xACT For Mac

Ever so often you come across exotic audio formats that are unsupported by iTunes or other third-party applications and the only way to add them to your music library is to convert them. xACT is a full-featured audio compression tool that gets the job done.

Moreover, xACT (short for X Audio Compression Toolkit) is a GUI based front end for the following UNIX applications: Shorten, shntool, FLAC, Monkey's Audio Compressor, TTA, Opus, cdda2wav and wavpack. The app uses LAME, SoX, TagLib, AtomicParsley and mp4v2.

xACT is designed to execute the basic command of all mentioned applications and adds the necessary features to supports everything from FLAC to AIFF and WAV.

The xACT application is distributed in a lightweight ZIP archive that you have to expand in order to copy the xACT utility to your Mac's Applications folder.

XACT features a simple and easy-to-use interface from which you can switch between the tabs and access its basic functions.

You can use xACT to encode and decode various audio files such as SHN, AIFF, FLAC, OFR, ALAC, MKW, ALS and many more.

The conversion process is pretty straightforward, just add the audio files to the queue list, choose the output format and click the Encode button.

On top of that, you can also edit metadata in FLAC tags, join, split and compare PCM data for multiple files and generate a cue sheet or split points from a set of files.

By accessing the Checksum tab, you can verify audio files and generate or verify checksum files with just a few mouse clicks.

Some of the most important features are under the shntool tab from which you can fix sector boundary problems with CD-quality PCM data, trim PCM silence from the end of the files and strip extra RIFF chunks and write canonical headers.

To sum it all up, xACT is a free and easy-to-use solution for users who need to convert various audio formats, from the popular lossy formats to the more rare lossless ones.