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

[brunoleiteb]

I have Lamb of God's discography in ALAC playing in my ipod nano 5th, and I have seen no defference in the battery usage, doesn't seem to go empty any faster. Only problem is when you mix lossy and lossless files without adjusting the sound volume, you will make your ears bleed when using Shuffle mode.

[Nubben]

Thanks for the reply. But surely unless you normalise the AAC/MP3s (transcoded from the ALACs) there would be no difference in volume level?

This post has been edited by Nubben: Feb 10 2012, 15:39

[probedb]

I have Lamb of God's discography in ALAC playing in my ipod nano 5th, and I have seen no defference in the battery usage, doesn't seem to go empty any faster. Only problem is when you mix lossy and lossless files without adjusting the sound volume, you will make your ears bleed when using Shuffle mode.

That's nothing to do with the files it's to do with the volume of different songs, once you've applied Soundcheck it won't matter.

[brunoleiteb]

Is there a way to apply soundcheck manually for the music in my ipod?

[andy o]

I use iVolume to apply the ReplayGain algorithm as Sound Check, but you can get away with doing it for free, doing RG with something else (like fb2k) and using mp3tag to change the values to SC.

Nubben, if you're going the iOS route and running Windows, prepare to install iTunes and several Apple services that come with it, if you don't wanna jump through hoops to manage apps, podcasts, etc. IMO with Win 7 it's not such a bad thing cause RAM management is much better than XP, but also I'm running an SSD, so with an actual HDD you might experience startup delays.

In my experience, if there is even a difference between ALAC decoding and AAC, it's negligible.

[Nubben]

I have Lamb of God's discography in ALAC playing in my ipod nano 5th, and I have seen no defference in the battery usage, doesn't seem to go empty any faster. Only problem is when you mix lossy and lossless files without adjusting the sound volume, you will make your ears bleed when using Shuffle mode.

That's nothing to do with the files it's to do with the volume of different songs, once you've applied Soundcheck it won't matter.

Appreciate that, but I guess that has nothing to do with mixing lossy and lossless? Thanks for your input though.

This post has been edited by Nubben: Feb 10 2012, 17:58

[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.

[MichaelW]

At one point I put some ALAC on my iPod Classic (160GB), and had problems with hesitation in playback, which I've never had before or since. Only with very long tracks (>10 mins). I guess file too big for buffer.

[andy o]

That should be moot for iOS devices though. With my 120GB Classic I had audio cutouts when playing in the car in the freeway (I guess cause I didn't stop often the buffer slowly depleted).