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is Apple Lossless truly lossless??

A

anikgol

macrumors member
Original poster
Aug 1, 2003
81
0
if searched through the net and not found a definitive answer to this. being a grateful dead fan im interested to know it its truly lossless as FLAC and shn.

ive heard that the bitrate is appr. 820 and it is much lower than wav/aif. but how can we test to see it this _truly_ is lossless and not just a AAC encoded at a high bitrate?? this is very important to many live music fans how trade music.
 
nice to know. but the better question is, does this have a future? how many ppl would use this?

what i would love to know is, can i create a smart playlist with only lossless tunes? well you know, my 10 000 song ipod might only carry 800 after loading it with lossless music....
 
redApple-- look i dotn think this is targeted at ipod users in general but i have theory that since itunes is going to make available Grateful dead (they are hard on lossless) this is targeted most at live recording material like Dead shows. this is great since there will be a definitive standard for itunes users how are into live music trading. i for myself will maybe use this alot. depends on how the file size is compared to FLAC.

i also suspect that apple will make not only live dead material but other artists friendly to live material recordings, like Pearl Jam and Phish.
 
where is "ars"? do you have a link for that page? artsdeca or something...?
 
redAPPLE said:
nice to know. but the better question is, does this have a future? how many ppl would use this?

what i would love to know is, can i create a smart playlist with only lossless tunes? well you know, my 10 000 song ipod might only carry 800 after loading it with lossless music....
Click to expand...

I've waited to rip my classical music due to the deficiencies of the existing formats. A lossless format would certainly be a great thing, especially using only half the storage of AIFF.
 
bousozoku said:
I've waited to rip my classical music due to the deficiencies of the existing formats. A lossless format would certainly be a great thing, especially using only half the storage of AIFF.
Click to expand...

It won't necessarily be half the file size of the equivalent AIFF files. The Apple Lossless codec (part of the newly emerging AAC Lossless codec, see: http://www.nue.tu-berlin.de/forschung/projekte/lossless/mpeg4als.html) is actually variable bit rate. Some of the files I've encoded are 2/3 the size of AIFFs, as opposed to half. But still, the fact remains, it is lossless.
 
why not use FLAC and shn? try shorten and xAct for shn and FLAC files.
 
anikgol said:
why not use FLAC and shn? try shorten and xAct for shn and FLAC files.
Click to expand...

FLAC is great (I use the now-dead MacAmp to listen to all of my FLACed files) .. but what's nice about the Apple Lossless is that it has a standard for metadata. FLAC has support for it, but it's not standard, and can be proprietarily added by different programs. Plus, this allows people to add lossless files to iTunes. I miss the elegance of iTunes when I use MacAmp, but since no QuickTime plugin yet exists for Flac, I'm still wondering if I should re-rip all of those CDs ....
 
MacManDan said:
It won't necessarily be half the file size of the equivalent AIFF files. The Apple Lossless codec (part of the newly emerging AAC Lossless codec, see: http://www.nue.tu-berlin.de/forschung/projekte/lossless/mpeg4als.html) is actually variable bit rate. Some of the files I've encoded are 2/3 the size of AIFFs, as opposed to half. But still, the fact remains, it is lossless.
Click to expand...

Considering that all of my other music is encoded as 256 Kbps mp3 format, I suppose 66 percent isn't too bad for classical. I'll just have to try it and see what kind of results I get from it. My hard drive has been hurting ever since ripping my music so, I can't use that much more without ditching applications. :D
 
People keep on saying "half the size of AIFF" or "two-third the size of AIFF." Well, I don't really know what that means. I'm interested in encoding my music in a lossless format, but how big is an average song going to be? Like a 4:00 minute song, for example, in my library is about 5.7 megs (192 kbps MP3). About how big would that song be in Apple Lossless? :confused:
 
jamdr said:
People keep on saying "half the size of AIFF" or "two-third the size of AIFF." Well, I don't really know what that means. I'm interested in encoding my music in a lossless format, but how big is an average song going to be? Like a 4:00 minute song, for example, in my library is about 5.7 megs (192 kbps MP3). About how big would that song be in Apple Lossless? :confused:
Click to expand...

AIFF is about 10MB/min. Assuming about the 50% compression rate on lossless, than means a 4 minute file will be about 20MB vs the AIFF at around 40MB.
 
jamdr said:
How does AAC compare to all of this? Apple only sells 128-bitrate AACs on iTunes, and I've restrained from buying any songs because that doesn't seem to be very high. I want my songs to sound at least as good at 192 kbps MP3. Is 128 AAC even close to this?
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There is an easy way to find out! Rip a song off of a CD at 192Kbps mp3 and again at 128Kbps AAC in iTunes. If you can't tell the difference, then one does not exist. ;)
 
jamdr said:
How does AAC compare to all of this? Apple only sells 128-bitrate AACs on iTunes, and I've restrained from buying any songs because that doesn't seem to be very high. I want my songs to sound at least as good at 192 kbps MP3. Is 128 AAC even close to this?
Click to expand...

It is generally accepted that 128 AAC is equivalent to at least 160 MP3, but for me, I went from 192 MP3 to 128 AAC, so that may vary by taste. Do your own test I think with some of your CDs. I'm sure that some people will come in here and tell you that nothing below 256 kbps AAC will do, but I know people (and I suspect this is typical) who have found that 128 and below AAC is absolutely fine for them.
 
ok well my personal favorite music is by this band called TOOL so i went ahead and tried to import one of thier cds at the lossless rate and this is what i got....anyone know why? is it because its a variable bit rate or what?
 

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PlaceofDis said:
ok well my personal favorite music is by this band called TOOL so i went ahead and tried to import one of thier cds at the lossless rate and this is what i got....anyone know why? is it because its a variable bit rate or what?
Click to expand...

That would be it exactly.
 
ok i thought it was variable bit rate, but doesnt this make it lossy? or are the other formats just as variable?
 
PlaceofDis said:
ok i thought it was variable bit rate, but doesnt this make it lossy?
Click to expand...

No, VBR is common among all loss-less compression schemes. This is because there are some parts of the data stream that compress better than others. CBR encodings basically throw out data until they reach the target bit rate, but VBR encodings are free to alter their compression rate to preserve more data. Lossless is VBR that isn't allowed to throw any data away.
 
Rincewind42 said:
No, VBR is common among all loss-less compression schemes. This is because there are some parts of the data stream that compress better than others. CBR encodings basically throw out data until they reach the target bit rate, but VBR encodings are free to alter their compression rate to preserve more data. Lossless is VBR that isn't allowed to throw any data away.
Click to expand...

thank you very much i was wondering about this and your anwer helps to clear it all up for me, i appreciate it
 
I ripped one opera piece and it went from 100.2 MB on the CD to 39.3 MB in iTunes' lossless format. That's not bad and it sounded okay, as far as I could tell with my lousy speakers. :D
 
bousozoku said:
I ripped one opera piece and it went from 100.2 MB on the CD to 39.3 MB in iTunes' lossless format. That's not bad and it sounded okay, as far as I could tell with my lousy speakers. :D
Click to expand...

Very nice! Mileage does vary on song, of course .. so I'm not too surprised. As long as Apple's format meets the standard (which I'm sure it does) then your files should audibly be exact replicas of the CD, so even if you had a much better system you shouldn't be able to tell the difference ;)
 
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