is Apple Lossless truly lossless??

[anikgol]

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.

[porovaara]

It is. Over on ars some people have already done comparisons with FLAC.

[redAPPLE]

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....

[anikgol]

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.

[anikgol]

where is "ars"? do you have a link for that page? artsdeca or something...?

[rosalindavenue]

http://www.arstechnica.com/

[gekko513]

where is "ars"? do you have a link for that page? artsdeca or something...?
the fleshy part of the human body that you sit on :confused: no, wait, that has an 'e' ... I think he means arstechnica.com (http://arstechnica.com)

[anikgol]

thanx a ton for the link.

takker og bukker fra Trondheim gekko.

[bousozoku]

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....

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.

[MacManDan]

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.

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.

[anikgol]

why not use FLAC and shn? try shorten and xAct for shn and FLAC files.

[MacManDan]

why not use FLAC and shn? try shorten and xAct for shn and FLAC files.

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 ....

[bousozoku]

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.

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

[jamdr]

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:

[Rincewind42]

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:

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.

[JordanNZ]

Some of the files I encoded with this have been 2/3 the size of Aiff, and some have been 1/5 of the size! Very impressive.

[stoid]

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?

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. ;)

[Rincewind42]

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?

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.

[PlaceofDis]

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?

[Rincewind42]

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?

That would be it exactly.

[PlaceofDis]

ok i thought it was variable bit rate, but doesnt this make it lossy? or are the other formats just as variable?

[Rincewind42]

ok i thought it was variable bit rate, but doesnt this make it lossy?

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.

[PlaceofDis]

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.

thank you very much i was wondering about this and your anwer helps to clear it all up for me, i appreciate it

[bousozoku]

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

[MacManDan]

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

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 ;)

[Makosuke]

It's worth noting that AIFF files can actually be of a number of MB/minute rates. *CD quality* uncompressed audio (in any uncompressed format), which is what most people are interested in, should take exactly 10.09MB/second, since CDs use 44.1KHz, 16 bit, stereo audio. AIFF files can also use 48KHz, 22KHz, 8 bit, or a number of different quality levels of audio, taking up more or less space than CD-quality audio. I don't know if the Apple lossless codec can compress different quality audio, or if it's limited to 44.1KHz, 16bit stereo, but if it can you could actually go slightly above CD quality and still use up slightly less space.

Perhaps the Apple lossless codec is targeted at the Dead, but it seems to me it's much more for audiophiles with iPods; after all, some pepole insist on CD quality on their iPods (one of the advantages of a 40GB audio player), so Apple has just let them take twice as much music with them (2000 full-quality songs in your pocket--nice).

Perhaps this is also the precursor to offering some sort of "audiophile" version of the iTMS, where full-quality tracks can be bought for a bit more money, thereby placating the hardcore audio fans. The parts are in place now, anyway.

(Incidentally, there are also compressed AIFF files, which use one of a few relatively crude [compared to MP3 or AAC] lossy compression schemes to save some space, but most of them sound pretty bad, and they're rarely used these days.)

[WinterMute]

The irony here is that digital audio by definition is lossy, as encoding at 44.1Khz excludes frequencies above 20Khz (according to the Nyquist Theorem as adopted by Phillips). It's been noted by a lot of audio pros that removing those frequencies (which we aren't supposed to be able to hear) alters the frequencies that we can hear, thus digital audio (at 44.1Khz) is automatically lossy.

Maybe Apple should call it the No Additional Loss codec. ;)

I think it sounds pretty good, I've run some comparisons in the studio with a pair of Dynaudio M2's and a Chord amp, there are some artifacts in the HF, but they are by no means as obvious or painful as with MP3 or AAC.

Results vary with material strangely, classical doesn't seem to fare as well as rock and pop, but overall this is a real step forward, now all I need is a 40Gig iPod to re-rip all my CD's to... :D :eek:

[ifjake]

yeah i have a feeling though once i hear 24 bit 96kHz sound i will have the hardest time going back to AAC. i'm tempted to just keep myself ignorant. but 24/96 is oh so tempting itself.

[Penman]

The irony here is that digital audio by definition is lossy, as encoding at 44.1Khz excludes frequencies above 20Khz (according to the Nyquist Theorem as adopted by Phillips). It's been noted by a lot of audio pros that removing those frequencies (which we aren't supposed to be able to hear) alters the frequencies that we can hear, thus digital audio (at 44.1Khz) is automatically lossy.

Maybe Apple should call it the No Additional Loss codec. ;)

I think it sounds pretty good, I've run some comparisons in the studio with a pair of Dynaudio M2's and a Chord amp, there are some artifacts in the HF, but they are by no means as obvious or painful as with MP3 or AAC.

