How much better is Apple lossless quality? - Page 3

Astute. The file can be of the same quality, but if the decoder sucks, the end result with be sucks. In order for lossless to be worthwhile, he decoding section has to be good. The perfectest of hardware and file compression can be hampered by horrible decoders.

Apart from that, I'd not look for answers about file quality here at headfi - ever.

I also don't recommend ALAC when you only have 8GB of memory.

By all means this is not a perfect example. Say that the ALAC file is a message in Zulu, but nobody understands Zulu, so the message needs to be translated into English. How good that translator is makes all the difference to us who do not understand Zulu, but English. ALAC is an audio format, an audio format follows certain encoding rules for storage. But it is useless unless you have a way to decode it. This is where the decoder come into the picture. Before you can hear an ALAC file,  the ALAC file needs to run through a decoder (or translator if you want to think of it that way). If the decoder sucks, then your music will suck as well.
 

 

He most probably mean..

That you should not rely too much on the answers given here at Head-Fi. Since there are so many different opinions around here, and hence no clear answer.

Example; many or most believe that lossless actually mean without loss (aka: lossless), while other claim they can hear an audible difference (aka: not lossless). Then of course there are no clear answer if there is an audible difference between lossy and lossless encoded audio either, and if so at which bitrate, codec and encoder they may be transparent.

 

In short - only believe your own ears!

TheDreamthinker, were you thinking about Lossless because you are unhappy with the sound quality using Apple's/iTunes' "normal" settings, or because you were just curious? 

 

If you were just curious, I don't think the improvements from going Lossless will really matter to you. Plus, with 8GB, you will lose a lot of songs by going Lossless. What headphones do you use, and what music do you listen to?

Absolutely!

 

If you want to go lossless, you should have picked up one of those 64GB players or an ipod Classic.

the decoder is in the firmware of the player. If you want to use ALAC, you should probably pick up one of those eyecandy Ipod players.

 

 

 

Yeah, at least that is the most common way to get ahold of decoders.

Although there are other ways...

 

 

Yeah, every audio codec need its specific  decoder.

An FLAC decoder can not decode Apple Lossless encoded audio - you need one specific for Apple Lossless. That goes the other way around as well, like for all other audio codecs.

A very important goal of audio compression is to avoid this to the greatest extent possible, and you will be be hard pressed to differentiate music encoded by different lossy codecs at high bitrates (>= ~200 kbps, be it mp3, ogg, aac, mpc...)

Lossless music, as the name implies, is decoded into an audio stream that is an exact copy of the source file, as long as the decoder has no flaws, which is the case for 99.9% of the decoders out there. So there you go, if someone arbitrarily tells you there is an audible difference between a losslessly (ALAC, FLAC, WavPack, Monkey's Audio...) encoded file and an uncompressed audio stream, you should take it with a sun's mass worth of salt. You can also verify the integrity of the output stream versus the original stream easily via checksums (MD5, for example.)