyl that a CD just doesn't catch.

These encodes are not playable on CD. If someone was to burn them, they would first need to get the sample rate down to 44.100Hz by first decoding to .wav and the using something like r8brain http://www.voxengo.com/product/r8brain/ (freeware)

The main difference in sound quality between vinyl and CD has to do with compression. Analog has a much richer tone, but will distort at high volume. Digital doesn't distort, but the compression causes the sound to be a bit tinny. Same reason vacuum tube amps have a richer sound than solid state amps.

If the original recording was not re-mastered for digital. A problem with all the earliest CD's that were originally vinyl records was just as Blackhorse suggested, they all sounded tinny. The vinyl versions sounded heaps better. I recall I even had a cassette tape recording of a vinyl record that sounded heaps better than the CD of the same album. I ended up some years later purchasing the remastered version. I had wondered since whether that was done deliberately for marketing reasons.

Not sure about FLAC, but Toast on mac converts 24 bit or/& 96 KHz audio to audio cd or standard 16 bit 41.1 KHz without issue in my experience. However, I'd prefer to use a proper audio pro editing program for the purpose of such downsampling.

I don't like some of the remastered versions. Most of them are as good as the original pressing but there are exceptions. If we take e.g. Hysteria, a cousin of mine owns both the Vinyl and the original CD pressing, while I own only the remastered version. I only listen to my copy of the original CD pressing while the remastered version I haven't even bothered to rip.

I don't think the person(s) who remastered that one can even have heard the original vinyl before remastering it. Either that or they brought their own artistic views onto it, which IMO is a nono.

BTW pretty nice that Toast will recognize sample rate before burning. Many programs don't and most others need some kind of plugin.

I never used it, some of my friend was telling me about this but at that time i was not aware of these parts, thanks for sharing for information, i am going to try this one and will let you know about the results.

I've been banned, so I'll never get to post my spam link here.