Results vary with material strangely, classical doesn't seem to fare as well as rock and pop, but overall this is a real step forward, now all I need is a 40Gig iPod to re-rip all my CD's to... :D :eek:

It's worth remembering that every studio in the planet now includes digital equipment and that a lot of the more popular, expensive, stuff is old (classice Lexicon 480 anyone). The music only has to be digitized once in order for all the modifications of digital to occur (which are far smaller than the crap that comes out of tube amps but that's another story - sometime's crap's not crap).

Don't worry too much about 16/44 digital. Even 24/192 has the limitations of 16/44 if the artist is using 16/44 equipment in the recording process. You can't upsample when you've lost information and get a better result.

A band like Tool's a good example. They're very digital - 24/192 won't affect them until the digital equipment in production catches up. That will take decades and some old digital equipment's here to stay.

[WinterMute]

It's worth remembering that every studio in the planet now includes digital equipment and that a lot of the more popular, expensive, stuff is old (classice Lexicon 480 anyone). The music only has to be digitized once in order for all the modifications of digital to occur (which are far smaller than the crap that comes out of tube amps but that's another story - sometime's crap's not crap).

Don't worry too much about 16/44 digital. Even 24/192 has the limitations of 16/44 if the artist is using 16/44 equipment in the recording process. You can't upsample when you've lost information and get a better result.

A band like Tool's a good example. They're very digital - 24/192 won't affect them until the digital equipment in production catches up. That will take decades and some old digital equipment's here to stay.

Agreed, the problem is the CD bottleneck. So many people have 16/44.1 machines that it becomes almost impossible to raise the consumer level to a better rate. The advent of DVD players capable of handling DVD audio discs up to 24/192 is a good move, but it's a slow process.

I record at 24/96 habitually now, and only downsample for the final jump to CD, it does have an effect on the final quality, as does recording on 24 track 2" analog tape and mastering to CD, you may not have the final richness that analog affords, but it does sound (subjectively) better.

Being as most punters can't hear the differences between 128K .mp3 and 1440K .aiff then I think Apple's new codec is an interesting aside for the audio pros and audiophiles.

[JFreak]

I want my songs to sound at least as good at 192 kbps MP3. Is 128 AAC even close to this?

i like aac@128 better than mp3@192. both are lossy, but aac comes close enough to original.

[JFreak]

yeah i have a feeling though once i hear 24 bit 96kHz sound i will have the hardest time going back to AAC.

i have a 24/96 protools system and i can tell you the difference to 16/44.1 is really very huge. in fact, it's the 8 additional bits that count more than doubling the sampling rate, but hey, in ten years audio dvd might have replaced cd if we as consumers really want that to happen.

yes, the bit depth counts more - 16bits can in theory represent about 96dB dynamic range which isn't enough. 24bits can do about 144dB which is more than human ear can handle. of course the higher the sampling rate the higher the audio resolution, but it is far more difficult to hear difference between 24/44.1 and 24/96 than it is to hear a difference between 16/44.1 and 24/44.1 'cause the limitation in dynamics is so severe in 16 bits.

but that's also relative. cd audio is enough for pop music. really. tech-wise pop music is over-compressed and lifeless and doesn't suffer much from cd distribution. acoustical though, that benefits greatly from dvd quality.

[Jack White]

ok well my personal favorite music is by this band called TOOL
i'm sorry.

[PlaceofDis]

i'm sorry.

everyone has their own opinions, no need to put anyone down for whatever reason....i prefer one thing over another, but you are the other way around...no big deal

[atari1356]

yeah i have a feeling though once i hear 24 bit 96kHz sound i will have the hardest time going back to AAC. i'm tempted to just keep myself ignorant. but 24/96 is oh so tempting itself.

I'm blissfully ignorant and am enjoying my 192kbps AAC encoded CD collection. Lossless? Pffftt... that takes up way too much hard drive space. :D

[buckuxc]

So, should I suppose with the Apple Lossless encoder, it is unnecessary to decompress the files back to wavs when wants to make an original copy of the CD again? I've been using Monkey's Audio for the past 3 months and have ripped most of my collection into it, but if this encoder is native to iTunes, that's just easier, especially since I can listen to it. Should I switch? and is decompression entirely unnecessary or would an audiophile really want to decompres back to AIFF/WAV?

sps

[Rincewind42]

So, should I suppose with the Apple Lossless encoder, it is unnecessary to decompress the files back to wavs when wants to make an original copy of the CD again? I've been using Monkey's Audio for the past 3 months and have ripped most of my collection into it, but if this encoder is native to iTunes, that's just easier, especially since I can listen to it. Should I switch? and is decompression entirely unnecessary or would an audiophile really want to decompres back to AIFF/WAV?

Decompression has never been necessary, wether the encoding was lossy or lossless. You lose information with a lossy encoder at the time of encoding, so decompressing the audio won't help you get anything back, and lossless encodings restore the original waveform. Technically the file is decompressed to make an Audio CD (just as it is to play it) but it doesn't affect anything for you to decompress it yourself.

