Storage

[Wilton331]

I just bought a new external hard drive to store my Lossless music on. I already have one with all my mp3s.

I am very new to the lossless music scene; I just began downloading FLACs a couple weeks ago.

Because I am using a Mac computer, I convert all the FLACs to Apple Lossless.

My question is, would it be more beneficial to store my Lossless albums on my external hard drive in FLAC or Apple Lossless?

I have begun to store them in Apple Lossless, but I was thinking that in the future that FLAC will be more beneficial if I ever wanted to upload them to a tracker. Can Apple Lossless be converted back into FLAC? If so, is there any quality degradation?

Thanks.

[Adman65]

I really dont' know about the conversion, but quite frankly if the only reason you are converting to apple loseless is to use it with itunes, I think its lame that way for a 2 reasons:
1. I dont' like Itunes. It has poor file support.
2. You shouldn't have to convert it. FLAC is a loseless codec, but I don't have the technical knowledge to say if you lose quality. In my mind there is no reason to deal with conversion. If you want a different player for OSX check out 'Cog' or even using VLC to play some stuff. Although, for me VLC was iffy on some FLAC files.

Just one mac user to another. I also just started downloading FLAC stuff. MUCH better. The thought of converting never crossed my mind. I have a feeling though going to FLAC -> ACC -> FLAC you may lose something, but I may be wrong. We need some people from E to help us

[znik]

I don't understand either why would you need to make such a conversion to apple lossless...
I could understand that if you wanted to use them on an Ipod, which doesn't support (I think) flac.

Anyway, even though I am not a MAC user myself, 2 easy and free utilities you could use are:

Play: http://www.sbooth.org/Play/ (FLAC player)


XLD: http://tmkk.hp.infoseek.co.jp/xld/index_e.html (Very easy drag&drop converter)


I believe there is no loss in quality, since both FLAC and apple lossless are lossless, but if you ever wanted to upload them later on to a highend tracker you would be forced to provide the EAC audio extraction logs of your flacs.

[grimms]

Yea there is zero quality loss. Keep it in flac and save it in flac to your external hdd.

[Wilton331]

Yeah, I've been converting it so that I can use it in Itunes. I have been keeping all the logs and cues from the albums I download - I figure since both formats are lossless, if I convert back to FLAC the statistics should be exactly the same as they were when they ripped. (Could just be ignorance on my part)

I guess I'll just download a FLAC player for Mac. You say that Play is the best?

[fstokebanget]

Actually you still can play FLAC with VLC, but you won't get it so organized as iTunes do. I think that FLAC is still better than Apple loseless, you better keep those FLAC on your external drive.
If you want to play FLAC in iTunes then this is a good tips to do that : http://www.simplehelp.net/2007/09/20...les-in-itunes/

[stoi]

If you want to play FLAC on your IPOD then go here

http://www.rockbox.org/

I put it on my IPOD but didnt like it so much, and couldnt work it out properly lol but its supposed to work.

[Adman65]

'Cog' for FLAC player on mac. It acts more like winamp and will keep things nice and tidy if you add them to your library. Global hot keys are installed, but who cares if you have quicksilver. It also takes up less mem/cpu than iTunes does.

[fstokebanget]

thanks for the info Adman65, looks like a nice player : http://cogx.org/screenshots.php
I'll give it a try

[$we]

My question is, would it be more beneficial to store my Lossless albums on my external hard drive in FLAC or Apple Lossless?

FLAC has 66% audio compression, while Apple Lossless has 72%. I used dBpoweramp and converted a .wav file into an .m4a and .flac using the best settings of each codec. FLAC is MUCH better. If you are copying the .flac files you download onto an XHDD as archives and not for seeding, then convert the lossless albums you download into .wav (source) and then re-compress them in .flac with dBpoweramp and use the highest setting.

Another reason to use flac, and ogg as your lossy codec instead of mp3 for this matter, is to support open-source software - if that's your fancy.