Apple Lossless

heiney9

cokewithvanilla wrote: »

While true, this has nothing to do with what lossless format he picks, which seems to be his dilemma... he has the same chance of not getting a bit perfect copy with wav as with flac (from my understanding).

In my opinion, flac is better than wav due to its metadata capabilities.

Ummmm....what you just said is exactly what my point was. I was responding to unc2701's post about lossless is lossless..........not quite, but I get it. There is a lot more to the entire process than just lossless ripping. It's a process and if done correctly from the beginning, the ending is the exactly the same as the beginning.

I would never use WAV files for music........FLAC is better indeed for size and metadata purposes.

cokewithvanilla

heiney9 wrote: »

Ummmm....what you just said is exactly what my point was. I was responding to unc2701's post about lossless is lossless..........not quite, but I get it. There is a lot more to the entire process than just lossless ripping. It's a process and if done correctly from the beginning, the ending is the exactly the same as the beginning.

I would never use WAV files for music........FLAC is better indeed for size and metadata purposes.

my bad

heiney9

It's confusing but we agree.

I just didn't want people to think that ripping a WAV file is bit for bit perfect while FLAC isn't. Both of them can be flawed with poor ripping and not be bit for bit perfect. It's the process of ripping that can cause this not the resulting final output.

fatchowmein

Lossless files are compressed copy that do not have any bits removed from the original. It "should" sound the same as the original wave file. However, I find that if I listen carefully, I prefer the original and flac but something is almost imperceptibly missing with m4a as Mantis pointed out. I believe this slight loss in audio quality is due to the itune software itself during the decompression(?) and playback. It may even be a coloration instead of a loss; but, whatever it is, I can hear a slight difference on well recorded material if I'm doing a comparison. Otherwise, I don't notice anything.

The only thing stopping me from using wave files is that I like the meta tagging.

The only thing stopping me from using flac is I'm married to an Apple junky so I have multiple iPods but I'm too lazy to hack them for flac playback.

unc2701

I realize that there are ripping methods that don't give you bit-perfect copies. Itunes is not one of them, for me, anyway. I've actually done the exercise of a variety of EAC ripping, iTunes ripping, burning, re-ripping, etc and was unable to induce any errors. The only weird thing i saw was a few additional blank frames at the start of some songs, which I couldn't really identify why it occasionally happened, but once you got into non-null data, it matched perfectly.

Granted, I don't think that any were HDCD's, but I doubt that would make a difference.