Ditshcing AAC all together for ALAC on Mac/iOS devices - good idea? Options

[Nubben]

Hi All,

My current set-up of converting my CDs are dBpa -> AIFF/ALAC then XLD to True VBR AAC highest quality.

However, I see that ALAC file sizes are not that much different from these XLD-produced files so I am considering dumping AAC all together (apart from iTuens purchases of course) and use ALAC files in iTunes and any iOS device. Also, converting to AAC adds another conversion step and it would be very nice to just keep one original ripped file as it is and cut out the AACs.

Question is - how much of additional battery drain will ALAC files cause?

Does anyone have any experience with this?

Thanks!

Nubben

[Ron Jones]

Just in case you aren't aware, you can have your cake and eat it too with iTunes: iTunes can be set to automatically convert ALAC (or anything greater in quality than ~128kbps AAC) to 128kbps AAC when you sync them onto your iOS devices. Apple's AAC encoder is of good quality and there are significant space savings to be realized with AAC versus ALAC, which is of benefit to storage-limited mobile devices.

One negative to this arrangement is that your 256kbps AAC iTunes Store purchases will be re-encoded to a lower bit rate when syncing to an iOS device, but this hasn't been that big of a deal in my experience.