hiya.. have all my cds in apple lossless files.. however wanting to edit them and remove skits, and sample some of the audio in the highest quality possible. have posted here before about editing on the fly apple lossless and apparently it cant be done (on pc)... so am thinking for the long term of redoing my cds in flac so that i can edit them and have a source that is more universally compatible. that being said.. what is a good flac editor/clipper.. wanting to split up future flac files... cheers

Audacity latest version handles flac files well, as does dbpoweramp. I have experienced a strange bug with flac files recently, which may be down to a software conflict, or may be inherent in modified flac files.. not sure which so please note if you experience similar.
After editing they will play perfectly on pc software players, all tags intact.. but on attempting to burn a normal audio cd the burning app throws an unsupported codec error. I got around this by using some audio conversion software to convert from flac to flac which took a couple of seconds per track.. so it did something to them, but for the life of me I can't work out what.

The trouble with apple files is they are pretty poor quality to begin with. Most m4a/m4p files I see are 128 or 256Kb/s which is far from cd quality. I would convert them to similar bitrate mp3 and use a simple mp3 editor instead of wasting heaps of filespace with poor sounding and large flac files.

Just out of interest.. what bitrate are these files?

well im ripping at apple lossless quality so they are lossless.. but wanting to rip to flac so its more universally supported and also can be edited. so audacity and dbpoweramp is able to edit the flac files so i can cut and edit samples of the files?? thats essentially what im after..

Use the latest beta of Audacity; it's much more advanced than the last stable release and the bugs are minor, AFAIK.

I used it to cut 5.1 ac3 and then export as 320kb/s mp3 (one of it's newer, better features - exporting to other bitrates than 128kb/s mp3, lol).

please notice my comment about the odd tagging bug (I worked out what the problem was) Tag the files and it seems to go away ;)

I'm about 4 versions upstream of the windows betas, so that's my input done.

seemingly ppl are just responding to their situations rather then to what im asking?

can you edit flac files in terms of cutting and splitting them>???

Yes.. audacity does it well. http://audacity.sourceforge.net/manual-1.2/

I was just letting you know about a peculiar bug I found in advance to avoid the next question "nero says unsupported codec if I try to make a normal audio cd from these files" ;)