iPod AAC to Apple Lossless

[polevault139]

I started converting all of my music (which was in AAC), to Apple Lossless. Will I see any change in the sound quality since I am converting from a lower bitrate file anyways? I wanted to convert because in some songs, parts became too distorted and sounded bad. I wanted to know if converting to Apple Lossless will help.

Thanks,
Kevin

 

[Blue Velvet]

Help? Absolutely not. Converting to Lossless will not put anything back in; it's like saving a lossy JPG as a lossless TIFF.

 

[devman]

nope. all you'll do is waste time and space.

 

[adrianblaine]

You will not be able to gain data that was not there to begin with.

 

[bousozoku]

You need to re-rip everything to Apple Lossless to get the full quality. You can't get it from something that doesn't have it.

 

[Zwhaler]

I wanted to do this as well, and I just started ripping all of my music...

 

[Shacklebolt]

Think of it like a painting.

You're a fantastic painter - Michaelangelo incarnate - and you've got this postcard of the Sistine Chapel that's really awesome, so you figure - "Sweet, I'll paint the Sistine Chapel design on my ceiling - it'll be wicked." ... only all you've got to go on is that little postcard.

Now, since you're a fantastic artist, you can do a pretty good job, but you're obviously not going to get it just right, because you don't know what the whole sistine chapel really looks like; let's face it, postcards can only get so detailed, your vision is only so good, etc. So yes, you can blow it up to the size of your ceiling, but at most, it will be as detailed as that little postcard; everything else will just be filler.

As has been said above, lossless is only meant to work directly from CDs or true AIFFs.

 

[benpatient]

i wouldn't think of it that way at all.

the jpg-TIFF analogy is much more accurate.

if you're a good artist, you can fake the missing parts of the sistine chapel MUCH more convincingly than you could if you were doing this:

take a digital scan of the postcard to Kinkos (without even running a descreen filter on it), have them print it out at the size of your ceiling, and then apply that print-out to your ceiling.

converting from lossy to lossless is pointless unless you're mixing different sources into a new, third product.

 

[bousozoku]

Think of it like a painting.

You're a fantastic painter - Michaelangelo incarnate - and you've got this postcard of the Sistine Chapel that's really awesome, so you figure - "Sweet, I'll paint the Sistine Chapel design on my ceiling - it'll be wicked." ... only all you've got to go on is that little postcard.

Now, since you're a fantastic artist, you can do a pretty good job, but you're obviously not going to get it just right, because you don't know what the whole sistine chapel really looks like; let's face it, postcards can only get so detailed, your vision is only so good, etc. So yes, you can blow it up to the size of your ceiling, but at most, it will be as detailed as that little postcard; everything else will just be filler.

As has been said above, lossless is only meant to work directly from CDs or true AIFFs.

That's interesting but it's more like switching from AAC 128 Kbps to mp3 256 Kbps. It's just different, not better because you still don't have all of the original information.