Hi all,

This is my first post at HydrygenAudio.

I recently decided to move from FLAC to ALAC since I wanted to keep everything in iTunes. My process:

1. Used XLD to convert FLAC to AIFF (I know I can do it to ALAC directly but decided to go through AIFF first for various reasons).

2. Imported AIFF's to iTunes.

3. Tagged all AIFF's

4. Converted to ALAC


I became concerned when I heard there was slight distortion on the converted tracks - almost like they were clipping. The bass was not clear at all, almost muddy at times and distorted. Not terribly bad though but still... The FLAC files sounded much better when playing them in XLD for instance. Go figure!

Then I noticed that I had left the "Sound Enhancer" on in iTunes and that the equalizer setting was on at "Flat". I immediately turned these off and noticed a slight improvement, although some distorion was still present.

Now, my questions are:

1. Will the Sound Enhancer and Equalizer settings have affected the sound quality of the ALAC files permanently or are these settings added "on top" of the files and are reversible?

2. Also, could it have been the XLD decoder which caused the distortion.

Not an expert when it comes to iTunes'/XLD's settings so any help would be much appreciated.

Many thanks in advance!

Regards,
Nubben

You should simply convert the ALAC back to AIFF and see if the two AIFF files are identical. If they are not then iTunes added processing to the file when converting to ALAC, which may or may not be a good thing-- depends what you are looking for.

Thanks Jido, but I'm not an expert when it comes to "comparing" etc and was wondering if someone had first-hand knowledge of similar situations.

Thanks for your input though.

Nubben

Anyone please?

Many thanks.

Nubben

1) Sound Enhancer/Equalizer settings only affect playback and will not have made any difference to the audio data during conversion.

2) XLD simply decompresses FLAC etc to WAV/AIFF or converts to another format, there is once again no alteration to the audio data unless a lossy compression format is selected as the output.

3) If you have xACT (and you should!) you can use the "cmp" option from the shntool tab to compare the audio data of two files. This should set your mind at ease with regard to any unwarranted alterations.

Out of interest, what are your reasons for eschewing a straight FLAC->ALAC conversion with XLD ?

Excellent! Thanks ffooky!

Re FLAC->AIFF->ALAC conversion - I just wanted to convert using iTunes so that I could get the "iTunes" encoder stamp in the track info panel. No biggie. Maybe silly, but there you go... :-)

Many thanks again!

Nubben