Lossless conversion format help

06-24-09: Daedalus_audio
I found Apple lossless to be 'lossy' , the sound is very inferior to WAV or AIFF.

Do you have a preference between WAV and AIFF?

Daedalus_audio - Apple lossless is indeed lossless. You can convert a WAV file to Apple lossless and then back to WAV and the original and converted WAV files are bit for bit identical. You can rip a file to Apple lossless and convert it to WAV and it is bit for bit identical to a WAV file ripped directly to WAV. Are you sure you have checked the box to do error correction when ripping with iTunes? If you are hearing major differences between Apple lossless and WAV then it is probably a playback issue or some other software issue, not a issue of Apple lossless being "lossy". There are lots of very detailed discussions on this topic and some people think there are subtle differences between various formats. There may be some minor errors is some of the software, but the actual data bits are the same. Since Apple does not provide details on its file format, it is very hard to analyze the various meta data in the file.

Mmike84 - I would suggest you look at dbPoweramp. It has a batch converter and I believe it can convert AIFF (or FLAC) to WMA, although I have not tried it. Note that WAV and FLAC files do not have embedded tags.

I also understand that lossless compression should produce files identical to the originals, but somehow, when I play music from my MacBook that I ripped with ALC, it's sort of irritating, where the music I've ripped as AIFF or WAV affects me in a more comfortable way.

Also, when I've transferred ALC files to my iPod Touch, the music sounds fine coming from the iPod Touch. Go figure.

Maybe a higher amount of jitter results from expanding a compressed file from a moving disk? The iPod Touch has no moving parts, and as I said, it sounds/feels just fine.

I'd sure like to figure this out, because if I go to WAV, I'll be using up at least twice the space for the same music. OTOH, what's the point of storing the music efficiently if playing it gets on my nerves? I guess I could always just sync up an 18-album playlist to the iPod Touch and play the music from there.

Also, maybe one of these would improve things.

I agree with Dtc. I have compared formats and really cant tell the difference between WAV, Apple Lossless, and AIFF.

Check your signal chain. If there are major differences between the 'lossless' formats, maybe there is another player here. ??
My brief experiments with FLAC, before going to Apple Lossless showed no differences. The reason I ended up with the Apple system is that I went with a MAC, junking out the Windows machine. My player before was WinAmp, which features native FLAC support. With the IMac, the intent is to use the wireless feature with an Airport Express, using the optical out to an external DA, in the form of my CA 840c. An eventual goal would be the IpodTouch as remote.