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If you store a piece of music online, does it come back to you at a lower quality?

post #1 of 3
7/20/12 at 2:15pm
Thread Starter 

I was just wondering this because I am backing up one CD to an online storage site.  I figure that there is some kind of server-side compression done to make storage more efficient.  That being said, if I store a lossless file, say an AIFF, on a server like this, will I lose some of the audio quality (assuming I can even tell the difference) when I download it from said server?  This may be more of a programming question, but I figured that this would be the place to ask it.

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post #2 of 3
7/20/12 at 2:30pm

Unless it's some kind of music streaming site/service that is transcoding your music for you, no.

 

Files tend not to be corrupted (have any content changed, which is the only way you'll lose quality) when being transferred from one place to another (to their server, onto a hard drive, etc.).  Otherwise e-mails you get might have random typos in them, programs you download wouldn't install correctly, and so on.

 

If you want to be really safe, you can put your music into archives with redundancy (recovery records), so even if some data is corrupted, you can get the perfect original copy, under most circumstances.

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post #3 of 3
7/20/12 at 2:35pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by UNCbassbone View Post

I was just wondering this because I am backing up one CD to an online storage site.  I figure that there is some kind of server-side compression done to make storage more efficient.  That being said, if I store a lossless file, say an AIFF, on a server like this, will I lose some of the audio quality (assuming I can even tell the difference) when I download it from said server?  This may be more of a programming question, but I figured that this would be the place to ask it.

 

Short Answer - No

Longer Answer - No. If the server side has any compression, which I doubt, it will be like the compression used when you "zip" up files and folders i.e on decompression (unzipping) ALL the data will be recovered, not a best guess or approximation. Your only worry is of the server itself getting hopelessly corrupted and any half-decent bunch will have redundancy there, or if the site is impounded by the Feds/RIAA in which case you do not get your data back ever. Why are you backing up just one CD this way when there are many other ways of doing this ?

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