For you nutjobs who insist on Apple Lossless, yes you Ron! =p

Re: For you nutjobs who insist on Apple Lossless, yes you Ron! =p

Before calling us nutjobs you should go after all the people going nuts over Blu-ray's "HD" audio formats, DVD-A, SACD, vinyl rigs costing tens of thousands, cables costing 100s, etc, etc. There is every reason to keep your CD collection in Apple Lossless and none in MP3. A 1TB disk these day is under $100. I doubt anyone here has a CD collection so big that it won't fit on a 1TB disk in Apple Lossless. Why deliberately reduce your music quality? Should we be aiming for the lowest common denominator?

Also, back in the day I did a blind test of 256K MP3 vs 256K AAC -- I picked which was which every single time -- MP3 was turning the bottom end to mud. I think that listening to the original CD quality can't any worse than AAC

Look, I know you're kidding when you say nutjob, but CD quality is hardly excessive. Spending zillions on cables on the other hand...

why would we have to re-encode? cds are still 16 bit, that article just talkes about getting downloads to be higher than cd's

 

 

i do wish apple and amazon would put out lossless file formats. I'd pay a little premium to get a better file above a normal mp3.

one of the reasons i like what trent reznor does. he gives you like 5 options on downloads

i agree 24 bit may be overkill for home set ups. but i would love for apple to start selling apple lossless files and for itunes to support flac and amazon start selling flacs. if i have a choice between mp3 or physical, i go physical. I got 3 cd's just this week because i want the most information i can get and each disk did cost me about 4 bucks more apiece than the download price.

 

i will buy digital files when i have to. one of the cds i got had a special edition thats no longer avaiable for physical purchase, but amazon and itunes both had the 13th track, apple was album only, but amazon was more than happy to sell me just the 13th track alone. i'd rather had the cd on it, but in this case it at least allowed me to get the music. this happpend to me before on the tron soundtrack too. UK got the 2nd disk of 5 tracks and then apple got 2 exclusives and amazone got 1 i think. Here again i was forced to get mp3s which i was kinda put out about, but had lossless versions been available i'd of felt fine about buying them.

What is it?

Apple Lossless allows you to compress a CD without losing any quality -- you could then decompress it and produce a bit for bit equivalent copy of the original CD.  Apple Lossless saves about 50% on the space used in the original, uncompressed CD.

 

So the question is, why did Apple just open source it -- my guess:

 

To support third party hardware Air Play devices which must be able to reproduce ALAC.

 

My hope: to start selling audio in Apple Lossless via iTunes.  Not holding my breath.

Sam, are you yelling "fire" again?  :)

Sound is subjective.  You can poll a vast number of people

on how they evaluate music at different bitrates and there won't

be a unanimous consensus.

 

I can hear the difference between lossless recording and 

something downloaded as an MP3.  I have been saying this

for years.

Sam,

 

No, I did not take the test.  I am traveling for the next few days.

 

...but I don't need to take the test.  I have been dealing with 

downloadable music and CD lossless for years as I am constantly

adding new music to my iPod collection.

 

I can hear the difference in sound between lower and higher bitrates.

I have talked about that many times.  In general, a low-bitrate MP3

is going to produce some very undesirable results in its highs.  This

is why I generally don't include any MP3 on my iPod under 320-360 kbps.

 

 

 

I plan on eventually re-ripping my CDs to lossless. The reasoning for me is simple: I'm pretty much married to the Apple solution for my portable music, and Apple doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon (this was a real concern just a decade ago). I ripped my entire library at 320AAC and now that I'm over 130GB and climbing, I realize that to have my entire library portable I'll probably have to re-rip at 256AAC or lower. The 160GB looks to be the last iPod Classic Apple will make, so I will have to wait for the Touches to get to that level which may be several generations away (if ever, because they'll try to push the cloud solution I'm sure in order to reduce/eliminate their dependence on Samsung creating higher density memory chips).

Also Apple has made, from time to time, improvements in conversion to AAC. Rather than having to eventually rip all of my CDs to AAC again, I'll rip them once to ALAC, and then whenever a newer conversion process, or a new CODEC comes out, I'll be able to re-rip my entire library from a hard drive filled with ALAC and do it as an overnight (or likely several nights) batch job without having to load over 1000 CDs into a tray.

I know, I know, people will say I should use EAC to FLAC for the master files and rip from those. But that kind of requires more technical know-how than I'm willing to invest right now (EAC has like a ton of settings). Ripping to ALAC is a one button task in iTunes, as is creating AAC from ALAC.