[mm0204]

if this belongs on another forum, i appologize and plead newbie. however, after reading the thread, it seems as though the posters here might have an idea or two.....

occasionally, when importing from my cd's to mp3, i get a loud clicking sound "under" the music. this happens with no predictable forshadowing... it happens with scratched cd's, pristine cd's, ripped-and-burned as well as professionally manufactured. my machine is a snow eMac w/ati graphics (g4?), apple stock combo drive, and about 160 mb ram i tunes 4, os 10.2.?. my itunes settings are to import to mp3 at 256k bit rate...

should i try aac, apple lossless, a different bit rate? my desire is to play music on my mac, burn mp3cd's for the car, and burn audioCD's for friends and family...

get back at me if you have any suggestions
mm0204 (at) ispwest (dot) com

[Crikey]

(For the poster with the static)

Is there any pattern to how that happens? First song you rip, or only on the thrid-fourth-fifth song or near the end of ripping a whole CD? Also, do you hear the static just listening to the song from the CD in iTunes, or only when listening?

160MB isn't much RAM for running MacOS X. Could be you're running out and swapping, which might interfere with iTunes' ability to rip without errors.

If you hear the static when just listening to the CD in iTunes, in addition to while ripping, maybe there is a compatibility problem between your drive and the CD? I have some CDs that have static when played on some audio CD players but not others.

Good luck!


Crikey

[mm0204]

thanks crikey for the response.... let me add some more detail of the problem

first off, my statement of my ram was just a brain fart (excuse me) my emac is a 700mhz g4 with 384mb ram/40gb hdd, standard apple combo drive

upon further inspection, the errors seem to occur with greatest frequency toward the end of the cd; last 3 or so songs. could this be a ram/swap file issue?

also, would one of the other codec's provide more error correction?

generally, the source cd sounds fine when played back thru iTunes or on my home stereo; it's only the mp3 files which "click" or have static.

any thoughts???????

thanks,
-Matt :)

[anikgol]

first of all. ive been a live audio collector for years and ive notived that mane mp3 source cds indeed have gaps between songs. this was also on pc so its not mac iTunes specific. what you can do is to try usign other applications for burning to see if there is any difference. but if yo uare into live audio then FLAC/shn is what you should use. if not, studio albums ahve gaps so i dont really see the problem.


people claim that since mp3s have tags and all that info they insert a small gap in files. what you can do is to remove the gaps from tracks using wav editor and then burning

[jeffy.dee-lux]

studio albums ahve gaps so i dont really see the problem.


that's not always true. some of my favourite artists like to blend parts of their albums into long sessions of a couple tracks that go together. In that case, the gap between songs is actually cutting into the music, not just the applause.

This little issue, the gaps between tracks, strikes me as something that should be trivial to fix; we're able to do a lot of pretty cool stuff with computers. This is the kind of thing that i would expect apple to tackle, make it so that when you tell iTunes you don't want a gap between tracks, it actually burns the disc that way.

[Sofa King Kool]

The irony here is that digital audio by definition is lossy, as encoding at 44.1Khz excludes frequencies above 20Khz (according to the Nyquist Theorem as adopted by Phillips). It's been noted by a lot of audio pros that removing those frequencies (which we aren't supposed to be able to hear) alters the frequencies that we can hear, thus digital audio (at 44.1Khz) is automatically lossy.

I agree with some of what you are saying here. The sampling rate of CD (as you noted) is indeed 44.1 kHz, however the sonic frequencies are limited to about 22kHz. The 16-bit words give a noise floor at about minus 96dB (dynamic range), which again really limits the accuracy. This is why CDs sound harsh, condensed, linear, and fatigue the listener. The analogue to digital conversion of PCM CDs requires too much decimation. Most people don't realize that the digital information must be converted back to analogue before you can hear it. One must also rely on highly accurate and often absurdly high priced digital to analogue converters to transfer the digital information back into analogue in order for it to reach the preamp, power amp, and then finally be heard from the speakers. It's a relatively long chain, but it does offer many advantages over LP. Newer technologies like SACD and DVD-A overcome many shortcomings of CD, but unfortunately introduce some other "possible/theoretical" setbacks. Both formats are however far superior to CD, and especially to downloadable music. To think people at one time believed that a 320 kbps mp3 is equal to CD quality! Now many believe 320 AAC (although a much better algorithm than mp3) is equal to CD quality! It's silly to think that an approximation of an approximation can ever be better or equal quality to the first approximation. Long story short, audiophiles will never download music. I wish others would learn to appreciate quality and start buying hard copies instead of downloading these musical summations. If you want tunes for your iPod, buy the album and import the songs… especially with such ridiculous prices for the Fisher Price version of a song.

[Sofa King Kool]

yeah i have a feeling though once i hear 24 bit 96kHz sound i will have the hardest time going back to AAC. i'm tempted to just keep myself ignorant. but 24/96 is oh so tempting itself.

Take the plunge! The only regret you will have is not listening to it sooner. If I'm wrong and you're angry because now you want all of your tunes on SACD or DVD-A, then feel free to punch me in the face.