I had my daughter spend most of two days ripping a customer's CD collection. I thought Sonos could handle any format thrown at it, since Sonos is normally pretty versatile. To keep from installing additional ripping software, I had her use media player and ripped them to WMA Lossless. Well, it looks like Sonos can't handle that. Sonos can handle WMA Lossy versions.

Anyone have a program that will convert a whole batch of files at one time?

lol, just a note: of all the formats you could have chosen, WMA is the one that has the least compatibility with anything.

Also note: as popular as FLAC is with a lot of highend devices and will also work on SONOS, it to is not universally compatible with everything. Meaning a lot of devices & services might not work with FLAC (including iOS devices - AppleTV, iTunes, etc.).

I would STRONGLY suggest you use the most popular lossless audio format: MPEG-4 Audio, also known as .m4a, also known as Apple lossless. Doing the research, you will find that format is universally compatible with most every device and service on the market. At least I haven't found a device yet that will not stream that.

Sound quality wise, I spent many hours years ago comparing WMA lossless, FLAC, .m4a, etc... and found I could hear no significant difference between the lossless formats and the original CD. And you should know I have picky ears. Only ever now & then would I 'think' I might have heard something different.

For conversion there are many programs available. Here are a few:
[Link: dbpoweramp.com]
[Link: skyshape.com]
http://www.any-audio-converter.com/

Sonos need to sort out the lossless situation.
I know that some of their hardware is archaic, but not being able to 'just work' hurts them. If every other wirleless multi-room system that's coming out on the market (Panasonic to Sony, Heos to B&O) can do it... why not Sonos?

Sonos's key line: 'Thanks for the feedback, we'll send this through to our development team for appraisal'.

Or...

We'll delete your e-mail, but hey, at least we'll send you an automated response message.

???
What are you talking about? Most devices/services do not work with Windows Media Audio Lossless. Including HEOS. But they do with flac & .m4a

Starting with a CD, creating a lossless rip, then recreating a CD master from the lossless rip, there would be no physical means to differentiate CD's pressed from either master -- unless there was some subtle error signature difference. If all of the errors are correctable by the player, the audio data presented to the DAC would be identical.

If the reviewer is told that one of the CD's is a copy, then the golden ear reviewer has a 50-50 chance of picking correctly. Typically, if the reviewer selects correctly, it is "see, I told you so". If the reviewer gets it wrong, then there is a claim that the test protocol is defective.

As far as starting with a CD copy, these have already been ripped to WMA. I'm not starting over. If it was my own collection, I might. But this is for a client that wouldn't have noticed the difference if I had ripped them into the highest compression MP3 format.

I found DBPowerAmp. I had a bit of trouble at first, but then figured out that most of the codecs aren't built in and have to be installed separately. After that little detail was fixed, it just has to run for the next 17 hours.

Did you choose FLAC or m4a? If you went ahead with FLAC, you might find yourself in this same boat again over a device in the future. That is why I strongly encouraged m4a.
Also, DBPowerAmp allows you to 'dual convert' at the same time. So you can create a library of lossless & .mp3 (@320kbps) at the same time. The dual library comes in handy for portable devices and such.

I had already started with FLAC before I saw your comment on this. I need to do my own CD collection, and will rip it to m4a, or maybe even wav. NAS drives are cheap enough to not worry about space any more.

Do not do .wav
That is a bit for bit format and although it may seem like a logical choice if you are not concerned about the file sizes, there are some issues.
1) .wav supports 16bit/44.1kHz as the highest audio sampling rate. FLAC & m4a can support high resoltuion audio, up to 24bit/96kHz.
2) .wav does not natively support metadata. You can add ID3 tags to .wav files (including coverart) but a lot of devices have problems reading them properly with .wav addons.

Why would you want to rip a CD to 24/96?

What would you suggest?

:)
You wouldn't, since the CD is only 16bit/44.1kHz - unless HDCD, which would then be 20bit.
But SACD, DVD-A, and many high resolution audio download services offer music in much higher formats. Those are usually sold in the FLAC or m4a formats.
FLAC & m4a gives you the flexiability of CD quality sound for your CDs, while providing the ability to handle much higher formats as well (like 24/96).

The OCD in me wants all my music to be in the same format - at least for the group. I have my m4a database (which includes some high-rez titles) and .mp3 database - which I use to have for the kids and their portable devices but they are all grown now and moved out. Plus they just stream everything these days.

As Brad suggests, don't use WAV as an archival format because there is no standard way of associating Metadata (TrackTitle, Artist, artwork, etc.) with a track. WAV is an ancient format. In its original form there was no concept of Metadata. We were happy just to be able to capture the music, storing it was a huge problem because a super large hard drive might have been 250MB. An hours worth of WAV music requires about 600MB. (On an early XT system, I had two 20MB drives. On an earlier system I had two 1MB 8" floppy drives and I laughed at the early PC's with their 80KB 5" drives) There are some WAV Metadata workarounds (hacks), but each will tie you to a particular player.

I like FLAC, but this is a bad choice for Apple players. ALAC is a good choice for Apple players, but not much else. As you have found, it is not very hard to convert from one format to another. I'm not much of an Apple guy so I don't care what happens on an Apple system. That said, if I'm mentoring a hard core Apple customer, I'll recommend that they use ALAC.

By the way, it is not a big deal any more to fetch artwork. I've never tried it, but one could probably fetch Metadata from the big online databases if you calculate the proper checksum from a WAV file. It turns out that the checksums of an album are nearly unique. This is why one can simply drop a CD into a ripping program and have the Metadata fetched -- it's magic because only track time could be fetched from the disc.

That is how I converted my WMA Lossless rips into Flac.

BTW, it was my group at Microsoft that developed WMA Lossless. :) We ported the decoder to Sonos back in 2005 or so. But their CEO refused to ship it claiming their device needed to have capacity to encode the analog input at the same time as decoding WMA Lossless. Their CPU was too weak to do this and no matter how much we explained that the chances of someone encoding on their analog input was low, they would not listen. So we wasted our money and resources in porting WMA to their hardware :(.

I left Microsoft back in 2008 and with it, all the effort toward having our formats supported in other devices stopped.

Check on that buzz. I found that 'everything' supports ALAC (.m4a) and really haven't found a device yet, that codec will not play on these days.
FLAC, like you mention and I previously, doesn't do well in the Apple ecosystem. And I have ran into a few devices that are not Apple, that sometimes don't support FLAC either. I'm not an Apple fanboy either (far from it) but the compatiblity issue is why I have settled on .m4a as a standard for lossless audio encoding.


[side note]: MPEG-4 is a container that handles many different formats (official file extention .mp4). So the file extention sets a standard for the type of media expected in the container. Video has a ton of different extentions.
Even MPEG-4 Audio has a couple of different extentions, depending on use:
.m4a (audio only), m4p (audio encrytped), .m4b (audio books), .m4r (ringtones).
And then the names given to the lossless audio formats of those: Apple Lossless, ALAC.

It is no wonder even avid users get confused at it all. I know I mix up the terms codec, format, etc. - each as a specific use but I jumble it all together like most.