If someone has an easy CD to EAC/FLAC workflow (and ideally an easy FLAC to AAC workflow) I'd love to hear/see it. I'm not planning on a re-rip of my catalog to lossless for at least a year or so. I had hoped to do it on a new Mac Pro but it looks like that line may die...

Sam - in my own single blind tests done years ago (so the results are probably invalid because my hearing has undoubtedly worsened) I ripped a bunch of tracks at WAV, ALAC, 320/256/192/128 AAC. Had a friend randomly play them to me while I listened on a pretty good set of headphone (Beyerdynamic DT880). I identified the 128AAC the majority of the time (something like 4 out of 5 times). I had much more trouble at the 192 and higher rates. Because at the time my iPod greatly exceeded what my library size would be at 320AAC, I decided to burn at that rate. I am willing to go down to 256 without hesitation, even perhaps 192 if space concerns become constrained (i.e. Apple never releases a flash memory iPod over 100GB) but I simply can't go to 128. I'll buy like 5 iPod Classics when they are discontinued before I do that!

I could envision paying $25 a year for iTunes Music Match (of my nearly 12000 songs, less than 20 were purchased/free through iTunes, all are rips of CDs I own). My main concern is that I listen to quite a few indie bands that will likely not be on there, so it will be a question of how Match works in tandem with your collection and being able to easily ID those tracks that weren't matched.

For example, ideally iTunes would tell me "here are the 1500 songs we couldn't match" and give me a way to easily sync to my iPhone the 1500 songs directly from my library, and the remaining songs from the cloud. My only worry is how it would perform over 3G. Even at 256kbps you're talking about 6MB per 4 minute song. While work and home are covered by wi-fi, I do a significant amount of listening on my walk to/from work every day (about an hour round trip).

There's a lot of unknowns for me with Match. It could work really well. Or...

Sam one of the main reasons I continue to shell out hundreds dollars for Apple's iPods, along with the thousands I've already spent (and will spend) for music, is that I want to have all of my library accessible at my fingertips. I do use Smart Playlists. I use Genius Playlists. I use the Genius feature. Enjoy them all. But my taste in music run far and wide, and I travel with my iPod nearly everywhere I go. And when I'm away from home, be it a conference for work, vacation, etc. there's nothing like being able to scratch that itch of wanting to hear X song at the touch of your fingertips. Kind of feels like bringing the comfort of home with me wherever I may travel. My hotel abroad may be less than ideal, the bed stiff, the walls thin, but if I can play whatever song strikes my fancy while there, it makes it all the more bearable.

Haha, I'm having it all now, and can continue to for another 30GB...or my iPod Classic dies and I can't buy a replacement!

Did some more reading on Match, if it works as they say it does, it should work for me. As you say, we'll see shortly!

Even though my portable music devices are iPods, I still encode everything as a VBR MP3. For me, 256Kbps using a LAME encoder provides a file that I cannot distinguish from the original CD on the playback devices I use. I prefer MP3 over ACC because it's a more universally supported format. This cmae in very handy recently when I purchased a new vehicle (2011 GMC Terrain). The vehicle has a USB port that supports an iPod or a USB memory stick. Instead of keeping an iPod in my car, I simply purchased a cheap 16GB USB stick and leave it in there all the time. The stereo supports MP3, but not ACC, so I would have not been able to do this had I chosen Apple's format.

BTW, I do not download music, so I cannot weigh in on that part of the discussion. I still prefer real media, and then making my own compressed files.

I tried something like that a few years back (my posts on it might still be around here), and gave up for lack of a useful solution.

 

There were two major problems at the time:

* No means to manage multiple copies for different uses (lossless for playback on the computer, compressed for use on the iPod)

* No means to transcode lossless to lossy and preserve all meta-data

 

I'm sure it could be done, but it was going to be a good bit of work. And now, I don't care.  Hopefully it's gotten better since then. If nothing else, you can rip to lossless and let iTunes do a 128 kbps down-convert on sync. If  you find a good solution, tell us about it :)

Will do, Dave. Was searching the 'net for answers and came across this in an iLounge forum. Please note, I have not done this, it isn't my solution, so I can't verify that it works. But it sounds like it might do for what I need. Also, this post was from 2010 and iTunes has had several upgrades since then, so hopefully every step that is listed below still exists in the latest version of iTunes.

I could see that working. At the time, I was on a WinPC and trying to use MP3 and tools like APE for lossless. I wasn't yet into AAC :)

Fascinating.

More information on Mastered for iTunes from ARS Technica:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2012/02/mastered-for-itunes-how-audio-engineers-tweak-tunes-for-the-ipod-age.ars/1