[dB Cooper]

Has anyone converted FLAC to Apple Lossless? SUPPOSEDLY you can transcode between these formats without loss but there is some compression involved, so??? I have a bunch of FLAC files that I would like to be able to play in iTunes. There is a component you can install which allows iTunes to play FLACs... *IF* you change the extension to .mov (which I don't want to do). Anybody have any thoughts/experiences/observations?

[ted_b]

First off, both are lossless compressed formats.  Other examples of lossless (but uncompressed )are AIFF and WAV.

So, the fact that one file gets bigger or smaller is simply the compression settings, not the loss of musical data.  FLAC, for example, defaults to compression level 5, but is settable by the FLAC encoder/user and is a trade off on size vs decompression times.  And yes, I've converted FLAC to ALAC, AIFF and WAV.  Most claim no difference (they are each lossless for gosh sakes) some claim some (like me).

I have no experience with 3rd party FLAC on iTunes playback (Fluke or whatever).  I use Pure Music and use wav, mostly (which is not a discussion for this thread).

[Pez]

I have half my collection on flac the other half is Apple lossless. There is absolutely 0 difference between the two sonically. I have done extensive listening comparing the two and there is nothing different. I read somewhere on a tech forum that someone used software to compare the two and see if they were truly lossless and they found no measurable difference. 

All that said, keep you hi-Rez stuff on FLAC! Apple lossless will sample pretty much anything you throw at it like 96kHz, BUT it does not preserve the bit width and changes it to 16bit even of it's 24. 

[JDUBS]

Has anyone converted FLAC to Apple Lossless? SUPPOSEDLY you can transcode between these formats without loss but there is some compression involved, so??? I have a bunch of FLAC files that I would like to be able to play in iTunes. There is a component you can install which allows iTunes to play FLACs... *IF* you change the extension to .mov (which I don't want to do). Anybody have any thoughts/experiences/observations?

FLAC playback in Pure Music (with the iTunes) interface is great.

It is explicit that lossless compression methods do not remove any data, hence the "lossless" as opposed to "lossy" (I.e. mp3).

Jim


Jim

[newzooreview]

Have you considered dumping the lossless compression altogether? That's what I've done. Hard drive space is dirt cheap. For the cost of about 10 CDs I can store my whole music collection (a one terabyte drive in a really good enclosure, like an Oyen Digital, is about $160, and you can get them for much less).

I keep everything in AIFF (which allows metadata and album art), and I never worry about compression/decompression. WAV is not great because it doesn't allow metadata (at least in my experience).

So maybe the answer is to transcode to lossless uncompressed and enjoy.

[srb]

I keep everything in AIFF (which allows metadata and album art), and I never worry about compression/decompression. WAV is not great because it doesn't allow metadata (at least in my experience).

I finally converted my library from WAV to AIFF for the same reasons.  I did spend some time comparing the formats and I could not detect any differences, and really shouldn't since they are both uncompressed linear PCM files with only the file header being different.
 
Steve

[Pez]

Check this out, this gives a pretty intelligent experiment to prove that Apple lossless and FLAC are truly lossless.

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=311789

[dB Cooper]

Thanks for the input, everybody. If there is little or no difference, I will probably go with ALAC. I like being able to quicklook a media file. I may or may not transcode what I've got already. I have some stuff which I bought online from zappa.com along with a few others in FLAC.