FLAC to Apple Lossless?

[chrismd]

I'm downloading 3 concert torrents that are flac files and was wondering if i'm going to have to convert them to put them in iTunes. If so, is there anything lost in converting to apple lossless? TIA

[goldcoaster]

itunes/ipod can't play flac - that is an open source lossless format - apple isn't open source.
audacity may convert, I am not sure.
these aren't illegal copies of music are they? tsk tsk!


- GoldCoaster

[Sparkee]

Must be free or Creative Commons licenced music.

Search the net for version 9 of dBpowerAMP Music Converter, it is still free to use. The latest version will also work for what you want and is free, but requires a licence for the mp3 encoder. Then goto Codec Central from their home page and download the codecs you require. You probably will not notice any loss of quality.

[goldcoaster]

thinking about it more - find a burner that can burn a flac to audio CD then rip as apples lossless via itunes.


- GoldCoaster

[goldcoaster]

nero has a flac plugin that will let you burn them (google search)


- GoldCoaster

[chrismd]

so i cant just drag and drop the flac files into iTunes and set the import to Apple Lossless? I know I can convert the files to wav but I want them to stay lossless and I have the room on my iPod to do it.

And no these are not illegal files haha.

[kornchild2002]

No, iTunes is NOT compatible with FLAC files, there is no way of doing this. You will either have to download a program called dbpoweramp and convert straight to Apple lossless (it would be the same quality as doing it through iTunes), or you can convert your files to the wav format and have iTunes convert them to Apple lossless.

Part of the problem with Apple lossless is that there are only two programs out there that support Apple lossless encoding (ie making Apple lossless files): iTunes and dbpoweramp. There is a neat little program called foobar2000 but it only supports Apple lossless decoding (reading).

[chrismd]

sorry to keep asking questions, but ideally i would like to just convert them to wav and then to apple lossless. I have the software to do this. But will doing that result in loss of quality as opposed to using dbpoweramp? Thanks everyone for your help. This audio format stuff is tricky.

[TobyG]

By definition, converting from a lossless format (flac) to another lossless format (wav) to another lossless format (alac) should result in no loss of quality. That being said, you'll lose comment tags doing it that way, though.

[goldcoaster]

Originally Posted by chrismd

so i cant just drag and drop the flac files into iTunes and set the import to Apple Lossless? I know I can convert the files to wav but I want them to stay lossless and I have the room on my iPod to do it.

And no these are not illegal files haha.

WAV is lossless (it the original lossless, I guess , so just do that.

- GoldCoaster

[goldcoaster]

Originally Posted by TobyG

By definition, converting from a lossless format (flac) to another lossless format (wav) to another lossless format (alac) should result in no loss of quality. That being said, you'll lose comment tags doing it that way, though.

in theory yes. But Apples and Flacs are a little compressed - so maybe they compress in different areas of the music and going from one to another is not optimal (but I doubt it would be noticable.

- GoldCoaster

[kornchild2002]

The lossless formats compress songs differently from lossy encoders. For example, with iTunes AAC and Lame mp3, information is thrown away. Normally, you don't hear this information so it doesn't really matter if it is there or not. Hence, when you choose a bitrate, you choose the amount of information that you want to retain from the original copy.

Now, lossless works totally different. Lossless formats work like WinZip (or WinRar), you are compressing the file but you aren't throwing away any information, you are just making the file size smaller. That is what FLAC and Apple lossless do, they use compression technologies that don't throw away any of the information, they just "zip" the audio so it can contain ID tag information and be a little more portable.

Going from FLAC to wav to Apple lossless will yield NO (ie 0%) loss in quality because of the nature of lossless encoders and the wav format. You can go from FLAC to Apple lossless to monkey's audio to Windows Media Audio Lossless to Real Audio Lossless to mpeg-4 lossless to wav then back to FLAC and you won't loose ANY quality. So going from FLAC to wav to Apple lossless would yield the same quality as ripping that CD directly to Apple lossless. If there was a quality loss, even a slight loss, the encoders wouldn't be called lossless.

[TobyG]

in theory yes.

In reality, yes, as well.

But Apples and Flacs are a little compressed - so maybe they compress in different areas of the music and going from one to another is not optimal (but I doubt it would be noticable.

They will use a different compression algorithm, but by definition, they are lossless, i.e. no information is lost in the compression. If you take a file compressed in a zip archive, unzip it, and then rar it, do you lose anything?

[goldcoaster]

I see, thanks.
I assumed compressed audio - even called lossless (especially from a manufacturer) could still be lossy - maybe I am used to marketing terms not being truthful terms like CD quality or DVD quality when they are not.

- goldcoaster

[kornchild2002]

You are correct though, if someone's marketing terms are false, then their lossless format could very well be lossy. That said company could then be taken to court for false advertising. Many people over at hydrogenaudio were worried about Microsoft's Lossless Windows Media Audio format, the Apple lossless format, and Sony's lossless ATRAC3 format. People put the three formats to the test and all three came out to be true lossless.