Digital Music: A Quick Guide to Having the Best Lossless Files
Digital Music
Surely changing our music from one side to the other, from an analog format to a digital one or even music already stored in digital format on a compact disc towards one for use on mobile devices, would result in a loss of sound quality that would exceed convenience and comfort.
This has been the main vision of people who care about sound quality, since the concept of digital music files was born. A reference generated by the common use of highly compressed lossy formats such as MP3.
wHowever, it is an opinion that simply “cannot take any more water.” Yes, popular formats like MP3 and AAC sacrifice some quality to keep file sizes small, but the emergence of lossless digital audio formats that are capable of preserving every piece of information from a CD recording means that a ripped file It may sound indistinguishable from the original.
You may still be wondering why you should spend precious time ripping up your CD collection. It’s all about convenience: a lossless digital music collection saves shelf space, is easy to move and to back up; for larger collections, it also makes locating individual songs and albums much easier and faster. You can also access a digital music library from multiple sources simultaneously, for example, from multiple network music players located in different rooms in your home.
Additionally, thanks to higher quality file acquisitions with popular streaming and download sites like B&W Society of Sound, higher quality music files can now be accessed as part of a subscription-based model without taking up space valuable on shelves – or even the attic – with physical means.
On the hardware side, storage devices like NAS and external hard drives offer huge amounts of space at ever lower prices. And with increasingly better and less expensive, widely available high-quality DACs, computers now offer excellent reproduction and can be easily connected to your existing hi-fi system, either wired or wireless.
When streaming or ripping discs, the file format option may seem complicated by too many options. This is what we think of the main formats that can be the salvation of true audio enthusiasts:
FLAC
Free Lossless Audio Codec is a popular choice for many audiophiles. Like MP3 and AAC, FLAC is compressed to keep file sizes relatively small, but unlike those formats, it is lossless and therefore – in theory – indistinguishable from the quality of a CD. In theory. Audio from CD converted to FLAC will typically shrink about 50 percent from its original size; a typical three-minute song on a CD will take up 30-40MB of space, while a ripped FLAC version of that song results in 15-20MB.
FLAC supports metadata (artist and song information can be embedded in the file and artwork can be referenced by the file) and will be played on a wide variety of software and hardware. Crucially for many, it is currently not compatible with Apple products like iTunes or the iPhone.
However, there are downsides to FLAC from an audiophile perspective and a lot of that comes during encoding and decompressing the file for playback. Because FLAC is unzipped on the fly, the sound quality is highly dependent on the software you are using to do that. Therefore, although it is theoretically lossless, there are still barriers to overcome when listening to the music contained in FLAC.
Apple Lossless
As you might guess from the name, Apple Lossless Audio Codec (or ALAC) was developed by Apple and works with company products like iTunes, iPod and iPhone (as well as supported by a number of other computers and players on software); If you are an avid user of the Apple team, it will be very attractive to you. However, like FLAC, this format is compressed, and files ripped from a CD are typically around 40-60 percent of their original size. Furthermore, ALAC suffers from the same decoding problems as FLAC.
AIFF
AIFF is a lossless format, but also without compression. While this means that it takes up as much space as the source file when ripping from a CD, it also avoids any compression issues, making it the ideal file for people who are concerned about sound quality.
