iTunes & EAC

Cwlondon,

Edesilva is talking about lossless compression, fundamentally differently from MP3 which is a lossy compression.

There should be no sonic difference between lossless compression and uncompressed, by definition.

ah....iTunes as a "lossless encoder"....

Maybe I was getting prematurely excited when I saw "WAV"

My issue with Apple lossless is that there may be some weird, embedded, copyright type scheme in their algorithim.

OK... maybe its perfect, maybe its bit for bit, maybe it UNcompresses to WAV like perfection.

But what irritates me, given that hard drive space is only getting cheaper and that 30+ CD's, for example, should be more than enough for the gym, is why people havent just figured out WAV + TAGGING?

But hey if "there should be no sonic difference" than perhaps we are already there, just where we need to be?

But I have heard that before re MP3, which sounded like crap, even with cotton in my ears.

In any case, I am glad to see people focusing on this topic and Edesilva thanks again.

Well, you can *sort* of tag wav files in iTunes... If you import a wav into iTunes, you can specify album/artist/genre. Unfortunately, the "tag" is only part of the library file, and not part of the [file].wav itself, so its not portable, and if you blow up your library, the tags will all disappear.

The only thing you really can't do in iTunes with a wav is specify album art, since the library doesn't store album art, it just references whether the song file has album art in it.

The other kind of drag about using wav files in iTunes is that, because the tags are library specific, they all need to be entered. Since I rip in artist/album format, it offended me that I can't somehow recover that information. I recently discovered, in fact, that you can. There is an iTunes SDK that allows you to write simple javascripts to manipulate database information. I just wrote one last night to locate songs with the format "##-Title" in the database, convert the name to just "Title" and convert the ## into an integer track entry. Think it was 10 lines of javascript.

While there is DRM associated with the Apple formats, it is not in effect for ripped files converted to ALAC or AAC. I tend to dislike proprietary formats, but my ALAC and AAC files are playable via my Squeezebox 3s, so there is some ability to use those formats outside the Apple environment.

One way to augment WAV files is to use a very long file name like "Artist, Album, Song title". Someone pointed out that SlimServer/Squeezebox can parse this information correctly, so you can search by artist, album or song as if the files are tagged.