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Do you use .alac on your iPhone/iPod

  • Yes

    Votes: 15 28.3%
  • No

    Votes: 29 54.7%
  • What is .alac / lossless?

    Votes: 8 15.1%
  • You can put lossless on the iPhone? Blew my mind.

    Votes: 1 1.9%

  • Total voters
    53

blueroom

macrumors 603
Feb 15, 2009
6,381
26
Toronto, Canada
I use ALAC on my CD rip collection, when syncing to my portable devices I let iTunes down convert to 128k to save space.
I use XLD for ripping.
 

vastoholic

macrumors 68000
Jan 28, 2009
1,957
1
Tulsa, OK
I use 320 and lossless on my phone, but only because I don't keep multiple copies of each on my computer. I don't let it downgrade to 128 either. I just let it sync as is. Sure it uses more space, but I only keep certain playlists or artist on my phone anyway.
 

Small White Car

macrumors G4
Aug 29, 2006
10,966
1,463
Washington DC
I only use my car speakers and my earbuds to listen to music from my phone. Higher quality files than what iTunes sells really won't be gaining me much.
 

ProudLoz

macrumors regular
Aug 26, 2012
240
0
I use ALAC on my CD rip collection, when syncing to my portable devices I let iTunes down convert to 128k to save space.
I use XLD for ripping.

Same here, except I do 256 kbps. ALAC or any lossless files are a bit useless on a mobile device.
 

zorinlynx

macrumors G3
May 31, 2007
8,170
17,694
Florida, USA
The nice thing about FLAC and ALAC is that they are both lossless formats. Once you've converted your FLACs to ALAC, you can even delete the FLACs; you won't lose a thing. If in the future you move to a platform that doesn't support ALAC, but does support FLAC, you can convert them back and be right where you started.

Max is an excellent free tool for this. I've put it though many paces!
 

alphaod

macrumors Core
Feb 9, 2008
22,183
1,245
NYC
No, I use iTunes Match on my iPhone.

I do put lossless on my iPod touch.

Also it's .m4a not .alac ;)
 

scaredpoet

macrumors 604
Apr 6, 2007
6,627
342
The nice thing about FLAC and ALAC is that they are both lossless formats. Once you've converted your FLACs to ALAC, you can even delete the FLACs; you won't lose a thing. If in the future you move to a platform that doesn't support ALAC, but does support FLAC, you can convert them back and be right where you started.

ALAC is now open source, so chances are you're going to be hard pressed over time to find something that doesn't support ALAC but does support FLAC. Pretty much any software using the libavcodec supports ALAC now.
 

Michael CM1

macrumors 603
Feb 4, 2008
5,681
276
I buy almost all of my stuff from iTunes, so no lossless here. I also mostly use EarPods and my car stereo -- the speakers are nice now, but the head unit is still about 7 watts of factory tinnage. So it makes zero sense to even think about using anything like that. Heck, I downconvert to 128k because 16GB feels like 1GB.

I'd appreciate seeing Apple offer some higher-quality music along the lines of DTS audio. I'm not sure of the technical specifics of it, but I remember being blown away by DTS quality on DVDs in the 1990s. We're still using just 2 channels on most music audio.

This wouldn't help much with earbuds, but it would help when streaming to Apple TV or to a car system if it was a good quality one. Plus I'm sure the music companies would love to sell some upcharged music like the movie studios love charging an extra $5 for HD movies.
 
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