As the risk of being shunned - Apple Lossless?

[madhombre]

Hi folks,

I totally understand the whole Flac/shn thing vs mp3 as far as quality goes but at the same time I want me music to be on my phone

What are the general thoughts about Apple Lossless - it is a joke of a format? or something that is worth looking into as I viable option

Thanks

[buffalofloyd]

My thought on this is quite simple. FLAC is open source and way more compatible, ALAC is proprietary. In the small amount of testing I've done FLAC has better compression and more range of compression sizes whereas I remember ALAC being you get what you get. They are both lossless, so no quality differences, just compatibility and size. I send my buddy FLAC all the time for his Apple phone and he's never complained, so he must be playing them just fine. I've no idea what your situation is but you should be able to play FLAC on an iPhone just fine, but I wouldn't be surprised if you told me you couldn't... because Apple. Yeah, not a fan.

[plegault]

ALAC is no longer proprietary since 2011! I also thought the same for some years.

[buffalofloyd]

Why must you make me feel old hahahaha?

[madhombre]

Thanks, I doubt it will become a sharing standard then

I will see how to get Flac to work, thanks for that.

[plegault]

To "stream" your recordings, there's not a lot of options out there. I personally do two uploads: I upload the FLACs to Vox, which is essentially an unlimited cloud Flac player that integrates well with iOS. I also convert some of the recordings to 320 AAC for the iOS Music uploads. There's no lossless uploads there (although there is multi channel).

[buffalofloyd]

Thanks, I doubt it will become a sharing standard then

I will see how to get Flac to work, thanks for that.

No worries man. I'd suggest embracing the FLAC format though, as it's not going anywhere and is great. If you have to convert to ALAC for your own sanity it's really easy and I have multiple encoders that will encode to many different formats, all free too. Foobar2000 is one such program that can help you. If you need a little assistance here is an older article that might help you on your way https://www.digitaltrends.com/music/...n-ios-devices/

In saying all this, I don't ever see a proprietary format ever being something that becomes a standard on any platform other than Apple.


~~~~~~~EDIT: apparently ALAC is not proprietary anymore, but still evil

[DaveTheRave]

I still buy my music through iTunes. I don’t care about the quality. I can’t hear the difference and only really get to listen to music in less than ideal environments - in my car, or while jogging with cheap earbuds.

[David S CA]

What are the general thoughts about Apple Lossless - it is a joke of a format? or something that is worth looking into as I viable option

There was a time when I imported my CDs into my iTunes Library on my MacBook as ALAC using what was then known as the iTunes app, now called the Apple Music app. When I played back those ALAC music files from my MacBook to my home stereo system via a direct wire connection from the MacBook's headphone jack, they sounded reasonably close to how they sounded if I played the CD itself via my Sony CD player connected to my home stereo system.

But the same ALAC files copied to iTunes on my iPhone and played from the iPhone to my car's stereo system via a direct Lightning-to-USB connection did not sound as good as if I played the original CD in my car's CD player. Ultimately I concluded that something was getting lost as my iPhone's computer processor was converting the ALAC to WAVE in realtime during the playback process. Also, when ripping a CD with the iTunes app on the MacBook, it automatically assigns a + / - volume adjustment to each track so each will play back at approximately the same volume, which is known as "Sound Check" on the Music app today. I found that Sound Check produced a real distortion issue for tracks that start out with very quiet passages and then get louder as the song progresses. The worst-case was playing "Neverland" from Marillion's album Marbles. I would barely be able to hear the beginning of the song and then it would distort horribly during that track's climax when played back from the iTunes-made ALAC file, but not when I played the actual CD. I found that AIFF files without Sound Check played back the same as the original CD.

I will confess to being perhaps a bit too picky about sound quality, but, nonetheless, it's important to me. And I can hear the difference. Therefore, I indulge this obsession. And, yes, I know that AIFF files take up a lot of storage, but my latest iPhone has a full terabyte of storage.

Now I use free apps for Mac OS to handle a lot of the duties that I used to do with the iTunes / Music app. I use the XLD app for accurately ripping CDs to uncompressed AIFF files, which I then add to my Apple Music library. XLD is also an excellent file converter and has been able to convert every file format I've encountered so far. Many times I'll use XLD for tag editing before performing a file conversion or a CD extraction, but the Apple Music app is still great for tagging and for organizing my music library.

For playback from my MacBook, I use the Pine Player app for Mac OS. It can play any music file format except for SHN (which can be converted with XLD), including FLAC, APE, and even non-PCM formats like DSF and DSD. Pine Player displays sound levels for each stereo channel, as well as the bit rate, sampling rate and the file format. Pine Player has converting and tagging features, but I find them not as reliable or easy-to-use compared to using XLD and Apple Music.

[madhombre]

Thanks for all the great info folks!
Will stick with flac