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I have been using apple lossless for a couple of years now. I assumed it was good because it was lossless, and hey, it works on my mac of course.
However now that I am getting a bit more informed about this stuff (I have heard that Apple Lossless is only 16 bit) I am wondering if I should switch to something like dbPower amp. would that give a better sound?
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Lossless compression formats differ only slightly in the way they compress the data, and in the format of the file. However they all work more-or-less the same, and there is some but little differences in how a given file may compress.So, to summarize:
They can use different methods to compress and decompress a given audio file, but the differences are mostly academic as the results are similar although not identical; by that we mean any two lossless audio files, say, a FLAC file and a Monkey Audio file, may be slightly different in file size as a compressed version but they contain data that can be de-compressed into the same exact audio data.
As long as the processor that is dealing with the file can operate "in real time" there will be no differences between formats, as the decompressed output will be identical between formats.
As far as processing power goes, any modern CPU and I/O system is more than adequate for the job; even a 10 year old computer can walk through this operation without issues. It is not particularly processor-intensive. My PowerMac 400 from 17 years ago could encode or decode and record to disk 8 channels of 24/96 live audio simultaneously without issues, for example. By "without issues" I mean with hundreds of live recordings, I never once experienced a single dropout. Never.
Now, the x86 architecture isn't quite as good as PowerPC for audio processing; I had to switch my workload so that no other programs were operating to get perfect files on newer, supposedly much faster x86 hardware. Still, I haven't experienced problems on x86 with hardware bought in the last 10 years or so (2009 or newer). And a Rasberry Pi can handle 2-channel audio today without issues. So hardware is not an issue any longer, and for at least some systems, hasn't been an issue for two decades.
Audio compression works like other compression schemes ... it rewrites the data to account for redundancies. A (very) crude explanation goes something like this:
A digital file consists of a series of 1's and 0's ... binary data.
That data will not consist of alternating 1's and 0's, by it's nature. So there will be data where more than one 1 or 0 bit repeats, and in some cases that repeat may be quite long before the bit changes to the other one. Maybe something like:1001000000001001 ...
That can be re-written as:
A 1, two 0's, another 1, eight 0's, a 1, two 0's, a 1 ....The point being there are seven "elements" to the digital data, instead of 12 elements as the uncompressed version has. The compressed format will then use seven elements to describe the original twelve elements, and in that way use fewer bits to describe the file, and that will result in a smaller output file. In other words, lossless compression.
It's not a complicated routine ... audio compression formats go back to the early days of digital, back to a time when WindowsOS didn't even exist, when a Graphical User Interface wasn't available, when no-one knew what a "mouse" was and everything was text input via a command line.
So, fear not. They are all fairly simple and they output the exact same original data when decompressed (played back).
Edits: 01/26/17 01/26/17 01/26/17 01/26/17 01/26/17
As I recall, older versions of Apple lossless only supported 16 bits and would convert 24 bits to 16 bits. I believe newer versions no longer have this limitation.
Lossless CODECs when used file to file will leave the audio unchanged as can be verified by doing multiple conversions and comparing. However, the utility programs that contain the CODECs may change the file headers, tags, etc... so the file itself may have different contents in the non-audio portions. This "should" not be a sound quality issue, but any time you feed slightly different data to a program, who knows what it may do?
If you do format conversions in real-time you may hear a difference (depending on your system) between uncompressed (WAV or AIFF) and lossless and possibly between different lossless formats which may have more or less efficient implementations. If you hear significant differences, then you can just convert lossless files to WAV before critical listening sessions. With utilities such as dBpoweramp this is quick and easy. Then play the WAV files.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
Apple Lossless supports 24-bit, but if you're ripping from CDs that doesn't really matter.
It is a program that can convert from one CODEC to another. You are limited by the properties of the original source files contained within any of the CODECs...
I have heard that Apple Lossless is only 16 bit
Not true, ALAC supports 24 bit as well
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