Apple Lossless Encoding - Quick Questions

Apple Lossless will sound exactly as the original CD, without the compression artifacts that MP3 and AAC introduces. However, in order to get this benefit from Apple Lossless, you have to convert the CD directly into Apple Lossless or convert from another lossless format such as WAV or FLAC. If your song library is already in MP3 or AAC, converting to Apple Lossless will not change the quality one bit. It will only make your files larger. Once a file has been "destroyed" by lossy compression, you can never get that quality back.

Rip your CDs in iTunes set to Apple Lossless under Import.

 

You cannot convert from MP3 or itunes songs to lossless because they've already been compressed ... the only time you can effectlively make a file in apple lossless is from the original CD

 

You rip in lossless to preserve the integrity of the file instead of putting it into mp3 format. It's like taking pictures in RAW instead of formatting directly to jpeg- with the lossless format you don't lose any information due to compression.

 

I use lossless for my collection, still adding as well. It sounds amazing. You can also use Metax to tag extra information if need be as its an .m4a file. Plus, if you have an iPhone, Nano, Shuffle or touch & you want alot you music on the iPod but not alot of space available, you can go over to dougscripts & download a script to copy lossless file to the iPod with on the fly converting to .acc files. Really handy.

You can use lossless on ipod/iphone as normal if you wish but, its also compatible with the Apple TV.

Its most certainly worth the time. But like previous post's, it's only worth it when ripping from a fresh CD or Vinyl. No point what so ever upconverting, doesn't do anything apart from making a .mp3 or .acc file bigger on the HDD for absolute no reason.

Hope that helps a bit more!?

 

Here it is: If you have the original uncompressed cd's of the music, you can do Apple Lossless and it will benefit you from having the original 1411kbps bitrate of a CD.

In your case, anytime you have mp3's, aac's, that's the end of the story. Not saying mp3's or compressed music sound bad, but you can't make music sound any better converting to lossless when your file's have already been stripped of the information.

 

Read my answers to your threads here:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=644385 (post #4, especially the in bold)

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=647915 (post #2)