For various practical reasons, including "Wife Acceptance Factor", I've built my digital audio jukebox solution around ITunes. I am about to embark upon a project to rip my 700 CDs to disk.

I plan to rip to Apple Lossless using ITunes. It's so easy my 7-year-old can do it for me. I can always transcode to another lossless format later if I need to.

My question involves gapless playback. Is there anything about the ALE file format that creates gaps in playback, or is the problem only with the ITunes / IPod player platform? If the problem is with the player, I am confident that someone will have a gapless ALE player at some time in the future. If not, I can transcode.

But I don't want to have to re-rip any live / classical / merged tracks at a later date.

I've lurked here for a while and learned a lot, thanks guys.

If it wasn't gapless it wouldn't be lossless, so I'd consider this a player problem.
Some players re-open the output between songs, which can lead to small gaps.

Aplle Lossless isn´t truely lossless, there are some frames missing at the end if you decode the file again. Maybe it´s just because iTunes has a bad decoder.

That's odd, on a few things I converted tho ALAC, and back to wav, matched the original wave byte for byte. Is it on samples on over a certain length or other circumstances?

If I remember reading the announcement thread for Apple Lossless, correctly, the small difference was due to the header in the wave file or something along those lines.

Also, the iPod inserts a moment of silence so that would be my 1st suspicion.
Here is the site I read. www.pretentiousname.com/mp3players/

See ya, tec

I am not aware of any "published" details on the ALE format such that you could transcode it using a third party decoder/encoder without first using Quicktime or iTunes to convert the ALE into an intermediate format subject to the loss of tags.

Sean

Wasn't the purpose of ALE really to have a way to stream music in a proprietary format to the AirPort Express. In other words, the reason ALE was created was to use a closed format to encrypt and stream music over a wireless network to the new AirPort Express devices. Without that need, I am highly skeptical Apple would have ever come out with a lossless encoding format.

The question is moot in light of 'DVD' Jon's clever hack allowing third party software the ability to drive an Airport Express device.

Sean

No, the reason it was created is because it's FAST and uses little CPU power - which enables things like the iPod being able to play it, the AEx being able to decode it, and less impact on system performance while using AirTunes.

I doubt it. FLAC is similar in speed and compression but they didn't show any interest in it.

Josh

Maybe on x86, but on PPC - especially the G4/G5, there is no competition.

Besides, what about memory usage for decompression? The iPod and AirPort might be on limited resources. That could be another reason to come up with their own solution.

Use iTunes to convert the file to AIFF format. The AIFF's produced by iTunes do have tags in the file itself. While I'm not aware of anything else capable of reading them, it'd likely be fairly easy to do. And LAME accepts AIFF format directly, I believe.

try flac-1.1.1 beta. decoding speed almost doubled after just one routine was optimized for altivec, and there are more coming. then you say "sure, but what about during the time they might have been evaluating alternatives?" well, FLAC, SHN, and to some extent wavpack were all known to have low decode complexity. and ALAC on PPC is heavily altivec optimized now. so an apples-to-apples comparison then would show the same thing. (BTW complexity is another reason I doubt that ALAC is MPEG4-ALS.)


this is hard to know for sure without hard numbers on available RAM and code space. I know flac (the command-line prog) uses <100k RAM decoding typical CD-DA, so what libFLAC uses will be less (maybe much less) than that. it doesn't seem to be a limitation for the other hardware FLAC is supported in.

Josh