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WAV or Apple Lossless Encoder?

We plan on purchasing a Wadia 170i Transport to use with our Museatex Bidat. As we have several hundred CD's that we want to transfer, we want to begin the process of downloading them into our itunes library. I was surprised when I read the Wadia owners manual that it appears to recommend using the WAV encoder and does also mention mention Apple Lossless as an alternative. We use a PC rather than a MAC (sorry) and I know that WAV was originally developed for the PC, but from every thing that I've read, Lossless is the superior solution. Anyone compare these two and notice a difference? I only want to do this once.
conedison8

Showing 5 responses by brianmgrarcom

brianmgrarcom
1,317 posts
 
I am going to experiment with Peter's suggestion but I have a question. I downloaded EAC today and copied a couple music files. When I insert a CD, EAC lists all the tracks but no information, no album name, artist name, track names, etc. Do I have something set wrong? This would be VERY tedious if I had to type this all in myself.
brianmgrarcom
1,317 posts
 
I experimented with two tracks, one from Diana Krall and one from Keb' Mo'.

I already had these on my iPod in Apple Lossless, I use a Wadia iTransport.

I copied these two tracks using EAC as .wav files and copied them into iTunes. I then used the iTunes tool to convert them to Apple Lossless, but keeping the .wav version also, giving me 3 copies to of each; I also copied the Diana Krall in for a 4th version, this using iTunes creating a .wav version.

In playing these I was thinking there was a slight difference, with the original iTunes Apple Lossless version being very slightly of lesser quality, although I played the cuts many times questioning this. This surprised and disappointed me. Then I realized the "original" version I created was done back before I started using error correction and wondered if that could be the cause of any difference. So I replaced the original with a newer Apple Lossless version with error correction on. My conclusion is that I can not hear any difference.

Maybe my song choices weren't the best, maybe you ears are better or maybe _____________, you fill in the blank. If I get a chance this weekend maybe I'll give yet another listen. When doing these comparisons it becomes quite annoying.

Brian
brianmgrarcom
1,317 posts
 
Peter is correct Audiowoman. The option you speak of is designed to convert a full size file, like a .wav, to Apple Lossless.

Brian
brianmgrarcom
1,317 posts
 
Apple lossles does compress audio not much but it does.
You talk not of what you know.
brianmgrarcom
1,317 posts
 
That means wav is copying 99.99% of the information on the cd disk and apple lossless doesn't because the file size is less than half of wav. So apple lossless is not really lossless because it is cmpressed.
Armyvet, Dtc explained what I was getting at very well, much better than I. Your comments above are the "issue" I was getting at as incorrect.

First, why is .wav only copying 99.99% and not a full 100% (To me this is analog thinking.)

Second, as Dtc stated so well, the Apple Lossless file size may be smaller but it has no less information.

Brian
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