Seldom without a computer of some sort since graduating from the University of British Columbia in 1978, I have been a full-time Linux user since 2005, a full-time Solaris and SunOS user from 1986 through 2005, and UNIX System V user before that.
On the technical side of things, I have spent a great deal of my career as a consultant, doing data analysis and visualization; especially spatial data analysis. I have a substantial amount of related programming experience, using C, awk, Java, Python, PostgreSQL, PostGIS and lately Groovy. I'm looking at Julia with great interest. I have also built a few desktop and web-based applications, primarily in Java and lately in Grails with lots of JavaScript on the front end and PostgreSQL as my database of choice.
Aside from that, I spend a considerable amount of time writing proposals, technical reports and - of course - stuff on https://www.opensource.com.
Authored Comments
Mike, thank you for your kind comments. I took a look at XLD; I gather it's for Mac computers only, so that makes it pretty much out of the question for me (at this point in my life, I'm a Linux-only person). I see that the source is offered but I could not locate a license file so I'm not sure of the terms of use.
In lieu of looking through the source code and offering a semi-informed opinion based on that (which probably would not be too reliable), I would suggest you try converting to and from your formats of interest and then checking out the converted format. In Linux, you can check the format with the "file" command as follows:
me@mydesktop:~/Music/The Fabulous Thunderbirds/Strong Like That (FLAC 96.0 kHz 24-bit)$ file *Smooth*
01-05 Smooth (FLAC 96.0 kHz 24-bit).flac: FLAC audio bitstream data, 24 bit, stereo, 96 kHz, 23919360 samples
me@mydesktop:~/Music/The Fabulous Thunderbirds/Strong Like That (FLAC 96.0 kHz 24-bit)$
I would guess there's a "file" command available in the terminal in OSX.
Having said that, I have run into a situation where "file" claims that a file is 96/24 but in fact the file is actually 96/16 (which was some kind of odd production error, according to the vendor who sold the files). So another way to check is to use a music player that gives an instantaneous idea of the bit rate - Guayadeque for instance. The Fabulous Thunderbirds' example above shows a bit rate in the neighborhood of 3200kbps; the 96/16 album I mentioned shows a bit rate in the vicinity of 1200kbps.
When I have files to convert (in my case, it's always WAV to FLAC; some vendors like to ship WAV for whatever reason, especially for high res files), generally I use a GNOME utility called "soundconverter"
https://soundconverter.org/
That probably won't help you in OSX. Two command-line options are "flac" and "ffmpeg". Occasionally I use flac; I discovered that ffmpeg likes to downsample by default, though its command line arguments can be used to avoid that. In my experience, neither "soundconverter" nor "flac" downsample by default.
Another possibility is "sox" http://sox.sourceforge.net/ which I have tried and quite like. Note however that "sox" offers a LOT of options and wading through them can be somewhat daunting. There is a version of sox for OSX.
I hope this helps!
Thanks for the very fine article, Matt.
Reading your thoughts and the comments above makes me think about the general topic of "switching from a familiar environment to an unfamiliar one". Very common to read articles written by people who love their familiar environment, be it Windows, OS/X, KDE, GNOME, etc, try out something new, and report back that "it was OK but I really had to come back to Old Faithful to get stuff done".
This happened to me, in the opposite sense to most people's story, when I briefly tried out Windows XP as my daily driver back in about 2005 or so. Because I was giving up my Old Faithful (a Sun Workstation), I found myself looking for ways to get a familiar working environment, installing Cygwin and so forth. Eventually I gave up on that, finding that I was spending a lot of time just finding alternatives and getting them going, and installed Ubuntu, which was GNOME2 based at that point, and had more than everything I needed right out of the box. I've stayed more-or-less there ever since, with a few side trips to other distros.
I remember reading that Joe Zawinul used to rewire his synthesizer keyboard to go from high to low, left to right. Supposedly it gave him a fresh burst of creativity. Kinda like distro-hopping or installing a different desktop environment.