I'd like to get some opinions from "audiophiles" on how best to archive audio CDs. I have a pretty big CD collection...close to a thousand discs...that I'd like to encode without any loss in audio quality.

As I'm a Mac user with iTunes, it seems that the easiest options are either Apple Lossless or AIFF. Is there any reason I should choose AIFF over Apple Lossless? I don't care about file portability to other devices. I simply want to archive the CDs without any loss in quality. In the future, I'd like to be able to re-encode the archived files (be they Apple Lossless or AIFF) into newer, more efficient formats as they become available.

All thoughts on this subject are much appreciated!

-Rob

AIFF is about twice the size. Lots of programs can read AIFF. Other than that, I don't see much difference. They're both lossless.

Presumably, however, more programs will support Apple Lossless in the future. If need be, I could convert from Apple Lossless to AIFF, correct, without any loss in quality?

Yes.

Not necessarily. Although having a major like Apple behind you could turn out a great help.


Absolutely. That's what lossless compression is all about.

I suspect AIFF to have bad tag support, which might not be the case with Apple Lossless.

Well, since you are using a Mac you may as well go ahead and use Apple Lossless. It's a new format so at the moment only iTunes will play it. Apple Lossless will compress your music down to a smaller size without losing any quality. AIFF files will be larger than Apple Lossless files.

robbyx - Have you considerd FLAC for your lossless needs? I'm in the same sort of posistion to you (using a Mac - lots of CDs to convert losslessly).

The reason I chose FLAC over Apple's Lossless Encoder (ALE), is that iTunes doesn't seem to have a decent way of handling two music collections at once. I need two, as I want my lossless collection on hand to listen to at home, and a lossy collection for my mini ipod.

Hopefully Apple will modify iTunes to support this, as I assume a lot of people will do this.

Other than that, I do really like ALE, as it's so simply to use with iTunes.

There've been reports that Winamp plays it with one of the M4A/AAC plug-ins out there, through quicktime.

Duke, how about setting up a Smart Playlist in iTunes that will automatically include all songs within a certain bitrate range (i.e. all your lossy stuff, <320 kbps) and have only that playlist sync to your iPod? That's what I will do once I start re-ripping all my CDs to Apple Lossless (currently all my stuff is ripped to Lame Extreme). Everything can then stay in a single library but it remains easy to manage. I love Smart Playlists.

Then how do you convert from FLAC to a lossy format. Because FLAC is not supported by my iTunes. For my iPod I prefer to use 128 QuickTime AAC and this is problem if I were to have my archive encoded in FLAC?

How do you go from FLAC to QuickTime AAC?

As Laguna said, in short: what can be simpler going with Apple Lossless & then setting up a smart playlist. (If you're into Itunes/Ipod). If you know you'll stick with Apple/Itunes, go with Apple Lossless.

Yep that's a good idea, but I'm a bit of perfectionist and don't like the way iTunes stores the files of the same name - it adds a 1 to it, for example:

mysong.mp4 <<-- ALE
mysong 1.mp4 <<-- AAC

Sure, you could probably knock up a script to tidy this up, but I'd prefer it if they were stored in different locations in the first place. Plus I have a lot of Smart Playlists (they rock) so just syncing the one is not what I'm looking for.

I've still not decided exactly how I'm going to rip my collection. It's going to be FLAC, but I'm not sure if I'm going to do a full image or individual files.

Eventually, I'll probably do a conversion from FLAC to mp3/AAC using Foobar on my PC, unless I find something to do it all my iBook that is.

Hi all,
I'm new to this board, but happen to be experiencing this same issue and tonight I think I found a solution. At least for PC users. Red Chair software has created an application called anapod. It has a ton of features that iTunes is lacking and most importantly, it can convert your FLAC, OGG, WAV files on the fly and downsample to your iPod on the fly. I haven't actually tested it, but it appears to have quite good reviews. I suggest you definitely check it out. Here's a URL showing the comparision.
http://www.redchairsoftware.com/anapod/ctable.php
Good luck!
-Mista E

I know one advantage to choosing FLAC is that it plays gapless. What about ALE, does it offer gapless playback? Since iTunes won't play anything gapless I'm not sure how to find out. Has anyone tested ALE with winamp using the AAC/MP4 plugin? Gapless playback would be a big factor for myself when choosing between ALE or another lossess format.

EDIT. Grammer and Spelling.

Hi. I'm sorry I'm not a audio expert. I'm having the same problem, encoding one CD in WMA Lossless, and encoding the same CD in Apple Lossless.

Being a programmer, I know that they should be mathemathically identical to the original after decompression. But my ears cannot fool my logic, since I do find the sound coming out of the apple lossless file a tad better than the WMA lossless file.

