Flac Links

My readers have often wondered whether the tedious nature of downloading one track at a time from nyctaper could be eliminated with an easy-to-use piece of software. In the past, I had directed readers in the comments sections of individual recordings to the wiki page for available download managers (click here).

Well, thanks to the pointer from “les amis Francais” at the Michto blog, I can point my readers to the new Firefox Extension called DownThemAll!.

If you’re still using Internet Explorer (oh shame!), this tool is not for you. However, if you’re one of the growing number of Firefox users, this freeware tool will allow you to download whatever links you choose from nyctaper. In other words, you can download an entire concert in one click, and maximize the speed of the download.

Download away!

Flac is the most common form of lossless compression. This form of file compression does not remove from the audio files any data, as do mp3 and other lossy schemes.

Flac has developed into a cross-platform format. Free software downloads are available for all potential uses of flac audio files, including computer listening and CD burning:

To listen to Flac files on your computer, 4 different programs are suggested:
Foobar is an advanced audio player for Windows.
Winamp is another windows based audio player

For Mac users, VLC is a cross-platform multi-media player which supports flac files
Cog is a Mac program (OS-X) with lossless codecs already installed to play flac on a Mac.

Flac files can be burned to audio CD either by direct burning with a flac plug-in, or by
converting to wav and burning to disc.

Nero is a commercial product which supports directly burning to disc with flac plugin. Unfortunately, although Nero is popular product it is prone to frequent crashes, and disc errors.

Roxio is a commercial product that offers a comparable but more stable software than Nero.
Download Roxio Software at Roxio.com

Multiple alternatives to Nero are located here

Flac Frontend is the flagship program for the flac format in the Windows format. It will convert to wav, which can be burned by any pre-installed CD burner.

For Mac users, an excellent compression toolkit is xACT

This Sourceforge page contains many other flac program downloads and very useful information. A visit to the Sourceforge page is very much recommended.

Trader’s Little Helper is a fine all-in-one lossless toolkit for Windows users.