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Apple Lossless Encoder - Audiophile Quality?

Is Apple Lossless Encoder the best format to use to import music into iTunes?

My goal is to get the highest quality music regardless of cost.

I want to get the best that I can get of a CD so that I won't have to re-import my music from the same CDs in 5-years.

I am using a Mac based system, but I don't think that should make any difference.
hdomke

Showing 3 responses by ckorody

ckorody
643 posts
 
I totally agree with Rdc2000 and Kthomas

iTunes is one of the crown jewels of the Apple empire. It is tightly coupled to their revenue model. There are some 125 million copies of iTunes out there.

In plain english this means that Apple has a world class team of developers and programmers supporting iTunes. There is no other format that can even begin to dream about that.

It sounds great, integrates all the functions associated with hard drive based music and its free...
ckorody
643 posts
 
It's the standard if you are using a Macintosh. Numerous threads will confirm that it can be converted back to WAV or AIFF with exactly the same number of bits.

As for why not use AIFF. AIFF and WAV are old standards. They were never designed to work with metadata - what is called tagging - meaning all the information that iTunes will automatically go get for you everytime you rip a CD.

Apple Lossless handles this information perfectly affording exactly the kind of flexibility that you are looking for. WAV and AIFF do not. Again a million threads on the subject.
ckorody
643 posts
 
Onhwy61 - the data is not compressed in a wireless transmission - its just data and there is not much of it at that. What makes this all work is the small size of the files and the pipe required.

Just for the record - since I didn't know I took a tour around Wikipedia. Seems that AIFF was developed by Apple in 1988 (20 years ago).It is uncompressed PCM. With the advent of Mac OS X Apple created a new AIFF format called AIFF-C/sowt which is what iTunes is now encoding in. The audio quality is said to be identical.

Now with Mac 10.4.9 (and by extension Leopard and the other kitties to come) different applications are exporting AIFF differently. Though not an issue with iTunes at present, this change presents potential compatibility issues between systems which use only AIFF, and files written in OS 10.4.9 as AIFF-C.

This is a good example of why I advocate Apple Lossless - I'd rather listen to music then worry about compatibility in the future.

Also it is unclear to me that AIFF of either flavor has room for all the metadata types we now use...
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