I read someone said it was the player. But get this, I imported the WMA file into i-Tunes and it automatically converted it to apple lossless... now i have two files, apple lossless from the orig CD, and the apple lossless from the WMA lossless..... any intelligent person will predict that they should sound the same. but they don't. still better sound coming off the original apple lossless file.

If anybody has an insight, please do help me. It will help me decide if I want to get a WMA capable (like a Rio) or an Ipod. I thought lossless meant lossless, but now.......

[PC & Audio config/setup (might help the "investigator"): AMD Athlon 64 3200+/1GB (2x512 dual channel) in 2-2-2-3 T1/300GB Hitachi SATA/Cheap Ass GF2 Video Card (i'm not a gamer)/Audigy 2 w/ latest drivers/NEC 8x DVD+-R/RW (this was the drive used to rip the orig. CD)/XP Pro SP1.1 (SP2 sucks!)]




update: i proceeded to put the two files side by side, changed the tags / ratings / etc to make them exactly the same and fc.exe 'ed them. FC reports them as "files are too different to compare". i was expecting a few lines would be different, it seems to be showing a significant difference bit-wise, as it could not find patterns / groups which are present on both files. so bit-wise they're not even equal. so... interesting...

Doesn't lossless imply gapless?

Lossless means lossless. Convert them both to WAV, load them up in foobar, run the comparison function to see if the audio matches between them. They should match. If they don't, then you need to figure out why.

ABX please. Lossless means lossless. I guarentee you have a placebo effect going here.

There's nothing about ALE that means it shouldn't be able to offer gapless playback. The problem is obviously in iTunes. What you of course can do for playback of classical music and compilations (where there never is a gap) is to set the cross-fade to "0". With lossless files there will be no audible transition what so ever.

iTunes 5 will almost certainly bring true gapless playback for both AAC & ALE. Hopefully, support for MPEG-4 scalable lossless (SLS) is added as well, but I doubt it

I believe that the WMP cd ripper does not rip as well as the itunes one. That is the only explanation I can think of.

Remember that ripping tools don't behave exactly the same. Some applications, like EAC, can be configured with an offset adjustment. So, if you ripped in EAC to something lossless, and then ripped in iTunes to something lossless... and compared the final output... they would be mathematically different. (The start and finish of the tracks ripped would not be identical... so the data inside the files would not be identical.)

To compare format vs. format, you should use the same ripping tool.

Anyway, there is no sound quality differences. It's Lossless. Really. I can even play DTS data encoded in ALAC or WMA Lossless (from DTS CDs).... and it all comes out OK. If it "sounded different" (digitally damaged), my DTS decoder in my home theater couldn't play it.

In My opinion Apple lossless is really good. The compression is unmatched.

Even I want a workaround to the solution of putting a "1" after the filename when one makes an AAC copy. Sometimes it is irritating. If a song name ends with "18" the other .m4a gets the name "... 18 19.m4a"

But all said and done Apple Lossless really compresses the best.

How do you reach that conclusion?
look here: http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?ti...less_comparison

Edit: Oh, and even Flac in version 1.13 will compress better. In this table Flac 1.12 is used.

In practice, is it better to decode back to Wav, before encoding to another lossless format? For example, let's say I have Apple Lossless, if I decide down the road FLAC may be the superior choice for my needs, should I convert my collection back to Wav, and then encode to FLAC from there? After writing this I'm thinking that may be the only way to do it, unless future iTunes integrates FLAC support, in which case my question bears validity...

I have ripped about 400 CDs in Apple Lossless using iTunes, and now I'm going back and converting (the command actually does a copy and convert process) the files to AAC. I have "Kind" activated as a field in the database, so I can tell the Lossless files from the AAC (Lossy) files.

While this worked well the first few times, now it creates ghost images of files and some files don't convert, they only copy. Then, when I delete duplicate copies, the copy I don't delete becomes a "ghost" file. By this I mean a link to a file that iTunes cannot find. It's quite a mess. Sometimes it seems everything is OK, but when I attempt to drag and drop an album (10 to 20 songs) of AAC tunes to a dedicated AAC Playlist some of the files are shown as Lossless files in the Playlist.

How does this happen? Has anyone else experienced these problems?

I did the Convert operation by creating a Playlist called "Temp", then putting about 200 songs in the playlist, then selecting them all and converting them all. After Conversion, the Playlist links only to the Lossless files, but the AAC files are in the main database. In general, it doesn't rename the files "mysong 1.mp4 <<-- AAC" as mentioned above, but it did this a few times.

I'm going to forget creating the "Temp" playlist in the future, and just do the convert operation in the overall database. Also, i'm going to convert only one album at a time. Perhaps converting 200 tunes at once in a dedicated "Temp" playlist was biting off more "Apple" than iTunes could chew.