In Reply to: apple Lossless compared to other lossles formats posted by digda_beat on November 2, 2014 at 21:34:32:
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
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- RE: apple Lossless compared to other lossles formats - Tony Lauck 06:33:58 11/04/14 (0)